Oscar Levy Quotes

Surely it is not every one who is chosen to combat a religion or a morality of two thousand years’ standing, fist within and then without himself.

Goethe … thought that the Englishman only observed without generalizing, whilst the German generalized without observing.

While in the nineteenth century you [Englishmen] have been occupied in consolidating an empire, conquering new countries, and spreading civilization to all parts of the world, you have in true British magnanimity forgotten to confer this blessing upon yourselves.

A man was wise if heavy and tardy, like all phlegmatic temperaments; learned if he wrote books with one eye on the public and the other on his colleague.

You English are never as thorough, never as decided, never as dead-set in your views as your cousins over the Channel. You are a people of compromises, of opportunism, of amiable and business-like settlements; you can even strike a bargain with your own conscience and live ever happy afterwards. … This is no doubt a great virtue, because it has preserved you from great follies, and it is no doubt a great vice, because it has sadly refrigerated your enthusiasm and your “feu sacré.”

With the great quality of egoism, great deeds and great merits became extinct.

In spite of my attack on Christianity: the Englishman who is a Christian is very much nearer to my heart than he who is not.

German erudition of his time he held in little esteem. “They go to work like galley slaves,” was his charge. “They do not write on a theme because inspired; but the theme comes first, and with assiduous and laborious study they hope to evolve something brilliant out of it.”

Altruism itself was so insisted upon in the latter half of the nineteenth century that … theory and practice, words and deeds, stood in liveliest contradiction. … Everywhere a conflict rent the world in twain: it created abysses in every thinker’s scheme of things: it made its presence so unpleasantly real that the best brains gave up research and thinking, and crept for refuge into a profession, a craft, into libraries, or hid themselves in the mine-shafts of specialism.

Some one wrote to me upon the publication of my book two years ago: “But you live in England! Poor man: then you are a preacher in the desert!” So I am. But I owe something to my desert. The desert is an excellent place for anybody who can make use of it, as biblical and post-biblical experience proves. Without my desert I should not have written my book. Without coming to England I should have become a modern creature, going in for money and motor-cars. For I was born with a fatal inclination for such lighter and brighter kind of things. I was born under a lucky star, so to say: I was born with a warm heart and a happy disposition; I was born to play a good figure in one of those delightful fêtes champêtres of Watteau, Lancret, and Boucher, with a nice little shepherdess on my arm, listening to the sweet music of Rossini and drinking the inspiring “Capri bianco” or “Verona soave” of that beautiful country Italy. But the sky over here is not blue—nor grows there any wine in England—and no Rossini ever lived here; and towards the native shepherdesses I adopted the ways of the Christian towards his beautiful ideals: I admired them intensely but kept myself afar. So there was nothing to console your thirsty and disenchanted traveller in the British Sahara. In the depths of his despair, there was sent to him, as to the traveller in the desert, an enchanting vision, a beautiful fata Morgana rising on the horizon of the future, a fertile and promising Canaan of a new creed that had arisen in Germany (there too as a revulsion against the desert): the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.
So I owe something to the desert. Had I not wandered there so long, I could never have fervently wished to escape nor finally succeeded in coming out of it.

I shall hate my brethren in St. Revoluzio, because they spoil all my pleasure in being disobedient and revolutionary myself; I shall love my enemies much better than those enthusiastic persons: but I shall console myself with the example of some one else, who also loved his enemies and, nevertheless, had, in propagating a new teaching, to suffer from the society of sinners, hysterical women, maniacs, and all the poor in spirit.

Whose interest was it to protect the weak? It was the weak themselves, the slave and the woman. And was not this verdict in conformity with historical fact ? Who were the first Christians? Slaves and women. Who next swore that it was incumbent on men to love their neighbour as themselves, to break their bread with the hungry, to give them their cloak and their possessions? They who had nor bread nor cloaks, nor possessions, they who might win by the bargain.

Nietzsche, unlike Jesus Christ, did not mistake his common folk and their ideals; he knew all they wanted was bread and fish, and that they spurned the bread which “cometh from Heaven.”

What the aristocratic civilization of Rome and Greece had meant, only those greater minds, Goethe and Nietzsche, grasped: but to none were those feelings of manly vigour more unintelligible than to the womanish Armageddon of serfs of the nineteenth century ; to none less clear than to those unnatural products of that unnatural time, the learned men.
The erudite was the absolute converse of the pagan positive. He studied the ancients because he could not feel them. … But not to all did antiquity remain dry and lifeless. Nietzsche lighted upon the slumber-bound beauty, and awoke her to new life, and released her from the arm of her unloved wooer.

One day, when Nietzsche was telling his friend Deussen that it was not abrogation of the will nor extinction of the passions he aimed at, but their ennobling, his friend, a learned man, fast in the trammels of Christian doctrine, answered—not without some justice—that the only means of ennoblement was abrogation and extinction. Nietzsche had a difficult position to maintain; for what he wished to ennoble was no longer there.