Oscar Levy: Man

“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.”

Oscar Levy

describing the state of Germans in the 19th century, pp. 82-83.
The Revival of Aristocracy (1906)

Books , Learning

“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.”

Oscar Levy

Preface, pp. xii-xiii.
The Revival of Aristocracy (1906)

Money , Books , Beauty , Music

“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.”

Oscar Levy

pp 48-49.
The Revival of Aristocracy (1906)

Justice , Learning , Passion

““Oh! the years I have lost,” will be the exclamation of a man, if he be not philosophical, and not possess Friedrich Nietzsche’s appreciation of the value of sorrow in education.”

Oscar Levy

Source: The Revival of Aristocracy (1906), p. 37.

Education

“Greatness loves itself, and all healthy instincts decline to flagellate themselves daily with the whip of altruism. What is great must will to do more than its mere duty; it must give, make others happy, and, be it at the cost of itself, its own wellbeing, its own money or life, it must will to pour forth its blessing over others, to the extent even of self-sacrifice—but not, as Christianity demands, from unegoistic motives; the impulse must come from a sense of pleasure, from overflowing energy, from need of bloodletting, so as to unburden the full heart. All acts then derived from conscience and duty, or done with a wry countenance out of obedience to the Categorical Imperative, seem to the great man, from his point of view, through this very fact contemptible, even as he has an unsurmountable prejudice against men and nations who are always prating of those words, conscience and duty.”

Oscar Levy

Source: The Revival of Aristocracy (1906), p. 81.

Love , Life , Men , Money