One not only wants to be understood when one writes, but also quite as certainly not to be understood. It is by no means an objection to a book when someone finds it unintelligible: perhaps this might just have been the intention of its author, perhaps he did not want to be understood by "anyone. A distinguished intellect and taste, when it wants to communicate its thoughts, always selects its hearers; by selecting them, it at the same time closes its barriers against "the others". It is there that all the more refined laws of style have their origin: they at the same time keep off, they create distance, they prevent "access" (intelligibility, as we have said,) while they open the ears of those who are acoustically related to them.
About This Quote
About Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher who started his career as a classical philologist and turned to philosophy early in his academic career. In 1869, aged 24, he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel. Read more on Wikipedia →