Quotation
Last reviewed:
“One thing is needful: to 'give style' to one's character.”
Friedrich Nietzsche · Genealogy and perspectivism · Modern · 1882
What does it mean?
One thing is needful, he says: to give style to one's character, a great and rare art. Style here means constraining a nature, including its weaknesses, under a single taste, until the result looks like a work rather than a pile of impulses. A rival reading hears lifestyle advice, a curated self for other people to look at. The aphorism is harsher. It is about self-imposed form, and it despises the inability to stop fiddling. Another reading thinks 'style' is superficial next to morality. He thinks form is the ethical fact. You can reject that.
Did Friedrich Nietzsche really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Kaufmann continues: a great and rare art. The aphorism is about giving form to one's strengths and weaknesses under a single taste, not about personal branding. The card quotes the opening claim and not the whole section.
Where it comes from
The Gay Science §290, in Walter Kaufmann's translation
Approximate date: 1882.
How to use it
Someone in a Brighton flat curates a feed and calls it style. Section 290 is about whether your strengths and your embarrassments can stand in one character you would sign. The feed may be pretty. The aphorism asks about the parts you leave out of the caption. Giving style is a constraint, not a filter.
A mindset reading
The scare quotes, or the italics translators use, mark 'give style' as a phrase he is offering, not as a cliché he found. Rare is doing work. If everyone in the room has style, you are not in his sentence.
Understand the philosophy
The Gay Science §290 sits in book 4, with the art of living that the eternal recurrence will then test. Style without that neighbourhood becomes decor. The neighbourhood is the reason to read past the opening clause.
- self
- virtue
- change
FAQ
What does it mean?
One thing is needful, he says: to give style to one's character, a great and rare art. Style here means constraining a nature, including its weaknesses, under a single taste, until the result looks like a work rather than a pile of impulses. A rival reading hears lifestyle advice, a curated self for other people to look at. The aphorism is harsher. It is about self-imposed form, and it despises the inability to stop fiddling. Another reading thinks 'style' is superficial next to morality. He thinks form is the ethical fact. You can reject that.
Did Friedrich Nietzsche really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Kaufmann continues: a great and rare art. The aphorism is about giving form to one's strengths and weaknesses under a single taste, not about personal branding. The card quotes the opening claim and not the whole section.
Which work is it in?
The Gay Science §290, in Walter Kaufmann's translation Approximate date: 1882.