Ecce Homo

Chapters titled Why I Am So Wise, Why I Am So Clever. Mostly dismissed as evidence he was already crazy.

The secret history of philosophers, the psychology of their great names, was revealed to me. How much truth can a certain mind endure; how much truth can it dare? -these questions became for me ever more and more the actual test of values. Error (the belief in the ideal) is not blindness; error is cowardice... Every conquest, every step forward in knowledge, is the outcome of courage, of hardness towards one's self, of cleanliness towards one's self.

I mostly agree. Not entirely sure of his usage of the word 'ideal'. I wonder how relevant this is to him going insane the very next year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche#Mental_breakdown_and_death_.281889.E2.80.931900.29

The knight of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends.

The truth seeker must love the truth more than friendships. But from the intro by Ludovici:
...and the fact that he endured such long years of solitude, which to him, the sensitive artist to whom friends were everything, must have been a terrible hardship...

And what a misanthrope he was. How he hated Germany. But then look what Germany then went and did later...

It also seems to me that the rudest word, the rudest letter, is more goodnatured, more straightforward, than silence.

Hate is better than indifference and of course bothering to try to communicate ought to be better than silence.

To the sick man resentment ought to be more strictly forbidden than anything else --it is his special danger: unfortunately, however, it is also his most natural propensity. This was fully grasped by that profound physiologist Buddha. His "religion," which it would be better to call a system of hygience, in order to avoid confounding it with a creed so wretched as Christianity, depended for its effect upon the triumph over resentment: to make the soul free therefrom was considered the first step towards recovery. "Not through hostility is hostility put to flight; through friendship does hostility end": this stands at the beginning of Buddha's teaching--this is not a precept of morality, but of physiology. Resentment born of weakness is not more deleterious to anybody than it is to the weak man himself--conversely, in the case of that man whose nature is fundamentally a rich one, resentment is a superfluous feeling, a feeling to remain master of which is almost a proof of riches. Those of my readers who know the earnestness with which my philosophy wages war against the feelings of revenge and rancour... will understand why I wish to focus attention upon my own personal attitude and the certainty of my practical instincts precisely in this matter.

Resentment, revenge... just other words for anger.

The loathing of mankind, of the rabble, was always my greatest danger...

Can one really blame him knowing what his people later did?

I am gifted with a sense of cleanliness the keenness of which is phenomenal; so much so, that I can ascertain physiologically--that is to say, smell--the proximity, nay, the inmost core, the "entrails" of every human soul... This sensitiveness of mine is furnished with psychological antennae, wherewith I feel and grasp every secret: the quality of concealed filth lying at the base of many a human character which may be the inevitable outcome of base blood, and which education may have veneered, is revealed to me at the first glance.

The sort of thing I might think here and there but would avoid saying. Well mostly try to avoid anyway.

What is it that I have never forgiven Wagner? The fact that he condescended to the Germans--that he became a German Imperialist... Wherever Germany spreads, she ruins culture.

....

Another form of prudence and self-defence consists in trying to react as seldom as possible, and to keep one's self aloof from those circumstances and conditions wherein one would be condemned, as it were, to suspend one's "liberty" and one's initiative, and become a mere reacting medium. As an example of this I point to the intercourse with books. The scholoar who, in sooth, does little else than handle books--with the philogist of average attainments their number may amount to two hundred a day--ultimately forgets entirely and completely the capacity of thinking for himself. When he has not a book between his fingers he cannot think. When he thinks, he responds to a stimulus (a thought he has read),--finally all he does is to react. The scholoar exhausts his whole strength in saying either "yes" or "no" to matter which has already been thought out, or in criticising it--he is no longer capable of thought on his own account... In him the instinct of self defence has decayed, otherwise he would defend himself against books. The scholar is a decadent. With my own eyes I have seen gifted, richly endowed, and free-spirited natures already "read to ruins" at thirty, and mere was vestas that have to be rubbed before they can give off any sparks--or "thoughts." To set to early in the morning, at the break of day, in all the fulness and dawn of one's strength, and to read a book--this I call positively vicious!

Yes. (Ironically) Well partially yes. The thing is to manage to keep thinking critically while reading them... Not be overwhelmed... This ends up meaning a lot less reading. A paragraph and then think about it for ten minutes, etc. And then you can't back up your criticisms with as much reading as the person who ate it all up.