Nietzsche
What does not kill me, conditions included
It is a maxim, not a law of nature
Twilight of the Idols, Maxims and Arrows 8 and 12
Probably the most quoted sentence he wrote, and the most misused. The question is what has to be true for it to hold.
What actually happened?
Maxims and Arrows, number eight, opens with a clause the poster cuts off. Out of life's school of war: what does not kill me makes me stronger. School of war. It is not a general blessing on suffering — the man writing it spent years in violent headaches and vomiting, with his eyesight close to gone, describing how he handled his own. Four maxims later in the same book: if we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how. Read together the two complete each other. Surviving is only the input.
By default suffering leaves you weaker
The maxim does not describe an automatic process. The same blow usually leaves wear and a flinch behind it. Turning it into strength takes a deliberate operation: going back over it, giving it a place, taking out the thing you can use next time. Skip the operation and the sentence is a placebo.
Two people, one failed project. One writes it up and changes the process; the other says it made him stronger. Six months on, only one of them is.
Without a why, the pain has nowhere to go
The second maxim supplies the condition. Someone with a direction can book a blow as a cost on the way there. Someone without one can only book it as loss. The same quantity, entered in two different ledgers, is not the same thing at all.
Overtime for a goal you chose and overtime for nothing cost the same hours. One accumulates progress, the other accumulates grievance.
It is a first-person sentence only
Used on your own history it is a way of processing. Said to somebody who is still bleeding, it asks them to translate their disaster into your inspirational story before you will listen. He wrote a school motto, not a condolence card.
Tell a friend made redundant last week that what does not kill him makes him stronger, and all he learns is that you were not going to listen.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: a bad stretch is behind you and you want it to have counted for something.
Ask first: what is the operation that turns it into material, and is my why still in place?
Where it goes wrong: treating the line as a law that applies itself, so the work never happens; or handing it to somebody else to close their pain down.
Lines to keep
Without a why, the blow goes into the ledger as pure loss.
Suffering does not compound by itself. Someone has to do the work.
Same situation, other people are asking
It's been a long time and I'm still not okay.That was years ago and I still can't pick life back up.So much time has passed and I'm still holding it.The thing I never said is still stuck in my throat.I never put it down · all 5 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.