“What does not kill me makes me stronger.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
This aphorism appears in Twilight of the Idols, published in 1889. Nietzsche wrote it as a maxim about hardship and resilience. It became one of the most quoted sentences in Western philosophy.
My father died when I was four. My younger brother died the next year. I grew up in a house of women, raised to be a Lutheran pastor, and instead became the man who declared God dead. At twenty-four I was the youngest full professor in the history of Basel. By thirty-five my health was collapsing. Migraines so severe I could not see. Nausea that lasted days. I wrote my most important books nearly blind, in cheap rented rooms across Italy and Switzerland. Almost no one read them while I was sane enough to know. At forty-four I collapsed on a street in Turin, embraced a horse being beaten, and never recovered. My sister edited my notebooks after I lost my mind and turned me into something I would have despised. Everything I built, I built while it was destroying me.