GameBanshee Forums

Unfortunatly i dont have BG2 installed at the minute, but i was wondering if someone could load it up and tell me the EXACT quote at the beginning, the abyss quote.

Ive been looking through the internet and found MANY different versions of it, and ive forgot the name of Nietzsche's book that its from, so i cant look that way.

Many thanks

TROD.

I watched the BG2 opening to see if I could find a Nietzsche quote. Either I didn't recognize that a quote was interwoven in the Bhaalspawn stIoryline.,,

or I was too fixated on the scary skull <seriously>

well good luck finding the quote. i never read nietzsche so i guess he would represent a perspective of nihilism? at least during a portion of his life's journey. i know he was a well read man.

maybe someone else will have a perspective on the quotation, because i am lacking - the knowledge.

myrophine

It's in the BGI intro I think. Something like 'When you look into the abyss long enough, the abyss looks into you'. But that's not the exact quote.

Maybe it was 'When you gaze into the abyss,the abyss also gazes into you.'

Something quite similar atleast,haven`t seen the text for quite some time.

"When you fight with monsters, you shall look into that you do not turn yourself a monster (something like that). When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."

The second part is right, the first needs update, but that's what it means. Favourite quotes of mine, one of them, at least.

The abyss sounds hard core. Not even a sphinx to ask you a riddle that you don't know the answer to and then eat you..

myro

so do we think that its possible BG1 not 2?

TROD.

100% sure it is BG1. In bg 2, the intro quote is from Alaundo's nevernding prayer, the one you heard outside Candlekeep:

The lord of murder shall perish,
And in his death he shall spawn a score of mortal progeny,
Chaos shall be sown in their footsteps,
So sayeth the wise alaundo

Something like this.

I'm pretty sure it was BG1 it was in, but the exact quote is as follows

"He who fighs with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.
And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

That was the long and much less quoted version, which I've included because the first sentence concerning the monster and the man was so wonderfully appropriate to the BG storyline, it's almost as if the creators wanted you to look it up. The version quoted in BG1 was the abridged version I believe, as follows

"If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."

Both of these quotes were, as mentioned before, from Freidrich Nietzche a German classical Scholar and, more famously, a Philosopher. Said to be the "Philosopher with a hammer" he wrote brilliantly, with authority and conviction unique unto himself. He is regarded as one of the first existentialist philosophers, along with Soren Kierkegaard and Franz Kafka, though it would do him little justice to confine him to that one sphere of thought. To give you a small idea of the power behind his Philosophical and social writings, one of his most prolific and startling works is entitled "Antichrist" where he famously asserts "God Is Dead". Search him out for yourself, he shapes today's thought more than we care to realize