" 'I understand you,' Insanity's First Sentence "
The story goes, in 1889 Nietzsche witnessed a horse being beaten in the street and was so distraught by the scene that he hugged it around the neck and started sobbing so that the cabbie beating the animal had to stop. He cried out, "I understand you," before collapsing on the ground. He lay silent on a couch for two days after the incident at which point he uttered the phrase, "Mutter, ich bin dumm," (Mother, I am dumb) to no one in particular. Thus marked the beginning of the rapid mental deterioration that would render him functionally vegetative for the final eleven years of his life. He died in 1900 at the age of 56.