The Genealogy of Morals quotes

We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves: this has its own good reason.

We have never searched for ourselves—how should it then come to pass, that we should ever find ourselves? Rightly has it been said: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Our treasure is there, where stand the hives of our knowledge.

this has its own good reason. We have never searched for ourselves—how should it then come to pass, that we should ever find ourselves? Rightly has it been said: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Our treasure is there, where stand the hives of our knowledge.

It is to those hives that we are always striving; as born creatures of flight, and as the honey-gatherers of the spirit, we care really in our hearts only for one thing—to bring something “home to the hive!”

Yet the priests are, as is notorious, the worst enemies—why? Because they are the weakest. Their weakness causes their hate to expand into a monstrous and sinister shape, a shape which is most crafty and most poisonous.

The really great haters in the history of the world have always been priests, who are also the cleverest haters⁠—in comparison with the cleverness of priestly revenge, every other piece of cleverness is practically negligible.

Human history would be too fatuous for anything were it not for the cleverness imported into it by the weak—take at once the most important instance.

But let us come back to it; the problem of another origin of the good—of the good, as the resentful man has thought it out—demands its solution.

It is not surprising that the lambs should bear a grudge against the great birds of prey, but that is no reason for blaming the great birds of prey for taking the little lambs.

And when the lambs say among themselves, “These birds of prey are evil, and he who is as far removed from being a bird of prey, who is rather its opposite, a lamb—is he not good?”

… subject which is called lightning, so also does the popular morality separate strength from the expression of strength, as though behind the strong man there existed some indifferent neutral substratum, which enjoyed a caprice and option as to whether or not it should express strength.

But there is no such substratum, there is no “being” behind doing, working, becoming; “the doer” is a mere appanage to the action. The action is everything.

In point of fact, the people duplicate the doing, when they make the lightning lighten, that is a “doing-doing”: they make the same phenomenon first a cause, and then, secondly, the effect of that cause.

then there is nothing to cavil at in the setting up of this ideal, though it may also be that the birds of prey will regard it a little sneeringly, and perchance say to themselves,

“We bear no grudge against them, these good lambs, we even like them: nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.”

To require of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a wish to overpower, a wish to overthrow, a wish to become master, a thirst for enemies and antagonisms and triumphs, is just as absurd as to require …

The breeding of an animal that can promise⁠—is not this just that very paradox of a task which nature has set itself in regard to man?

Is not this the very problem of man? The fact that this problem has been to a great extent solved, must appear all the more phenomenal to one who can estimate at its full value that force of forgetfulness which works in opposition to it.

As one may imagine, this primeval problem was not solved by exactly gentle answers and gentle means; perhaps there is nothing more awful and more sinister in the early history of man than his system of mnemonics.

“Something is burnt in so as to remain in his memory: only that which never stops hurting remains in his memory.”

This is an axiom of the oldest (unfortunately also the longest) psychology in the world.

Alas! reason, seriousness, mastery over the emotions, all these gloomy, dismal things which are called reflection, all these privileges and pageantries of humanity: how dear is the price that they have exacted!

How much blood and cruelty is the foundation of all “good things”!

But how is it that that other melancholy object, the consciousness of sin, the whole “bad conscience,” came into the world? And it is here that we turn back to our genealogists of morals.

they almost died with laughing at it.)

The sight of suffering does one good, the infliction of suffering does one more good

—this is a hard maxim, but none the less a fundamental maxim, old, powerful, and “human, all-too-human”; one, moreover, to which perhaps even the apes as well would subscribe:

one, moreover, to which perhaps even the apes as well would subscribe: for it is said that in inventing bizarre cruelties they are giving abundant proof of their future humanity, to which, as it were, they are playing the prelude.

Without cruelty, no feast: so teaches the oldest and longest history of man⁠—and in punishment too is there so much of the festive.

Entertaining, as I do, these thoughts, I am, let me say in parenthesis, fundamentally opposed to helping our pessimists to new water for the discordant and groaning mills of their disgust with life;

another is “les nostalgies de la croix”).

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering

;

might society say. “Let them live and flourish! I am strong enough for it.”—

The justice which began with the maxim, “Everything can be paid off, everything must be paid off,” ends with connivance at the escape of those who cannot pay to escape

—it ends, like every good thing on earth, by destroying itself.—The self-destruction of Justice! we know the pretty name it calls itself—Grace! it remains, as is obvious, the privilege of the strongest, better still, their super-law.

this wholly active bad conscience has finally (as one already anticipates)—true fountainhead as it is of idealism and imagination—produced an abundance of novel and amazing beauty and affirmation, and perhaps has really been the first to give birth to beauty at all.

What would beauty be, forsooth, if its contradiction had not first been presented to consciousness, if the ugly had not first said to itself, “I am ugly”?

At any rate, after this hint the problem of how far idealism and beauty can be traced in such opposite ideas as “selflessness,” self-denial, self-sacrifice, becomes less problematical;

it is only the bad conscience, only the will for self-abuse, that provides the necessary conditions for the existence of altruism as a value.

Undoubtedly the bad conscience is an illness, but an illness like pregnancy is an illness.

If we search out the conditions under which this illness reaches its most terrible and sublime zenith, we shall see what really first brought about its entry into the world.

… of punishment and guilt, in order to cut off once and for all any escape out of this labyrinth of “fixed ideas,” his will for rearing an ideal—that of the “holy God”—face to face with which he can have tangible proof of his own unworthiness.

Alas for this mad melancholy beast man!

What fantasies invade it, what paroxysms of perversity, hysterical senselessness, and mental bestiality break out immediately, at the very slightest check on its being the beast of action.

“How foolish they are,” so thinks he of the misdeeds of mortals—and “folly,” “imprudence,” “a little brain disturbance,” and nothing more, are what the Greeks, even of the strongest, bravest period, have admitted to be the ground of much that is evil and fatal.—

Folly, not sin, do you understand?

… But even this brain disturbance was a problem—“Come, how is it even possible?

… We modern men, we inherit the immemorial tradition of vivisecting the conscience, and practising cruelty to our animal selves. That is the sphere of our most protracted training, perhaps of our artistic prowess, at any rate of our dilettantism and our perverted taste.

Man has for too long regarded his natural proclivities with an “evil eye,” so that eventually they have become in his system affiliated to a bad conscience.

A converse endeavour would be intrinsically feasible—but who is strong enough to attempt it?—namely, to affiliate to the “bad conscience” all those unnatural proclivities, all those transcendental aspirations, contrary to sense, instinct, nature, and animalism—in short, all past and present ideals, which are all ideals …

as though the artist himself actually were the object which he is able to represent, imagine, and express. In point of fact, the position is that even if he conceived he were such an object, he would certainly not represent, conceive, express it.

Homer would not have created an Achilles, nor Goethe a Faust, if Homer had been an Achilles or if Goethe had been a Faust.

A complete and perfect artist is to all eternity separated from the “real,” from the actual;

Up to the present what great philosophers have been married? Heracleitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, Schopenhauer—they were not married, and, further, one cannot imagine them as married.

A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my rule

; as for that exception of a Socrates—the malicious Socrates married himself, it seems, ironice, just to prove this very rule. Every philosopher would say, as Buddha said, when the birth of a son was announced to him:

the tone of his style supplies the reason—he has no time, he has small faith in himself, he finds expression now or never.

But a spirit who is sure of himself speaks softly; he seeks secrecy, he lets himself be awaited.

A philosopher is recognised by the fact that he shuns three brilliant and noisy things—fame, princes, and women: which is not to say that they do not come to him. He shuns every glaring light: therefore he shuns his time and its “daylight.”

the tone of his style supplies the reason—he has no time, he has small faith in himself, he finds expression now or never. But a spirit who is sure of himself speaks softly; he seeks secrecy, he lets himself be awaited.

A philosopher is recognised by the fact that he shuns three brilliant and noisy things⁠—fame, princes, and women: which is not to say that they do not come to him.

He shuns every glaring light: therefore he shuns his time and its “daylight.” Therein he is as a shadow; the deeper sinks the sun, the greater grows the shadow. As for his humility, he endures, as he endures darkness, a certain dependence and obscurity:

…

All good things were once bad things; from every original sin has grown an original virtue.

Marriage, for example, seemed for a long time a sin against the rights of the community;

the sinister symbol of the oldest and newest history of philosophy in the whole world.

Everyone who has ever built anywhere a “new heaven” first found the power thereto in his own hell.

… Let us compress the facts into a short formula.

those functions, I say, by means of which “abstract” seeing first became seeing something; in these theories consequently the absurd and the nonsensical is always demanded of the eye.

There is only a seeing from a perspective, only a “knowing” from a perspective, and the more emotions we express over a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we train on the same thing, the more complete will be our “idea” of that thing, our “objectivity.”

But the elimination of the will altogether, the switching off of the emotions all and sundry, granted that we could do so, what! would not that be called intellectual castration?

You understand me already: this ascetic priest, this apparent enemy of life, this denier—he actually belongs to the really great conservative and affirmative forces of life. … What does it come from, this diseased state?

For man is more diseased, more uncertain, more changeable, more unstable than any other animal, there is no doubt of it⁠—he is the diseased animal: what does it spring from?

Certainly he has also dared, innovated, braved more, challenged fate more than all the other animals put together;

… he sniffs almost wherever he goes today an air something like that of a madhouse, the air of a hospital—I am speaking, as stands to reason, of the cultured areas of mankind, of every kind of “Europe” that there is in fact in the world.

The sick are the great danger of man, not the evil, not the “beasts of prey.”

They who are from the outset botched, oppressed, broken, those are they, the weakest are they, who most undermine the life beneath the feet of man, who instil the most dangerous venom and scepticism into our trust in life, in man, in ourselves.

Is that done?

The sick are the greatest danger for the healthy; it is not from the strongest that harm comes to the strong, but from the weakest.

Is that known? Broadly considered, it is not for a minute the fear of man, whose diminution should be wished for; for this fear forces the strong to be strong, to be at times terrible—it preserves in its integrity the sound type of man.

Is that known? Broadly considered, it is not for a minute the fear of man, whose diminution should be wished for; for this fear forces the strong to be strong, to be at times terrible—it preserves in its integrity the sound type of man.

What is to be feared, what does work with a fatality found in no other fate, is not the great fear of, but the great nausea with, man; and equally so the great pity for man.

Supposing that both these things were one day to espouse each other, then inevitably the maximum of monstrousness would immediately come into the world—the “last will” of man, his will for nothingness, Nihilism. And, in sooth, the way is well paved thereto.

… of mysterious powers, sometimes going among even the other kind of beasts of prey, determined as he is to sow on their soil, wherever he can, suffering, discord, self-contradiction, and only too sure of his art, always to be lord of sufferers at all times.

He brings with him, doubtless, salve and balsam; but before he can play the physician he must first wound; so, while he soothes the pain which the wound makes, he at the same time poisons the wound.

Well versed is he in this above all things, is this wizard and wild beast tamer, in whose vicinity everything healthy must needs become ill, and everything ill must needs become tame. He protects, in sooth, his sick herd well enough, does this strange herdsman;

… a torturing suspicion and get drunk on the venom of their own malice—they tear open the oldest wounds, they make themselves bleed from the scars which have long been healed, they make evildoers out of friends, wife, child, and everything which is nearest to them.

“I suffer: it must be somebody’s fault”⁠—so thinks every sick sheep.

But his herdsman, the ascetic priest, says to him, “Quite so, my sheep, it must be the fault of someone; but thou thyself art that someone, it is all the fault of thyself alone—it is the fault of thyself alone against thyself”:

… “pain in the soul,” the cause is, speaking crudely, to be found not in his “soul” but more probably in his stomach (speaking crudely, I repeat, but by no means wishing thereby that you should listen to me or understand me in a crude spirit).

A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some tough morsels to swallow.

If he fails to “relieve himself” of an experience, this kind of indigestion is quite as much physiological as the other indigestion—and indeed, in more ways than one, simply one of the results of the other.

the latter, on the contrary, range themselves together with positive delight in such a muster—their instincts are as much gratified thereby as the instincts of the “born master” (that is, the solitary beast-of-prey species of man) are disturbed and wounded to the quick by organisation.

There is always lurking beneath every oligarchy⁠—such is the universal lesson of history⁠—the desire for tyranny.

Every oligarchy is continually quivering with the tension of the effort required by each individual to keep mastering this desire. (Such, e.g., was the Greek; Plato shows it in a hundred places, Plato, who knew his contemporaries—and himself.)

that of an emetic—and this by reason of its moral sugariness and falsity, its ingrained feminism, which it is pleased to call “Idealism,” and at any rate believes to be idealism.

Our cultured men of today, our “good” men, do not lie⁠—that is true; but it does not redound to their honour!

The real lie, the genuine, determined, “honest” lie (on whose value you can listen to Plato) would prove too tough and strong an article for them by a long way;

for Schopenhauer as well wrote much about himself, and perhaps also against himself: (εἰς ἑαντόν). The virtuous American Thayer, Beethoven’s biographer, suddenly stopped his work: he had come to a certain point in that honourable and simple life, and could stand it no longer. Moral:

What sensible man nowadays writes one honest word about himself?

He must already belong to the Order of Holy Foolhardiness. We are promised an autobiography of Richard Wagner; who doubts but that it would be a clever autobiography?

probably it infects even us. Of what was that diplomat warning us, when he said to his colleagues:

“Let us especially mistrust our first impulses, gentlemen! they are almost always good”

? So should nowadays every psychologist talk to his colleagues. And thus we get back to our problem, which in point of fact does require from us a certain severity, a certain mistrust especially against “first impulses.”

“My kingdom is not of this world,” quoth he, both at the beginning and at the end: had he still the right to talk like that?—

Goethe has maintained that there are only thirty-six tragic situations: we would infer from that, did we not know otherwise, that Goethe was no ascetic priest.

He—knows more.

it almost upsets me that I stand so isolated in my taste so far as concerns this valued, this overvalued Scripture; the taste of two thousand years is against me; but what boots it! “Here I stand! I cannot help myself”—

I have the courage of my bad taste.

The Old Testament—yes, that is something quite different, all honour to the Old Testament! I find therein great men, an heroic landscape, and one of the rarest phenomena in the world, the incomparable naivete of the strong heart; further still, I find a people.

Meekness and braggadocio cheek by jowl; an emotional garrulousness that almost deafens; passionate hysteria, but no passion; painful pantomime; here manifestly everyone lacked good breeding.

How dare anyone make so much fuss about their little failings as do these pious little fellows! No one cares a straw about it⁠—let alone God.

Finally they actually wish to have “the crown of eternal life,” do all these little provincials! In return for what, in sooth? For what end? It is impossible to carry insolence any further. An immortal Peter! who could stand him!

The diligence of our best scholars, their senseless industry, their burning the candle of their brain at both ends—their very mastery in their handiwork—how often is the real meaning of all that to prevent themselves continuing to see a certain thing?

Science as a self-anaesthetic: do you know that?

You wound them—everyone who consorts with scholars experiences this—you wound them sometimes to the quick through just a harmless word;

Because up to the present the ascetic ideal dominated all philosophy, because Truth was fixed as Being, as God, as the Supreme Court of Appeal, because Truth was not allowed to be a problem. Do you understand this “allowed”?

From the minute that the belief in the God of the ascetic ideal is repudiated, there exists a new problem: the problem of the value of truth.

The Will for Truth needed a critique—let us define by these words our own task—the value of truth is tentatively to be called in question.

Plato’s instinct felt this—Plato, the greatest enemy of art which Europe has produced up to the present.

Plato versus Homer, that is the complete, the true antagonism

—on the one side, the wholehearted “transcendental,” the great defamer of life; on the other, its involuntary panegyrist, the golden nature.

Alas, his belief in his dignity, his uniquenesses irreplaceableness in the scheme of existence, is gone—he has become animal, literal, unqualified, and unmitigated animal, he who in his earlier belief was almost God (“child of God,” “demigod”).

Since Copernicus man seems to have fallen on to a steep plane⁠—he rolls faster and faster away from the centre⁠—whither? into nothingness?

into the “thrilling sensation of his own nothingness”—Well!

Anacreontic moods imperceptibly come over me. This Nature, who gave to the steer its horn, to the lion its χάσμ’ ὀδοντων, for what purpose did Nature give me my foot?—

To kick, by St. Anacreon, and not merely to run away!

To trample on all the worm-eaten “chairs,” the cowardly contemplators, the lascivious eunuchs of history, the flirters with ascetic ideals, the righteous hypocrites of impotence! All reverence on my part to the ascetic ideal, in so far as it is honourable!

But I like not all these coquettish bugs who have an insatiate ambition to smell of the infinite, until eventually the infinite smells of bugs; I like not the whited sepulchres with their stagey reproduction of life;

I like not the tired and the used up who wrap themselves in wisdom and look “objective”

; I like not the agitators dressed up as heroes, who hide their dummy-heads behind the stalking-horse of an ideal; I like not the ambitious artists who would fain play the ascetic and the priest, and are at bottom nothing but tragic clowns;

it is obvious that there is a new business to be done in little ideal idols and obedient “idealists”—don’t pass over this tip! Who has sufficient courage? We have in our hands the possibility of idealising the whole earth.

But what am I talking about courage? we only need one thing here⁠—a hand, a free, a very free hand.

Enough! enough! let us leave these curiosities and complexities of the modern spirit, which excite as much laughter as disgust. Our problem can certainly do without them, the problem of the meaning of the ascetic ideal—what has it got to do with yesterday or today?