The Twilight of the Idols, and The Antichrist quotes

Aristotle says that in order to live alone, a man must be either an animal or a god.

The third alternative is lacking: a man must be both—a philosopher.

“All truth is simple.”—Is not this a double lie?

Can a donkey be tragic?—To perish beneath a load that one can neither bear nor throw off? This is the case of the Philosopher.

If a man knows the wherefore of his existence, then the manner of it can take care of itself.

Man does not aspire to happiness; only the Englishman does that.

Posthumous men, like myself, are not so well understood as men who reflect their age, but they are heard with more respect.

In plain English: we are never understood—hence our authority.

Among women.—“Truth? Oh, you do not know truth! Is it not an outrage on all our pudeurs?”—

“German intellect”; for eighteen years this has been a contradictio in adjecto.

By seeking the beginnings of things, a man becomes a crab.

The historian looks backwards: in the end he also believes backwards.

By seeking the beginnings of things, a man becomes a crab.

The historian looks backwards: in the end he also believes backwards.

Contentment preserves one even from catching cold. Has a woman who knew that she was well-dressed ever caught cold?—No, not even when she had scarcely a rag to her back.

On ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis (G. Flaubert). Here I have got you, you nihilist! A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit.

Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.

There are times when we psychologists are like horses, and grow fretful. We see our own shadow rise and fall before us. The psychologist must look away from himself if he wishes to see anything at all.

There are times when we psychologists are like horses, and grow fretful. We see our own shadow rise and fall before us.

The psychologist must look away from himself if he wishes to see anything at all.

Do we immoralists injure virtue in any way? Just as little as the anarchists injure royalty. Only since they have been shot at do princes sit firmly on their thrones once more. Moral: morality must be shot at.

Even Socrates’ dying words were:—“To live—means to be ill a long while: I owe a cock to the god Æsculapius.” Even Socrates had had enough of it. What does that prove?

What does it point to?

Formerly people would have said (—oh, it has been said, and loudly enough too; by our Pessimists loudest of all!): “In any case there must be some truth in this! The consensus sapientium is a proof of truth.”—Shall we say the same to-day?

“In any case there must be some sickness here,” we make reply. These great sages of all periods should first be examined more closely! Is it possible that they were, everyone of them, a little shaky on their legs, effete, rocky, decadent?

Does wisdom perhaps appear on earth after the manner of a crow attracted by a slight smell of carrion?

This irreverent belief that the great sages were decadent types, first occurred to me precisely in regard to that case concerning which both learned and vulgar prejudice was most opposed to my view.

they can be considered only as symptoms,—per se such judgments are nonsense. You must therefore endeavour by all means to reach out and try to grasp this astonishingly subtle axiom, that the value of life cannot be estimated.

A living man cannot do so, because he is a contending party, or rather the very object in the dispute, and not a judge; nor can a dead man estimate it—for other reasons.

For a philosopher to see a problem in the value of life, is almost an objection against him, a note of interrogation set against his wisdom—a lack of wisdom. What?

with dialectics the mob comes to the top. Before Socrates’ time, dialectical manners were avoided in good society: they were regarded as bad manners, they were compromising. Young men were cautioned against them. All such proffering of one’s reasons was looked upon with suspicion.

Honest things like honest men do not carry their reasons on their sleeve in such fashion.

It is not good form to make a show of everything. That which needs to be proved cannot be worth much. Wherever authority still belongs to good usage, wherever men do not prove but command, the dialectician is regarded as a sort of clown.

Young men were cautioned against them. All such proffering of one’s reasons was looked upon with suspicion. Honest things like honest men do not carry their reasons on their sleeve in such fashion. It is not good form to make a show of everything.

That which needs to be proved cannot be worth much.

Wherever authority still belongs to good usage, wherever men do not prove but command, the dialectician is regarded as a sort of clown. People laugh at him, they do not take him seriously. Socrates was a clown who succeeded in making men take him seriously:

That which needs to be proved cannot be worth much. Wherever authority still belongs to good usage, wherever men do not prove but command, the dialectician is regarded as a sort of clown. People laugh at him, they do not take him seriously.

Socrates was a clown who succeeded in making men take him seriously: what then was the matter?

A man resorts to dialectics only when he has no other means to hand. People know that they excite suspicion with it and that it is not very convincing. Nothing is more easily dispelled than a dialectical effect:

Even Heraclitus did an injustice to the senses. The latter lie neither as the Eleatics believed them to lie, nor as he believed them to lie,—they do not lie at all.

The interpretations we give to their evidence is what first introduces falsehood into it; for instance the lie of unity, the lie of matter, of substance and of permanence.

Reason is the cause of our falsifying the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show us a state of Becoming, of transiency, and of change, they do not lie.

In so far as the senses show us a state of Becoming, of transiency, and of change, they do not lie. But in declaring that Being was an empty illusion, Heraclitus will remain eternally right.

The “apparent” world is the only world: the “true world” is no more than a false adjunct thereto.

And what delicate instruments of observation we have in our senses! This human nose, for instance, of which no philosopher has yet spoken with reverence and gratitude, is, for the present, the most finely adjusted instrument at our disposal:

in its favour are every word and every sentence that we utter!—Even the opponents of the Eleatics succumbed to the seductive powers of their concept of Being. Among others there was Democritus in his discovery of the atom.

“Reason” in language!—oh what a deceptive old witch it has been!

I fear we shall never be rid of God, so long as we still believe in grammar.

Among others there was Democritus in his discovery of the atom. “Reason” in language!—oh what a deceptive old witch it has been!

I fear we shall never be rid of God, so long as we still believe in grammar.

People will feel grateful to me if I condense a point of view, which is at once so important and so new, into four theses: by this means I shall facilitate comprehension, and shall likewise challenge contradiction.

fortunately no Christian acts in obedience to this precept. To annihilate the passions and desires, simply on account of their stupidity, and to obviate the unpleasant consequences of their stupidity, seems to us to-day merely an aggravated form of stupidity.

We no longer admire those dentists who extract teeth simply in order that they may not ache again.

On the other hand, it will be admitted with some reason, that on the soil from which Christianity grew, the idea of the “spiritualisation of passion” could not possibly have been conceived.

It is said there, for instance, with an application to sexuality: “if thy eye offend thee, pluck it out”: fortunately no Christian acts in obedience to this precept.

To annihilate the passions and desires, simply on account of their stupidity, and to obviate the unpleasant consequences of their stupidity, seems to us to-day merely an aggravated form of stupidity.

We no longer admire those dentists who extract teeth simply in order that they may not ache again.

the most poisonous diatribes against the senses have not been said by the impotent, nor by the ascetics; but by those impossible ascetics, by those who found it necessary to be ascetics.

The spiritualisation of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.

Another triumph is our spiritualisation of hostility. It consists in the fact that we are beginning to realise very profoundly the value of having enemies:

And we behave in precisely the same way to the “inner enemy”: in this quarter too we have spiritualised enmity, in this quarter too we have understood its value.

A man is productive only in so far as he is rich in contrasted instincts; he can remain young only on condition that his soul does not begin to take things easy and to yearn for peace.

Nothing has grown more alien to us than that old desire—the “peace of the soul,” which is the aim of Christianity. Nothing could make us less envious than the moral cow and the plump happiness of a clean conscience.

Inasmuch as it says “God sees into the heart of man,” it says Nay to the profoundest and most superior desires of life and takes God as the enemy of life. The saint in whom God is well pleased, is the ideal eunuch.

Life terminates where the “Kingdom of God” begins.

Admitting that you have understood the villainy of such a mutiny against life as that which has become almost sacrosanct in Christian morality, you have fortunately understood something besides; and that is the futility, the fictitiousness, the absurdity and the falseness of such a mutiny.

… life, a man would need to be placed outside life, and moreover know it as well as one, as many, as all in fact, who have lived it These are reasons enough to prove to us that this problem is an inaccessible one to us.

When we speak of values, we speak under the inspiration, and through the optics of life: life itself urges us to determine values: life itself values through us when we determine values.

From which it follows that even that morality which is antagonistic to life, and which conceives God as the opposite and the condemnation of life, is only a valuation of life—of what life? of what kind of life? But I have already answered this question:

a party that can make such mistakes, is in its last agony—it no longer possesses any certainty of instinct. Every mistake is in every sense the sequel to degeneration of the instincts, to disintegration of the will. This is almost the definition of evil,

Everything valuable is instinct—and consequently easy, necessary, free.

Exertion is an objection, the god is characteristically different from the hero (in my language: light feet are the first attribute of divinity).

Meanwhile we have come to our senses. To-day we no longer believe a word of all this.

The “inner world” is full of phantoms and will-o’-the-wisps: the will is one of these.

The will no longer actuates, consequently it no longer explains anything—all it does is to accompany processes; it may even be absent. The so-called “motive” is another error.

And the result is that a certain manner of postulating causes tends to predominate ever more and more, becomes concentrated into a system, and finally reigns supreme, to the complete exclusion of all other causes and explanations.

The banker thinks immediately of business, the Christian of “sin,” and the girl of her love affair.

The whole Domain of Morality and Religion may be classified under the Rubric “Imaginary Causes.” The “explanation” of general unpleasant sensations. These sensations are dependent upon certain creatures who are hostile to us (evil spirits:

… nature and all social institutions and customs of all signs of those two concepts, we recognise no more radical opponents than the theologians, who with their notion of “a moral order of things,” still continue to pollute the innocence of Becoming with punishment and guilt

Christianity is the metaphysics of the hangman.

What then, alone, can our teaching be?—That no one gives man his qualities, neither God, society, his parents, his ancestors, nor himself (—this non-sensical idea which is at last refuted here, was taught as “intelligible freedom” by Kant, and perhaps even as early as Plato …

One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole,—there is nothing that could judge, measure, compare, and condemn our existence, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing and condemning the whole.

But there is nothing outside the whole!

The fact that no one shall any longer be made responsible, that the nature of existence may not be traced to a causa prima, that the world is an entity neither as a sensorium nor as a spirit—this alone is the great deliverance,—thus alone is …

We invented the concept “purpose”; in reality purpose is altogether lacking.

One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole,—there is nothing that could judge, measure, compare, and condemn our existence, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing and condemning the whole.

But there is nothing outside the whole!

This demand is the result of a point of view which I was the first to formulate: that there are no such things as moral facts. Moral judgment has this in common with the religious one, that it believes in realities which are not real.

Morality is only an interpretation of certain phenomena: or, more strictly speaking, a misinterpretation of them.

Moral judgment, like the religious one, belongs to a stage of ignorance in which even the concept of reality, the distinction between real and imagined things, is still lacking:

Let me give you one example, quite provisionally.

In all ages there have been people who wished to “improve” mankind: this above all is what was called morality.

But the most different tendencies are concealed beneath the same word. Both the taming of the beast man, and the rearing of a particular type of man, have been called “improvement”:

Both the taming of the beast man, and the rearing of a particular type of man, have been called “improvement”: these zoological termini, alone, represent real things—real things of which the typical “improver,” the priest, naturally knows nothing, and will know nothing.

To call the taming of an animal “improving” it, sounds to our ears almost like a joke.

He who knows what goes on in menageries, doubts very much whether an animal is improved in such places.

much industry and much perseverance—and a certain inherited soberness which is much more in need of a spur than of a brake. Let me add that in this country people still obey without feeling that obedience humiliates.

And no one despises his opponent.

You observe that it is my desire to be fair to the Germans: and in this respect I should not like to be untrue to myself,—I must therefore also state my objections to them.

You observe that it is my desire to be fair to the Germans: and in this respect I should not like to be untrue to myself,—I must therefore also state my objections to them.

It costs a good deal to attain to a position of power; for power stultifies.

The Germans—they were once called a people of thinkers: do they really think at all at present? Nowadays the Germans are bored by intellect, they mistrust intellect;

And how much more am I in search of one with whom I could be cheerful —The Twilight of the Idols: ah! what man to-day would be capable of understanding the kind of seriousness from which a philosopher is recovering in this work!

It is our cheerfulness that people understand least.

Let us examine another aspect of the question: it is not only obvious that German culture is declining, but adequate reasons for this decline are not lacking.

In order to be true to my nature, which is affirmative and which concerns itself with contradictions and criticism only indirectly and with reluctance, let me state at once what the three objects are for which we need educators.

People must learn to see; they must learn to think, and they must learn to speak and to write: the object of all three of these pursuits is a noble culture.

To learn to see—to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides.

to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality.

One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts.

To learn to see, as I understand this matter, amounts almost to that which in popular language is called “strength of will”: its essential feature is precisely not to wish to see, to be able to postpone one’s decision.

Stiff awkwardness in intellectual attitudes, and the clumsy fist in grasping—these things are so essentially German, that outside Germany they are absolutely confounded with the German spirit.

The German has no fingers for delicate nuances.

The fact that the people of Germany have actually tolerated their philosophers, more particularly that most deformed cripple of ideas that has ever existed—the great Kant, gives one no inadequate notion of their native elegance.

Sainte-Beuve.—There is naught of man in him; he is full of petty spite towards all virile spirits.

He wanders erratically; he is subtle, inquisitive, a little bored, for ever with his ear to key-holes,—at bottom a woman, with all woman’s revengefulness and sensuality.

As a psychologist he is a genius of slander; inexhaustively rich in means to this end; no one understands better than he how to introduce a little poison into praise. In his fundamental instincts he is plebeian and next of kin to Rousseau’s resentful spirit:

The Goncourts are the greatest sinners in this respect: they cannot put three sentences together which are not absolutely painful to the eye—the eye of the psychologist.

From an artistic standpoint, nature is no model.

It exaggerates, distorts, and leaves gaps. Nature is the accident. To study “from nature” seems to me a bad sign: it betrays submission, weakness, fatalism—this lying in the dust before trivial facts is unworthy of a thorough artist.

It exaggerates, distorts, and leaves gaps. Nature is the accident. To study “from nature” seems to me a bad sign: it betrays submission, weakness, fatalism—this lying in the dust before trivial facts is unworthy of a thorough artist.

To see what is—is the function of another order of intellects, the anti-artistic, the matter-of-fact.

One must know who one is.

To study “from nature” seems to me a bad sign: it betrays submission, weakness, fatalism—this lying in the dust before trivial facts is unworthy of a thorough artist. To see what is—is the function of another order of intellects, the anti-artistic, the matter-of-fact.

One must know who one is.

Concerning the psychology of the artist For art to be possible at all—that is to say, in order that an æsthetic mode of action and of observation may exist, a certain preliminary physiological state is indispensable ecstasy.[1] This state of ecstasy must first have intensified …

A Moral for Psychologists. Do not go in for any note-book psychology!

Never observe for the sake of observing!

Such things lead to a false point of view, to a squint, to something forced and exaggerated. To experience things on purpose—this is not a bit of good. In the midst of an experience a man should not turn his eyes upon himself;

In his case it is the great act of will, the will that moveth mountains, the ecstasy of the great will which aspires to art. The most powerful men have always inspired architects; the architect has always been under the suggestion of power.

In the architectural structure, man’s pride, man’s triumph over gravitation, man’s will to power, assume a visible form.

Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of forms. Now it is persuasive, even flattering, and at other times merely commanding. The highest sensation of power and security finds expression in grandeur of style.

The most powerful men have always inspired architects; the architect has always been under the suggestion of power. In the architectural structure, man’s pride, man’s triumph over gravitation, man’s will to power, assume a visible form.

Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of forms.

Now it is persuasive, even flattering, and at other times merely commanding. The highest sensation of power and security finds expression in grandeur of style. That power which no longer requires to be proved, which scorns to please; which responds only with difficulty;

… heroico-moral interpretation of dyspeptic moods.—Carlyle, a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetorician by necessity, who seems ever to be tormented by the desire of finding some kind of strong faith, and by his inability to do so (—in this respect a typical Romanticist!).

To yearn for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, but rather the reverse.

If a man have a strong faith he can indulge in the luxury of scepticism; he is strong enough, firm enough, well-knit enough for such a luxury.

Emerson.—He is much more enlightened, much broader, more versatile, and more subtle than Carlyle; but above all, he is happier.

He is one who instinctively lives on ambrosia and who leaves the indigestible parts of things on his plate.

Compared with Carlyle he is a man of taste.—Carlyle, who was very fond of him, nevertheless declared that “he does not give us enough to chew.”

It does occur, but as an exception. The general condition of life is not one of want or famine, but rather of riches, of lavish luxuriance, and even of absurd prodigality,—where there is a struggle, it is a struggle for power.

We should not confound Malthus with nature.

—Supposing, however, that this struggle exists,—and it does indeed occur,—its result is unfortunately the very reverse of that which the Darwinian school seems to desire, and of that which in agreement with them we also might desire:

Species do not evolve towards perfection: the weak always prevail over the strong—simply because they are the majority, and because they are also the more crafty. Darwin forgot the intellect (—that is English!), the weak have more intellect.

In order to acquire intellect, one must be in need of it.

One loses it when one no longer needs it. He who possesses strength flings intellect to the deuce (—“let it go hence!”[2] say the Germans of the present day, “the Empire will remain”).

... Has nobody found Schiller out yet?—But there are other “ands” which are even more egregious. With my own ears I have heard—only among University professors, it is true!—men speak of “Schopenhauer and Hartmann.” ...[3]

The most intellectual men, provided they are also the most courageous, experience the most excruciating tragedies: but on that very account they honour life, because it confronts them with its most formidable antagonism.

Concerning “the Conscience of the Intellect” Nothing seems to me more uncommon to-day than genuine hypocrisy. I strongly suspect that this growth is unable to flourish in the mild climate of our culture.

From this there arises an attitude of toleration towards one’s self. Toleration towards one’s self allows of a greater number of convictions: the latter live comfortably side by side, and they take jolly good care, as all the world does to-day, not to compromise themselves.

How does a man compromise himself to-day?

When he is consistent; when he pursues a straight course; when he has anything less than five faces; when he is genuine.... I very greatly fear that modern man is much too fond of comfort for certain vices;

Toleration towards one’s self allows of a greater number of convictions: the latter live comfortably side by side, and they take jolly good care, as all the world does to-day, not to compromise themselves. How does a man compromise himself to-day?

When he is consistent; when he pursues a straight course; when he has anything less than five faces; when he is genuine....

I very greatly fear that modern man is much too fond of comfort for certain vices; and the consequence is that the latter are dying out.

Man imagines the world itself to be overflowing with beauty,—he forgets that he is the cause of it all. He alone has endowed it with beauty. Alas! and only with human all-too-human beauty!

Truth to tell man reflects himself in things, he thinks everything beautiful that throws his own image back at him.

The judgment “beautiful” is the “vanity of his species.” ... A little demon of suspicion may well whisper into the sceptic’s ear: is the world really beautified simply because man thinks it beautiful? He has only humanised it—that is all.

He alone has endowed it with beauty. Alas! and only with human all-too-human beauty! Truth to tell man reflects himself in things, he thinks everything beautiful that throws his own image back at him.

The judgment “beautiful” is the “vanity of his species.” ...

A little demon of suspicion may well whisper into the sceptic’s ear: is the world really beautified simply because man thinks it beautiful? He has only humanised it—that is all.

We no longer value ourselves sufficiently highly when we communicate our soul’s content. Our real experiences are not at all garrulous. They could not communicate themselves even if they wished to. They are at a loss to find words for such confidences.

Those things for which we find words, are things wehave already overcome.

In all speech there lies an element of contempt. Speech, it would seem, was only invented for average, mediocre and communicable things.—Every spoken word proclaims the speaker vulgarised—(Extract from a moral code for deaf-and-dumb people and other philosophers.)

Our real experiences are not at all garrulous. They could not communicate themselves even if they wished to. They are at a loss to find words for such confidences. Those things for which we find words, are things wehave already overcome.

In all speech there lies an element of contempt.

Speech, it would seem, was only invented for average, mediocre and communicable things.—Every spoken word proclaims the speaker vulgarised—(Extract from a moral code for deaf-and-dumb people and other philosophers.)

conversely hardness and terribleness in morals may be the result of a surplus of life. When the latter state prevails, much is dared, much is challenged, and much is also squandered. That which formerly was simply the salt of life, would now be our poison.

To be indifferent—even this is a form of strength—for that, likewise, we are too senile, too decrepit: our morality of fellow-feeling, against which I was the first to raise a finger of warning, that which might be called moral impressionism, is one symptom the more of the excessive physiological irritability which is peculiar to everything decadent.

That movement which attempted to introduce itself in a scientific manner on the shoulders of Schopenhauer’s morality of pity—a very sad attempt!—is in its essence the movement of decadence in morality, and as such it is intimately related to Christian morality.

Regarded more closely, it is war which produces these results, war in favour of liberal institutions, which, as war, allows the illiberal instincts to subsist. For war trains men to be free. What in sooth is freedom?

Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.

It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men. To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself. To be ready to sacrifice men for one’s cause, one’s self included.

The man who has won his freedom, and how much more so, therefore, the spirit that has won its freedom, tramples ruthlessly upon that contemptible kind of comfort which tea-grocers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats worship in their dreams.

The free man is a warrior.—How is freedom measured in individuals as well as in nations?

According to the resistance which has to be overcome, according to the pains which it costs to remain uppermost. The highest type of free man would have to be sought where the greatest resistance has continually to be overcome:

great danger made out of them something which deserves reverence, that danger which alone can make us aware of our resources, our virtues, our means of defence, our weapons, our genius,—which compels us to be strong.

First principle: a man must need to be strong, otherwise he will never attain it.

—Those great forcing-houses of the strong, of the strongest kind of men that have ever existed on earth, the aristocratic communities like those of Rome and Venice, understood freedom precisely as I understand the word:

We physiologists, at least, are aware of this. But all priests and moralists have believed in it,—they wished to drag and screw man back to a former standard of virtue.

Morality has always been a Procrustean bed.

Even the politicians have imitated the preachers of virtue in this matter. There are parties at the present day whose one aim and dream is to make all things adopt the crab-march. But not everyone can be a crab. It cannot be helped:

either democratically in the style of Buckle, or religiously after the manner of Carlyle.—The danger which great men and great ages represent, is simply extraordinary; every kind of exhaustion and of sterility follows in their wake.

The great man is an end; the great age—the Renaissance for instance,—is an end.

The genius—in work and in deed,—is necessarily a squanderer: the fact that he spends himself constitutes his greatness. The instinct of self-preservation is as it were suspended in him; the overpowering pressure of out-flowing energy in him forbids any such protection and prudence.

But, owing to the fact that humanity has been much indebted to such explosives, it has endowed them with many things, for instance, with a kind of higher morality....

This is indeed the sort of gratitude that humanity is capable of: it misunderstands its benefactors.

beauty must have been preferred to profit, to habit, to opinion and to indolence.

The first rule of all:—nobody must “let himself go,” not even when he is alone.—Good things are exceedingly costly:; and in all cases the law obtains that he who possesses them is a different person from him who is acquiring them.

Everything good is an inheritance: that which is not inherited is imperfect, it is simply a beginning. In Athens at the time of Cicero—who expresses his surprise at the fact—the men and youths were by far superior in beauty to the women:

And has not Goethe been—not alone for Germany, but also for the whole of Europe,—merely an episode, a beautiful “in vain”? But great men are misunderstood when they are regarded from the wretched standpoint of public utility.

The fact that no advantage can be derived from them—this in itself may perhaps be peculiar to greatness.

Goethe is the last German whom I respect: he had understood three things as I understand them. We also agree as to the “cross.”[9] People often ask me why on earth I write in German: nowhere am I less read than in the Fatherland.

This book belongs to the very few. Maybe not one of them is yet alive; unless he be of those who understand my Zarathustra. How can I confound myself with those who to-day already find a hearing?—

Only the day after to-morrow belongs to me.

Some are born posthumously.

This book belongs to the very few. Maybe not one of them is yet alive; unless he be of those who understand my Zarathustra. How can I confound myself with those who to-day already find a hearing?—Only the day after to-morrow belongs to me.

Some are born posthumously.

I am only too well aware of the conditions under which a man understands me, and then necessarily understands. He must be intellectually upright to the point of hardness, in order even to endure my seriousness and my passion.

We were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor others: but we were very far from knowing whither to direct our bravery. We were becoming gloomy; people called us fatalists. Our fate—it was the abundance, the tension and the storing up of power.

We thirsted for thunderbolts and great deeds; we kept at the most respectful distance from the joy of the weakling, from “resignation.” ...

Thunder was in our air, that part of nature which we are, became overcast—for we had no direction. The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal.

We thirsted for thunderbolts and great deeds; we kept at the most respectful distance from the joy of the weakling, from “resignation.” ... Thunder was in our air, that part of nature which we are, became overcast—for we had no direction.

The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal.

What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and power itself in man. What is bad?—All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness?—The feeling that power is increasing,—that resistance has been overcome.

We are hyperboreans,—we know well enough how far outside the crowd we stand. “Thou wilt find the way to the Hyperboreans neither by land nor by water”: Pindar already knew this much about us. Beyond the north, the ice, and death—our life, our happiness....

We discovered happiness; we know the way; we found the way out of thousands of years of labyrinth.

Who else would have found it?—Not the modern man, surely?—“I do not know where I am or what I am to do; I am everything that knows not where it is or what to do,”—sighs the modern man.

What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and power itself in man. What is bad?—All that proceeds from weakness.

What is happiness?—The feeling that power is increasing,—that resistance has been overcome.

Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency[1] (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, free from all moralic acid). The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our humanity.

One word more against Kant as a moralist.

A virtue must be our invention, our most personal defence and need: in every other sense it is merely a danger.

That which does not constitute a condition of our life, is merely harmful to it: to possess a virtue merely because one happens to respect the concept “virtue,” as Kant would have us do, is pernicious.

Do not let us undervalue the fact that we ourselves, we free spirits, are already a “transvaluation of all values,” an incarnate declaration of war against all the old concepts “true” and “untrue” and of a triumph over them.

The most valuable standpoints are always the last to be found: but the most valuable standpoints are the methods.

AH the methods and the first principles of our modern scientific procedure, had for years to encounter the profoundest contempt:

And even in asserting this we go a little too far; for, relatively speaking, man is the most botched and diseased of animals, and he has wandered furthest from his instincts.

Be all this as it may, he is certainly the most interesting!

As regards animals, Descartes was the first, with really admirable daring, to venture the thought that the beast was machina, and the whole of our physiology is endeavouring to prove this proposition. Moreover, logically we do not set man apart, as Descartes did:

In him it honours the conditions which enable it to remain uppermost,—that is to say, its virtues. It projects its joy over itself, its feeling of power, into a being, to whom it can be thankful for such things.

He who is rich, will give of his riches: a proud people requires a God, unto whom it can sacrifice things....

Religion, when restricted to these principles, is a form of gratitude. A man is grateful for his own existence;

To insist upon chastity only intensifies the vehemence and profundity of the religious instinct—it makes the cult warmer, more enthusiastic, more soulful.—

Love is the state in which man sees things most widely different from what they are.

The force of illusion reaches its zenith here, as likewise the sweetening and transfiguring power. When a man is in love he endures more than at other times; he submits to everything.

The force of illusion reaches its zenith here, as likewise the sweetening and transfiguring power.

When a man is in love he endures more than at other times; he submits to everything.

The thing was to discover a religion in which it was possible to love: by this means the worst in life is overcome—it is no longer even seen.—So much for three Christian virtues Faith, Hope, and Charity:

I was then twenty years of age; now I am too serious for that sort of thing. What do I care about the contradictions of “tradition”? How can saintly legends be called “tradition” at all!

The stories of saints constitute the most ambiguous literature on earth: to apply the scientific method to them, when there are no other documents to hand, seems to me to be a fatal procedure from the start—simply learned fooling.

The point that concerns me is the psychological type of the Saviour. This type might be contained in the gospels, in spite of the gospels, and however much it may have been mutilated, or overladen with foreign features:

Epicureanism, the pagan theory of salvation, even though it possessed a large proportion of Greek vitality and nervous energy, remains the most closely related to the above. Epicurus was a typical decadent: and I was the first to recognise him as such.—

The terror of pain, even of infinitely slight pain—such a state cannot possibly help culminating in a religion of love....

I have given my reply to the problem in advance. The prerequisite thereto was the admission of the fact that the type of the Saviour has reached us only in a very distorted form. This distortion in itself is extremely feasible:

has it not set an Amphitryon story at the threshold of the Christian “faith”? And a dogma of immaculate conception into the bargain?... But by so doing it defiled conception.——

The “Kingdom of Heaven” is a state of the heart—not something which exists “beyond this earth” or comes to you “after death.”

The whole idea of natural death is lacking in the gospels. Death is not a bridge, not a means of access: it is absent because it belongs to quite a different and merely apparent world the only use of which is to furnish signs, similes.

“why precisely thus?” will be understood only too well. In this case everything must be necessary, everything must have meaning, a reason, the highest reason.

The love of a disciple admits of no such thing as accident.

Only then did the chasm yawn: “who has killed him?” “who was his natural enemy?”—this question rent the firmament like a flash of lightning. Reply: dominant Judaism, its ruling class. Thenceforward the disciple felt himself in revolt against established order;

What was the only part of Christianity which was subsequently borrowed by Muhamed? St Paul’s invention, his expedient for priestly tyranny and to the formation of herds: the belief in immortality—that is to say, the doctrine of the “Last Judgment.” ...

When the centre of gravity of life is laid, not in life, but in a beyond—in nonentity,—life is utterly robbed of its balance.

The great lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all nature in the instincts,—everything in the instincts that is beneficent, that promotes life and that is a guarantee of the future, henceforward aroused suspicion.

So little is it so that, when pleasurable sensations make their influence felt in replying to the question “what is true,” they furnish almost the contradiction of truth, or at any rate they make it in the highest degree suspicious.

The proof through “happiness,” is a proof of happiness—and nothing else; why in the world should we take it for granted that true judgments cause more pleasure than false ones, and that in accordance with a pre-established harmony, they necessarily bring pleasant feelings in their wake?

—The experience of all strict and profound minds teaches the reverse.

great minds are sceptical. Zarathustra is a sceptic. Strength and the freedom which proceeds from the power and excessive power of the mind, manifests itself through scepticism. Men of conviction are of no account whatever in regard to any principles of value or of non-value.

Convictions are prisons.

They never see far enough, they do not look down from a sufficient height: but in order to have any say in questions of value and non-value, a man must see five hundred convictions beneath him,—behind him....

it makes him unscrupulous; it even gives him the courage to employ unholy means; in certain circumstances it even allows him convictions. Conviction as a means: much is achieved merely by means of a conviction.

Great passion makes use of and consumes convictions, it does not submit to them—it knows that it is a sovereign power.

Conversely; the need of faith, of anything either absolutely affirmative or negative, Carlylism (if I may be allowed this expression), is the need of weakness.

whether a lie is perpetrated before witnesses or not is beside the point.—

The most common sort of lie is the one uttered to one’s self; to lie to others is relatively exceptional.

Now this refusal to see what one sees, this refusal to see a thing exactly as one sees it, is almost the first condition for all those who belong to a party in any sense whatsoever:

this was his practical reason.—There are some questions in which it is not given to man to decide between true and false; all the principal questions, all the principal problems of value, stand beyond human reason....

To comprehend the limits of reason—this alone is genuine philosophy.

For what purpose did God give man revelation? Would God have done anything superfluous? Man cannot of his own accord know what is good and what is evil, that is why God taught man his will.... Moral:

And in his way, each has his privilege. Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre.

Life always gets harder towards the summit,—the cold increases, responsibility increases.

A high civilisation is a pyramid: it can stand only upon a broad base, its first prerequisite is a strongly and soundly consolidated mediocrity.

All that is anthropomorphism! Anarchy, ugliness, form—are unrelated concepts. There is no such thing as imperfection in the realm of mechanics.

Everything has returned: Sirius, and the spider, and thy thoughts at this moment, and this last thought of thine that all these things will return.

Our whole world consists of the ashes of an incalculable number of living creatures: and even if living matter is ever so little compared with the whole, everything has already been transformed into life once before and thus the process goes on.

And then you will find every pain and every pleasure, every friend and every enemy, every hope and every error, every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine once more, and the whole fabric of things that makes up your life.

This ring in which you are but a grain will glitter afresh for ever.

And in every one of these cycles of human life there will be one hour where for the first time one man, and then many, will perceive the mighty thought of the eternal recurrence of all things:—and for mankind this is always the hour of …

he unto whom subordination, following, obedience, is the greatest happiness, let him obey. All that is necessary is that he should know what it is that gives him the highest happiness, and to fight shy of no means!

Eternity is at stake!

“But if everything is necessary, what control have I over my actions?” Thought and faith are a form of ballast which burden thee in addition to other burdens thou mayest have, and which are even more weighty than the latter.

that is why Socialism is its fruit; for with Socialism ephemeral individuals wish to secure their happiness by means of socialisation. They have no reason to wait, as those men had who believed in eternal souls, in eternal development and eternal amelioration.

My doctrine is: Live so that thou mayest desire to live again,—that is thy duty,—for in any case thou wilt live again

He unto whom striving is the greatest happiness, let him strive; he unto whom peace is the greatest happiness, let him rest; he unto whom subordination, following, obedience, is the greatest happiness, let him obey.

Let us try and discover how the thought that something gets repeated has affected mankind hitherto (the year, for instance, or periodical illnesses, waking and sleeping, &).

Even supposing the recurrence of the cycle is only a probability or a possibility, even a thought, even a possibility, can shatter us and transform us.

It is not only feelings and definite expectations that do this! See what effect the thought of eternal damnation has had!

It is not only feelings and definite expectations that do this! See what effect the thought of eternal damnation has had!

From the moment when this thought begins to prevail all colours will change their hue and a new history will begin.

The history of the future: this thought will tend to triumph ever more and more, and those who disbelieve in it will be forced, according to their nature, ultimately to die out.

Timelessness and immediate re-birth are compatible, once intellect is eliminated!

Thou feelest that thou must soon take thy leave perhaps—and the sunset glow of this feeling pierces through thy happiness.

Give heed to this sign: it means that thou lovest life and thyself, and life as it has hitherto affected thee and moulded thee,—and that thou cravest for its eternity—Non alia sed hac vita sempiterna!

Give heed to this sign: it means that thou lovest life and thyself, and life as it has hitherto affected thee and moulded thee,—and that thou cravest for its eternity—Non alia sed hac vita sempiterna!

Know also, that transiency singeth its short song for ever afresh and that at the sound of the first verse thou wilt almost die of longing when thou thinkest that it might be for the last time.

Let us stamp the impress of eternity upon our lives! This thought contains more than all the religions which taught us to contemn this life as a thing ephemeral, which bade us squint upwards to another and indefinite existence.—

Know also, that transiency singeth its short song for ever afresh and that at the sound of the first verse thou wilt almost die of longing when thou thinkest that it might be for the last time.

Let us stamp the impress of eternity upon our lives!

This thought contains more than all the religions which taught us to contemn this life as a thing ephemeral, which bade us squint upwards to another and indefinite existence.—

We must not strive after distant and unknown states of bliss and blessings and acts of grace, but we must live so that we would fain live again and live for ever so, to all eternity!—

Our duty is present with us every instant.

The leading tendencies: (1) We must implant the love of life, the love of every man’s own life in every conceivable way! However each individual may understand this love of self his neighbour will acquiesce, and will have to learn great tolerance towards it:

towards all gloomy, dissatisfied and brooding natures. We must prevent these from procreating! But our hostility itself must be a means to our joy! Thus we shall laugh; we shall mock and we shall exterminate without bitterness I Let this be our mortal combat

This life is thy eternal life!

What was the cause of the downfall of the Alexandrian culture?

People call him good who always wishes to be first, but they also call him good who does not wish to be ahead of anybody in anything.

We possess a powerful store of moral feelings, but we have no goal for them all.

They mutually contradict each other: they have their origin in different tables of values.

All goals have been annihilated, mankind must give themselves a fresh goal. It is an error to suppose that they had one: they gave themselves all the goals they ever had. But the prerequisites of all previous goals have been annihilated.

Science traces the course of things but points to no goal: what it does give consists of the fundamental facts upon which the new goal must be based.

The profound sterility of the nineteenth century. I have not encountered a single man who really had a new ideal to bring forward. The character of German music kept me hoping longest, but in vain.

“The conflict in the heart of the ruler is the contest between the love which is in his heart for him who is most remote, and the love which he feels for his neighbour.”

To be a creator and to be capable of goodness are not at all things which exclude one another.

They are rather one and the same thing; but the creator is farsighted and the good man nearsighted.

… with it,—we find out that our only means of enduring it is to create a creature who is able to endure it:—unless, of course, we voluntarily dazzle ourselves afresh and blind ourselves in regard to it But this we are no longer able to do!

We it was who created the gravest thought,—let us now create a being unto whom it will be not only light but blessed.

In order to be able to create we must allow ourselves greater freedom than has ever been vouch-safed us before; to this end we must be emancipated from morality, and we must be relieved by means of feasts (Premonitions of the future!

We must compose the myth poetry of the future! We must live in hopes!) Blessed moments I And then we must once again pull down the curtain and turn our thoughts to the next unswerving purpose.

Mankind must set its goal above itself—not in a false world, however, but in one which would be a continuation of humanity.

The half-way house is always present when the will to the future arises: the greatest event stands immediately before it.

“We wish to create a Being,” we all wish to have a hand in it, to love it. We all want to be pregnant—and to honour and respect ourselves on that account.

We must have a goal in view of which we may all love each other!

All other goals are only fit for the scrap heap.

1. Dissatisfaction with ourselves. An antidote to repentance. The transformation of temperament (e.g., by means of inorganic substances). Good will to this dissatisfaction.

We should wait for our thirst and let it become great in order to discover its source.

2. Death must be transformed into a means of victory and triumph.

Life itself created this thought which is the most oppressive for life. Life wishes to get beyond its greatest obstacle I

We must desire to perish in order to arise afresh,—from one day to the other.

Wander through a hundred souls,—let that be thy life and thy fate! And then finally: desire to go through the whole process once more!

Live under the scorn of the prevailing morality. The anguish of experiments and errors. The solution of all the joys offered by the older ideals (they are now felt to be partly hostile and partly strange).

What is it which gives a meaning, a value, an importance to things? It is the creative heart which yearns and which created out of this yearning.

It created joy and woe. It wanted to sate itself also with woe. Every kind of pain that man or beast has suffered, we must take upon ourselves and bless, and have a goal whereby such suffering would acquire some meaning.