The Will to Power, Books I and II quotes

1.

Nihilism is at our door: whence comes this most gruesome of all guests to us?

—To begin with, it is a mistake to point to "social evils," "physiological degeneration," or even to corruption as a cause of Nihilism. This is the most straightforward and most sympathetic age that ever was.

5. The Nihilistic consequences of present natural science (along with its attempts to escape into a Beyond). Out of its practice there finally arises a certain self-annihilation, an antagonistic attitude towards itself—a sort of anti-scientificality.

Since Copernicus man has been rolling away from the centre towards x.

6. The Nihilistic consequences of the political and politico-economical way of thinking, where all principles at length become tainted with the atmosphere of the platform: the breath of mediocrity, insignificance, dishonesty, etc. Nationalism. Anarchy, etc. Punishment.

1. Nihilism As an Outcome of the Valuations and Interpretations of Existence Which Have Prevailed Heretofore.

What does Nihilism mean?—That the highest values are losing their value.

There is no bourne. There is no answer to the question: "to what purpose?"

What does Nihilism mean?—That the highest values are losing their value. There is no bourne.

There is no answer to the question: "to what purpose?"

Thorough Nihilism is the conviction that life is absurd, in the light of the highest values already discovered;

but falsely projected into the nature of things.

It is always man's exaggerated ingenuousness to regard himself as the sense and measure of all things.

[2] This probably refers to Kant's celebrated table of twelve categories. The four classes, quantity, quality, relation, and modality, are each provided with three categories.—TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.

It finds that the value of things consists precisely in the fact that these values are not real and never have been real, but that they are only a symptom of strength on the part of the valuer, a simplification serving the purposes of existence.

Values and their modification are related to the growth of power of the valuer.

The measure of disbelief and of the "freedom of spirit" which is tolerated, viewed as an expression of the growth of power.

"Nihilism" viewed as the ideal of the highest spiritual power, of the over-rich life, partly destructive, partly ironical.

What is belief? How is a belief born?

All belief assumes that something is true.

because no real world is at hand. It were therefore: only an appearance seen in perspective, whose origin must be found in us (seeing that we are constantly in need of a narrower, a shortened, and simplified world).

This should be realised, that the extent to which we can, in our heart of hearts, acknowledge appearance, and the necessity of falsehood, without going to rack and ruin, is the measure of strength.

In this respect, Nihilism, in that it is the negation of a real world and of Being, might be a divine view of the world.

then he endeavoured to demonstrate at least his relationship to the most essential and in itself most valuable side of life—as all metaphysicians do, who wish to hold fast to the dignity of man, in their belief that moral values are cardinal values.

He who has let God go, clings all the more strongly to the belief in morality.

Every purely moral valuation (as, for instance, the Buddhistic) terminates in Nihilism: Europe must expect the same thing! It is supposed that one can get along with a morality bereft of a religious background; but in this direction the road to Nihilism is opened.

Concerning the genesis of the Nihilist.

The courage of all one really knows comes but late in life.

It is only quite recently that I have acknowledged to myself that heretofore I have been a Nihilist from top to toe. The energy and thoroughness with which I marched forward as a Nihilist deceived me concerning this fundamental principle.

The philosopher is lacking, the interpreter of deeds, and not alone he who poetises them.

Imperfect Nihilism—its forms: we are now surrounded by them.

All attempts made to escape Nihilism, which do not consist in transvaluing the values that have prevailed hitherto, only make the matter worse; they complicate the problem.

the higher species fail, and as an example of degeneration tend to dispose all hearts against them—on the other hand, there is some indignation caused by the mediocre positing themselves as the end and meaning of all things.

No one can any longer reply to the question: "Why?"

(4) Belittlement, susceptibility to pain, unrest, haste, and confusion are steadily increasing—the materialisation of all these tendencies, which is called "civilisation," becomes every day more simple, with the result that, in the face of the monstrous machine, the individual despairs and surrenders.

The race is corrupted—not by its vices, but by its ignorance: it is corrupted because it has not recognised exhaustion as exhaustion: physiological misunderstandings are the cause of all evil.

Virtue is our greatest misunderstanding.

Problem: how were the exhausted able to make the laws of values? In other words, how did they who are the last, come to power?... How did the instincts of the animal man ever get to stand on their heads?...

Disintegration—that is to say, uncertainty—is peculiar to this age: nothing stands on solid ground or on a sound faith.

People live for the morrow, because the day-after-to-morrow is doubtful.

All our road is slippery and dangerous, while the ice which still bears us has grown unconscionably thin: we all feel the mild and gruesome breath of the thaw-wind—soon, where we are walking, no one will any longer be able to stand!

Disintegration—that is to say, uncertainty—is peculiar to this age: nothing stands on solid ground or on a sound faith. People live for the morrow, because the day-after-to-morrow is doubtful.

All our road is slippery and dangerous, while the ice which still bears us has grown unconscionably thin: we all feel the mild and gruesome breath of the thaw-wind—soon, where we are walking, no one will any longer be able to stand!

If this is not an age of decay and of diminishing vitality, it is at least one of indiscriminate and arbitrary experimentalising—and it is probable that out of an excess of abortive experiments there has grown this general impression, as of decay:

Our age, with its indiscriminate endeavours to mitigate distress, to honour it, and to wage war in advance with unpleasant possibilities, is an age of the poor.

Our "rich people"—they are the poorest! The real purpose of all wealth has been forgotten.

Criticism of modern man:—"the good man," but corrupted and misled by bad institutions (tyrants and priests);—reason elevated to a position of authority;—history is regarded as the surmounting of errors;—the future is regarded as progress;—the Christian state ("God of the armies");—Christian sexual intercourse (as marriage);—the realm …

"Be simple"—a demand which, when made to us complicated and incomprehensible triers of the heart and reins, is a simple absurdity....

Be natural: but even if we are unnatural—what then?

The means employed in former times in order to arrive at similarly constituted and lasting types, throughout long generations: entailed property and the respect of parents (the origin of the faith in gods and heroes as ancestors).

That Science is possible in the way in which it is practised to-day, proves that all elementary instincts, the instincts which ward off danger and protect life, are no longer active.

We no longer save, we are merely spending the capital of our forefathers, even in the way in which we pursue knowledge.

(a) In the natural sciences ("purposelessness"), causality, mechanism, "conformity to law," an interval, a remnant.

On the other hand, there is no sight more wretched than that of a cobbler or a schoolmaster who, with the air of a martyr, gives one to understand that he was really born for something better.

There is nothing better than what is good! and that is: to have a certain kind of capacity and to use it.

This is virtù in the Italian style of the Renaissance.

they know that it is peculiar to the rich mind to live in a disinterested fashion, without taking too much petty thought for the morrow, and to distribute its wealth prodigally.

For intellect is a bad domestic economist, and pays no heed whatever to the fact that everything lives on it and devours it.

The motleyness of modern men and its charm Essentially a mask and a sign of boredom.

That is the appearance of things which deceives the most circumspect. But the nineteenth century shows no advance whatever on the sixteenth: and the German spirit of 1888 is an example of a backward movement when compared with that of 1788....

Mankind does not advance, it does not even exist.

The aspect of the whole is much more like that of a huge experimenting workshop where some things in all ages succeed, while an incalculable number of things fail; where all order, logic, co-ordination, and responsibility is lacking.

But, in order to endure that extreme Pessimism (which here and there peeps out of my Birth of Tragedy), to live alone "without God or morality," I was compelled to invent a counter-prop for myself.

Perhaps I know best why man is the only animal that laughs: he alone surfers so excruciatingly that he was compelled to invent laughter.

The unhappiest and most melancholy animal is, as might have been expected, the most cheerful.

Perhaps I know best why man is the only animal that laughs: he alone surfers so excruciatingly that he was compelled to invent laughter.

The unhappiest and most melancholy animal is, as might have been expected, the most cheerful.

In regard to German culture, I have always had a feeling as of decline. The fact that I learned to know a declining form of culture has often made me unfair towards the whole phenomenon of European culture.

How is it that precisely Germans discovered the Greek (the more an instinct is developed, the more it is tempted to run for once into its opposite).

Music is the last breath of every culture.

Renaissance and Reformation.—What does the Renaissance prove? That the reign of the "individual" can be only a short one. The output is too great; there is not even the possibility of husbanding or of capitalising forces, and exhaustion sets in step by step.

Whether the variety of its ideals and their contradictions are conditioned by a higher purpose: whether they are something higher.—For it might be the prerequisite of greatness, that growth should take place amid such violent tension.

Dissatisfaction, Nihilism, might be a good sign.

General survey.—As a matter of fact, all abundant growth involves a concomitant process of crumbling to bits and decay: suffering and the symptoms of decline belong to ages of enormous progress;

we can endure a considerable diminution of this value, we may grant a great deal of nonsense and accident: the power man has acquired now allows of a lowering of the means of discipline, of which the strongest was the moral interpretation of the universe.

The hypothesis "God" is much too extreme.

If anything shows that our humanisation is a genuine sign of progress, it is the fact that we no longer require excessive contraries, that we no longer require contraries at all....

for no natural humanity has ever existed yet. Scholastic, unnatural, and antinatural values are the rule and the beginning; man only reaches Nature after a long struggle—he never turns his "back" to her....

To be natural means, to dare to be as immoral as Nature is.

We are coarser, more direct, richer in irony towards generous feelings, even when we are beneath them.

Our attitude to morality is also more natural.

Principles have become a laughing-stock; no one dares to speak of his "duty," unless in irony.

But a helpful, benevolent disposition is highly valued. (Morality is located in instinct and the rest is despised. Besides this there are few points of honour.)

Our attitude to politics is more natural: we see problems of power, of the quantum of power, against another quantum. We do not believe in a right that does not proceed from a power which is able to uphold it.

We regard all rights as conquests.

Our valuation of great men and things is more natural: we regard passion as a privilege; we can conceive of nothing great which does not involve a great crime; all greatness is associated in our minds with a certain standing-beyond-the-pale in morality.

(4). The multiformity of the world as a question of strength, which sees all things in the perspective of their growth. The moral Christian values to be regarded as the insurrection and mendacity of slaves (in comparison with the aristocratic values of the ancient world).

All the beauty and sublimity with which we have invested real and imagined things, I will show to be the property and product of man, and this should be his most beautiful apology.

Man as a poet, as a thinker, as a god, as love, as power. Oh, the regal liberality with which he has lavished gifts upon things in order to impoverish himself and make himself feel wretched!

Man as a poet, as a thinker, as a god, as love, as power.

Oh, the regal liberality with which he has lavished gifts upon things in order to impoverish himself and make himself feel wretched!

Hitherto, this has been his greatest disinterestedness, that he admired and worshipped, and knew how to conceal from himself that he it was who had created what he admired.

Religion is an example of the "altération de la personalité." A sort of fear and sensation of terror in one's own presence.... But also a feeling of inordinate rapture and exaltation.

Among sick people, the sensation of health suffices to awaken a belief in the proximity of God.

Rudimentary psychology of the religious man:—All changes are effects; all effects are effects of will (the notion of "Nature" and of "natural law," is lacking); all effects presuppose an agent. Rudimentary psychology:

In all non-ascetic religions the procreative act is the secret per se: a sort of symbol of perfection and of the designs of the future: re-birth, immortality.

Our belief in ourselves is the greatest fetter, the most telling spur, and the strongest pinion.

Christianity ought to have elevated the innocence of man to the position of an article of belief—men would then have become gods: in those days believing was still possible.

As a matter of fact, it was the enfeeblement and moralisation of the man of antiquity. The new interpretation of natural functions, which made them appear like vices, had already gone before!

Religions are ultimately wrecked by the belief in morality.

The idea of the Christian moral God becomes untenable,—hence "Atheism,"—as though there could be no other god.

He bids us show anger to no one, and treat no one with contempt;—give alms secretly; not to desire to become rich;—not to swear;—not to stand in judgment;—become reconciled with our enemies and forgive offences;—not to worship in public.

"Blessedness" is nothing promised: it is here, with us, if we only wish to live and act in a particular way.

Subsequent Additions;—The whole of the prophet- and thaumaturgist-attitudes and the bad temper; while the conjuring-up of a supreme tribunal of justice is an abominable corruption (see Mark vi. 11: "And whosoever shall not receive you....

The New Testament is the gospel of a completely ignoble species of man; its pretensions to highest values—yea, to all values, is, as a matter of fact, revolting—even nowadays.

How little the subject matters! It is the spirit which gives the thing life!

What a quantity of stuffy and sick-room air there is in all that chatter about "redemption," "love," "blessedness," "faith," "truth," "eternal life"! Let any one look into a really pagan book and compare the two;

at best, he only remains a dear, absurd little ram with horns—provided, of course, he does not burst with vanity or excite indignation by assuming the airs of a supreme judge.

What a terrible glow of false colouring here floods the meanest virtues—as though they were the reflection of divine qualities!

The natural purpose and utility of every virtue is systematically hushed up; it can only be valuable in the light of a divine command or model, or in the light of the good which belongs to a beyond or a spiritual world.

it needs neither the teaching of the personal God, nor of sin, nor of immortality, nor of redemption, nor of faith; it has absolutely no need whatever of metaphysics, and it needs asceticism and Christian "natural science" still less.

Christianity is a method of life, not a system of belief.

It tells us how we should behave, not what we should believe.

Poverty, humility, and chastity are dangerous and slanderous ideals; but like poisons, which are useful cures in the case of certain diseases, they were also necessary in the time of the Roman Empire.

All ideals are dangerous: because they lower and brand realities; they are all poisons, but occasionally indispensable as cures.

God created man, happy, idle, innocent, and immortal: our actual life is a false, decadent, and sinful existence, a punishment....

he does not even know himself now. The knowledge, for instance, that man has a nervous system (but no "soul") is still the privilege of the most educated people. But man is not satisfied, in this respect, to say he does not know.

A man must be very superior to be able to say: "I do not know this,"—that is to say, to be able to admit his ignorance.

Suppose he is in pain or in a good mood, he never questions that he can find the reason of either condition if only he seeks.... In truth, he cannot find the reason; for he does not even suspect where it lies.... What happens?...

Sleep is the result of every kind of exhaustion; exhaustion follows upon all excessive excitement....

In all pessimistic religions and philosophies there is a yearning for sleep; the very notion "sleep" is deified and worshipped.

In this case the exhaustion is racial; sleep regarded psychologically is only a symbol of a much deeper and longer compulsion to rest.... In praxi it is death which rules here in the seductive image of its brother sleep....

"A method of treating cases of neurasthenia and hysteria ... by removal from home, rest in bed, massage twice a day, electrical excitation of the muscles, and excessive feeding, at first with milk."

A pang of conscience in a man is a sign that his character is not yet equal to his deed.

There is such a thing as a pang of conscience after good deeds: in this case it is their unfamiliarity, their incompatibility with an old environment.

Extreme pride is much more fitting here. What is the good of it all in the end!

No deed gets undone because it is regretted, no more than because it is "forgiven" or "expiated."

A man must be a theologian in order to believe in a power that erases faults: we immoralists prefer to disbelieve in "faults." We believe that all deeds, of what kind soever, are identically the same at root;

exceptional acts, born of a particular abundance of happiness and health; they are the highest waves of our spring tides, driven to an unusual height by a storm—an accident: such acts and "deeds" are also not typical.

An artist should never be judged according to the measure of his works.

A. In proportion as Christianity seems necessary to-day, man is still wild and fatal....

This creature full of contradictions, however, has in his being a grand method of acquiring knowledge: he feels the pros and cons, he elevates himself to Justice—that is to say, to the ascertaining of principles beyond the valuations good and evil.

The wisest man would thus be the richest in contradictions, he would also be gifted with mental antennæ wherewith he could understand all kinds of men; and with it all he would have his great moments, when all the chords in his being would ring in splendid unison—the rarest of accidents even in us!

A sort of planetary movement.

The compass of moral valuations: they play a part in almost every mental impression.

To us the world is coloured by them.

We have imagined the purpose and value of all things:

"the condition of existence" is now quite divorced from the moral values. It is much more superfluous and not nearly so painful. It becomes an arbitrary matter. Chaos.

Who creates the goal which stands above mankind kind and above the individual?

Formerly morality was a preservative measure: but nobody wants to preserve any longer, there is nothing to preserve. Thus we are reduced to an experimental morality, each must postulate a goal for himself.

Who creates the goal which stands above mankind kind and above the individual? Formerly morality was a preservative measure: but nobody wants to preserve any longer, there is nothing to preserve.

Thus we are reduced to an experimental morality, each must postulate a goal for himself.

What is the criterion of a moral action? (1) Its disinterestedness, (2) its universal acceptation, etc. But this is parlour-morality. Races must be studied and observed, and, in each case, the criterion must be discovered, as also the thing it expresses: a belief such as:

The necessity of false values.—A judgment may be refuted when it is shown that it was conditioned: but the necessity of retaining it is not thereby cancelled.

Reasons can no more eradicate false values than they can alter astigmatism in a man's eyes.

The need of their existence must be understood: they are the result of causes which have nothing to do with reasoning.

The necessity of false values.—

A judgment may be refuted when it is shown that it was conditioned: but the necessity of retaining it is not thereby cancelled.

Reasons can no more eradicate false values than they can alter astigmatism in a man's eyes.

The arrière pensée is always this: If man is not a causa prima through his will, he must be irresponsible,—therefore he does not come within the jurisdiction of morals,—virtue or vice is automatic and mechanical....

In short: in order that man may respect himself he must be capable of becoming evil.

Theatricalness regarded as the result of "Free Will" morality. It is a step in the development of the feeling of power itself to believe one's self to be the author of one's exalted moments (of one's perfection) and to have willed them....

Nothing in all that happens can be reprehensible in itself: one would not dare to eliminate it completely; for everything is so bound up with everything else, that to exclude one part would mean to exclude the whole.

A reprehensible action, therefore, would mean a reprehensible world as a whole....

And even then, in a reprehensible world even reprehending would be reprehensible.... And the consequence of an attitude of mind that condemns everything, would be the affirmation of everything in practice....

The dominion of virtue is not established by means of virtue itself; with virtue itself, one renounces power, one loses the Will to Power.

The victory of a moral ideal is achieved by the same "immoral" means as any other victory: violence, lies, slander, injustice.

He who knows the way fame originates will be suspicious even of the fame virtue enjoys.

The victory of a moral ideal is achieved by the same "immoral" means as any other victory: violence, lies, slander, injustice.

He who knows the way fame originates will be suspicious even of the fame virtue enjoys.

Morality is just as "immoral" as any other thing on earth; morality is in itself a form of immorality.

He who knows the way fame originates will be suspicious even of the fame virtue enjoys.

Morality is just as "immoral" as any other thing on earth; morality is in itself a form of immorality.

The great relief which this conviction brings. The contradiction between things disappears, the unity of all phenomena is saved——

We should begin to entertain doubts concerning a man if we heard that he required reasons in order to remain respectable: we should, in any case, certainly avoid his society.

The little word "for" in certain cases may be compromising; sometimes a single "for" is enough to refute one.

If we should hear, in course of time, that such-and-such an aspirant for virtue was in need of bad reasons in order to remain respectable, it would not conduce to increasing our respect for him. But he goes further;

Virtue must be defended against its preachers: they are its worst enemies.

For they teach virtue as an ideal for all; they divest virtue of the charm which consists in its rareness, its inimitableness, its exceptional and non-average character—that is to say, of its aristocratic charm.

He who finds a particular virtue an easy matter, ultimately laughs at it. Seriousness cannot be maintained once virtue is attained.

As soon as a man has reached virtue, he jumps out of it—whither? Into devilry.

Meanwhile, how intelligent all our evil tendencies and impulses have become! What an amount of inquisitiveness torments them! They are all fishhooks of knowledge!

He who finds a particular virtue an easy matter, ultimately laughs at it.

Seriousness cannot be maintained once virtue is attained.

As soon as a man has reached virtue, he jumps out of it—whither? Into devilry.

Meanwhile, how intelligent all our evil tendencies and impulses have become!

What an amount of inquisitiveness torments them!

They are all fishhooks of knowledge!

The Patrons of Virtue.—Lust of property, lust of power, laziness, simplicity, fear; all these things are interested in virtue; that is why it stands so securely.

Virtue is no longer believed in; its powers of attraction are dead; what is needed is some one who will once more bring it into the market in the form of an outlandish kind of adventure and of dissipation.

It exacts too much extravagance and narrow-mindedness from its believers to allow of conscience not being against it to-day. Certainly, for people, without either consciences or scruples, this may constitute its new charm: it is now what it has never been before—a vice.

This view of the danger of the virtue which is understood as impersonal and objective also holds good of modesty: through modesty many of the choicest intellects perish.

The morality of modesty is the worst possible softening influence for those souls for which it is pre-eminently necessary that they become hard betimes.

The domain of morality must be reduced and limited step by step;

And is it supposed that I have thereby done any harm to virtue?... Just as little as anarchists do to princes.

Only since they have been shot at, have they once more sat securely on their thrones....

For thus it has always been and will ever be: one cannot do a thing a better service than to persecute it and to run it to earth.... This—I have done.

such expressions of opinion involve a condemnation of the whole course of events.

For there is nothing quite isolated in the world: the smallest thing bears the largest on its back; on thy small injustice the whole nature of the future depends; the whole is condemned by every criticism which is directed at the smallest part of it.

Now granting that the moral norm—even as Kant understood it—is never completely fulfilled, and remains like a sort of Beyond hanging over reality without ever falling down to it;

secondly, by grasping the insolence and stupidity of the attitude of mind: for to desire that something should be otherwise than it is, means to desire that everything should be different—it involves a damaging criticism of the whole.

But life itself consists in such desiring!

To ascertain what exists, how it exists seems an ever so much higher and more serious matter than every "thus should it be," because the latter, as a piece of human criticism and arrogance, appears to be condemned as ludicrous from the start.

"Innocence" to them is idealised stultification; "blessedness" is idealised idleness; "love," the ideal state of the gregarious animal that will no longer have an enemy. And thus everything that lowers and belittles man is elevated to an ideal.

A desire magnifies the thing desired; and by not being realised it grows—the greatest ideas are those which have been created by the strongest and longest desiring.

Things grow ever more valuable in our estimation, the more our desire for them increases:

if "moral values" have become the highest values, it simply shows that the moral ideal is the one which has been realised least (and thus it represented the Beyond to all suffering, as a road to blessedness).

Man, with ever-increasing ardour, has only been embracing clouds: and ultimately called his desperation and impotence "God."

Think of the naïveté of all ultimate "desiderata"—when the "wherefore" of man remains unknown.

My view: all the forces and instincts which are the source of life are lying beneath the ban of morality: morality is the life-denying instinct. Morality must be annihilated if life is to be emancipated.

To avoid knowing himself is the prudence of the idealist.

The idealist: a creature who has reasons for remaining in the dark concerning himself, and who is also clever enough to remain in the dark concerning these reasons also.

Whatever kind of eccentric ideal one may have (whether as a "Christian," a "free-spirit," an "immoralist," or a German Imperialist), one should try to avoid insisting upon its being the ideal; for, by so doing, it is deprived of all its privileged nature.

One should have an ideal as a distinction; one should not propagate it, and thus level one's self down to the rest of mankind.

How is it, that in spite of this obvious fact, the majority of idealists indulge in propaganda for their ideal, just as if they had no right to it unless the majority acquiesce therein?—For instance, all those plucky and insignificant girls behave in this way, …

they thus "beautify" themselves in the eyes of those who still believe in disinterestedness and heroism. Whereas real heroism consists, not in fighting under the banner of self-sacrifice, submission, and disinterestedness, but in not fighting at all.... "

I am thus; I will be thus—and you can go to the devil!

"

The "good man" Or, hemiplegia of virtue.—In the opinion of every strong and natural man, love and hate, gratitude and revenge, goodness and anger, affirmative and negative action, belong to each other.

A man is good on condition that he knows how to be evil; a man is evil, because otherwise he would not know how to be good.

Whence comes the morbidness and ideological unnaturalness which repudiates these compounds—which teaches a sort of one-sided efficiency as the highest of all things? Whence this hemiplegia of virtue, the invention of the good man?

In short: he denies Life, he sees how "good," as the highest value, condemns Life.... And thus his ideology concerning good and evil ought to strike him as refuted.

But one cannot refute a disease.

Therefore he is obliged to conceive another life!...

"

Disasters are not to the faint-hearted,

" is a Russian proverb.

The "subject" is a piece of fiction: the ego of which every one speaks when he blames egoism, does not exist at all.

Our "ego"—which is not one with the unitary controlling force of our beings!—is really only an imagined synthesis; therefore there can be no "egoistic" actions.

Since all instincts are unintelligent, utility cannot represent a standpoint as far as they are concerned. Every instinct, when it is active, sacrifices strength and other instincts into the bargain:

Every society has a tendency to reduce its opponents to caricatures,—at least in its own imagination,—as also to starve them.

As an example of this sort of caricature we have our "criminal." In the midst of the Roman and aristocratic order of values, the Jew was reduced to a caricature. Among artists, "Mrs. Grundy and the bourgeois" become caricatures;

Falsity seems so deep, so many-sided, and the will is directed so inexorably against perfect self-knowledge and accurate self-classification, that one is very probably right in supposing that Truth and the will to truth are perhaps something quite different and only disguises. (

The need of faith is the greatest obstacle in the way of truthfulness.

)

One conceals one's self in the presence of the unfamiliar: and he who would attain to something, says what he would fain have people think about him, but not what he thinks. ("

The powerful man is always a liar.

")**

And the same applies to the moral mania, which, instead of insisting upon the control of the passions, sues for their extirpation. Its conclusion always is: only the emasculated man is a good man.

Instead of making use of and of economising the great sources of passion, those torrents of the soul which are often so dangerous, overwhelming, and impetuous, morality—this most shortsighted and most corrupted of mental attitudes—would fain make them dry up.

Conquest over the passions?—No, not if this is to mean their enfeeblement and annihilation. They must be enlisted in our service: and to this end it may be necessary to tyrannise them a good deal (not as individuals, but as communities, races, etc.).

The moralist's means are the most terrible that have ever been used; he who has not the courage to be an immoralist in deeds may be fit for anything else, but not for the duties of a moralist.

Morality is a menagerie; it assumes that iron bars may be more useful than freedom, even for the creatures it imprisons; it also assumes that there are animal-tamers about who do not shrink from terrible means, and who are acquainted with the use of red-hot iron.

This terrible species, which enters into a struggle with the wild animal, is called "priests."

I must set up the highest ideal of a philosopher. Learning is not everything!

The scholar is the sheep in the kingdom of learning; he studies because he is told to do so, and because others have done so before him.

The superstition concerning philosophers: They are confounded with men of science. As if the value of things were inherent in them and required only to be held on to tightly!

The struggle between systems, together with the struggle between epistemological scruples, is one which involves very special instincts (forms of vitality, of decline, of classes, of races, etc.).

The so-called thirst for knowledge may be traced to the lust of appropriation and of conquest: in obedience to this lust the senses, memory, and the instincts, etc., were developed.

The quickest possible reduction of the phenomena, economy, the accumulation of spoil from the world of knowledge (i.e. that portion of the world which has been appropriated and made manageable)....

It is thus that Kant in his "morality" falsifies his inner tendency to psychology; a more modern example of the same thing is Herbert Spencer's Ethics.

A man should neither conceal nor misrepresent the facts concerning the way in which he conceived his thoughts.

The deepest and most inexhaustible books will certainly always have something of the aphoristic and impetuous character of Pascal's Pensées. The motive forces and valuations have lain long below the surface; that which comes uppermost is their effect.

It is thus that Kant in his "morality" falsifies his inner tendency to psychology; a more modern example of the same thing is Herbert Spencer's Ethics. A man should neither conceal nor misrepresent the facts concerning the way in which he conceived his thoughts.

The deepest and most inexhaustible books will certainly always have something of the aphoristic and impetuous character of Pascal's Pensées.

The motive forces and valuations have lain long below the surface; that which comes uppermost is their effect.

this prospect is beside the point: I use my character, but I try neither to understand it nor to change it—the personal calculation of virtue has not entered my head once.

It strikes me that one closes the doors of knowledge as soon as one becomes interested in one's own personal case—or even in the "Salvation of one's soul"!...

One should not take one's morality too seriously, nor should one forfeit a modest right to the opposite of morality....

It strikes me that one closes the doors of knowledge as soon as one becomes interested in one's own personal case—or even in the "Salvation of one's soul"!...

One should not take one's morality too seriously, nor should one forfeit a modest right to the opposite of morality....

A sort of heritage of morality is perhaps presupposed here: one feels that one can be lavish with it and fling a great deal of it out of the window without materially reducing one's means.

for the will to power was considered immoral.

In the whole of moral evolution, there is no sign of truth: all the conceptual elements which come into play are fictions; all the psychological tenets are false; all the forms of logic employed in this department of prevarication are sophisms.

The chief feature of all moral philosophers is their total lack of intellectual cleanliness and self-control: they regard "fine feelings" as arguments: their heaving breasts seem to them the bellows of godliness....

all the forms of logic employed in this department of prevarication are sophisms. The chief feature of all moral philosophers is their total lack of intellectual cleanliness and self-control: they regard "fine feelings" as arguments: their heaving breasts seem to them the bellows of godliness....

Moral philosophy is the most suspicious period in the history of the human intellect.

The first great example: in the name of morality and under its patronage, a great wrong was committed, which as a matter of fact was in every respect an act of decadence.

The great reasonableness underlying all moral education lay in the fact that it always attempted to attain to the certainty of an instinct: so that neither good intentions nor good means, as such, first required to enter consciousness.

Just as the soldier learns his exercises, so should man learn how to act in life.

In truth this unconsciousness belongs to every kind of perfection: even the mathematician carries out his calculations unconsciously....

It is indecent to show all the five fingers at the same time. That which can be "demonstrated" is little worth. The instinct of every party-speaker tells him that dialectics excites mistrust and carries little conviction.

Nothing is more easily wiped away than the effect of a dialectician.

It can only be a last defence. One must be in an extremity; it is necessary to have to extort one's rights; otherwise one makes no use of dialectics.

he compromises when he conquers. The dialectician leaves it to his opponent to demonstrate that he is not an idiot; he is made furious and helpless, while the dialectician himself remains calm and still possessed of his triumphant reasoning powers—he paralyses his opponent's intellect.—

The dialectician's irony is a form of mob-revenge: the ferocity of the oppressed lies in the cold knife-cuts of the syllogism....

In Plato, as in all men of excessive sensuality and wild fancies, the charm of concepts was so great, that he involuntarily honoured and deified the concept as a form of ideal. Dialectical intoxication:

One commanded, and that sufficed. Among friends, inter pares, there was tradition—also a form of authority: and last but not least, one understood each other. There was no room found for dialectics. Besides, all such modes of presenting reasons were distrusted.

All honest things do not carry their reasons in their hands in such fashion.

It is indecent to show all the five fingers at the same time. That which can be "demonstrated" is little worth. The instinct of every party-speaker tells him that dialectics excites mistrust and carries little conviction.

There was no room found for dialectics. Besides, all such modes of presenting reasons were distrusted. All honest things do not carry their reasons in their hands in such fashion. It is indecent to show all the five fingers at the same time.

That which can be "demonstrated" is little worth.

The instinct of every party-speaker tells him that dialectics excites mistrust and carries little conviction. Nothing is more easily wiped away than the effect of a dialectician. It can only be a last defence. One must be in an extremity;

Acoustic hallucinations in Socrates: morbid element. When the intellect is rich and independent, it most strongly resists preoccupying itself with morality. How is it that Socrates is a moral-maniac?—Every "practical" philosophy immediately steps into the foreground in times of distress.

When morality and religion become the chief interests of a community, they are signs of a state of distress.

Intelligence, clearness, hardness, and logic as weapons against the wildness of the instincts. The latter must be dangerous and must threaten ruin, otherwise no purpose can be served by developing intelligence to this degree of tyranny.

Intelligence, clearness, hardness, and logic as weapons against the wildness of the instincts. The latter must be dangerous and must threaten ruin, otherwise no purpose can be served by developing intelligence to this degree of tyranny.

In order to make a tyrant of intelligence the instincts must first have proved themselves tyrants.

This is the problem. It was a very timely one in those days. Reason became virtue—virtue equalled happiness.

Answer: virtue.—Why virtue? Because virtue is supreme rationalness, and rationalness makes mistakes in the choice of means impossible: virtue in the form of reason is the way to happiness. Dialectics is the constant occupation of virtue, because it does away with passion and intellectual cloudiness.

As a matter of fact, man does not desire "happiness."

Pleasure is a sensation of power: if the passions are excluded, those states of the mind are also excluded which afford the greatest sensation of power and therefore of pleasure.

Epicurus was more naïf, more idyllic, more grateful; Pyrrho had more experience of the world, had travelled more, and was more nihilistic. His life was a protest against the great doctrine of Identity (Happiness = Virtue = Knowledge).

The proper way of living is not promoted by science: wisdom does not make "wise." ...

The proper way of living does not desire happiness, it turns away from happiness....

The return to the facts of common sense, the facts of the common man and of "paltry people." Honesty and intelligence stored up for generations of people who are quite unconscious of their principles, and who even have some fear of principles.

It is not reasonable to desire a reasoning virtue. ...

A philosopher is compromised by such a desire.

Gennius lies in the instincts; goodness does too.

One only acts perfectly when one acts instinctively.

Even from the moral point of view all thinking which is conscious is merely a process of groping, and in the majority of cases an attack on morality. Scientific honesty is always sacrificed when a thinker begins to reason: let any one try the experiment:

He is rather a symptom of the great multiformity of culture than of the effeteness of the latter. The decadent scholar is a bad scholar. Whereas the decadent philosopher has always been reckoned hitherto as the typical philosopher.

Among philosophers, nothing is more rare than intellectual uprightness: they perhaps say the very reverse, and even believe it.

But the prerequisite of all their work is, that they can only admit of certain truths; they know what they have to prove; and the fact that they must be agreed as to these "truths" is almost what makes them recognise one another as philosophers.

they know what they have to prove; and the fact that they must be agreed as to these "truths" is almost what makes them recognise one another as philosophers. There are, for instance, the truths of morality.

But belief in morality is not a proof of morality: there are cases—and the philosopher's case is one in point—when a belief of this sort is simply a piece of immorality.

What is the retrograde factor in a philosopher?—He teaches that the qualities which he happens to possess are the only qualities that exist, that they are indispensable to those who wish to attain to the "highest good" (for instance, dialectics with Plato).

Goodwill, "noble feelings," and "lofty states of the soul" are just as underhand and deceptive in the means they use as are the passions love, hatred, and revenge, which morality has repudiated and declared to be egotistic.

Errors are what mankind has had to pay for most dearly: and taking them all in all, the errors which have resulted from goodwill are those which have wrought the most harm.

The illusion which makes people happy is more harmful than the illusion which is immediately followed by evil results: the latter increases keenness and mistrust, and purifies, the understanding; the former merely narcoticises....

Errors are what mankind has had to pay for most dearly: and taking them all in all, the errors which have resulted from goodwill are those which have wrought the most harm.

The illusion which makes people happy is more harmful than the illusion which is immediately followed by evil results: the latter increases keenness and mistrust, and purifies, the understanding; the former merely narcoticises....

Fine feelings and noble impulses ought, speaking physiologically, to be classified with the narcotics: their abuse is followed by precisely the same results as the abuse of any other opiate—weak nerves.

The illusion which makes people happy is more harmful than the illusion which is immediately followed by evil results: the latter increases keenness and mistrust, and purifies, the understanding; the former merely narcoticises....

Fine feelings and noble impulses ought, speaking physiologically, to be classified with the narcotics: their abuse is followed by precisely the same results as the abuse of any other opiate—weak nerves.

Error is the most expensive luxury that man can indulge in: and if the error happen to be a physiological one, it is fatal to life. What has mankind paid for most dearly hitherto? For its "truths ":

Fine feelings and noble impulses ought, speaking physiologically, to be classified with the narcotics: their abuse is followed by precisely the same results as the abuse of any other opiate—weak nerves.

Error is the most expensive luxury that man can indulge in: and if the error happen to be a physiological one, it is fatal to life.

What has mankind paid for most dearly hitherto? For its "truths ": for every one of these were errors in physiologicis>....

for, in itself, truth could have been thoroughly painful, harmful, and even fatal. Likewise truth was combated only on account of the advantages which a victory over it would provide—for instance, emancipation from the yoke of the ruling powers.

The method of truth was not based upon motives of truthfulness, but upon motives of power, upon the desire to be superior.

How is truth proved? By means of the feeling of increased power,—by means of utility,—by means of indispensability,—in short, by means of its advantages (that is to say, hypotheses concerning what truth should be like in order that it may be embraced by us).

Ultimately all of them wanted to be right in the same absurd way as their opponents....

The word "conviction," "faith," the pride of martyrdom—these things are most unfavourable to knowledge.

The adversaries of truth finally adopt the whole subjective manner of deciding about truth,—that is to say, by means of poses, sacrifices, and heroic resolutions,—and thus prolong the dominion of the anti-scientific method. As martyrs they compromise their very own deed.

The adversaries of truth finally adopt the whole subjective manner of deciding about truth,—that is to say, by means of poses, sacrifices, and heroic resolutions,—and thus prolong the dominion of the anti-scientific method.

As martyrs they compromise their very own deed.

The dangerous distinction between "theoretical" and "practical" in Kant for instance, but also in the ancient philosophers:—they behave as if pure intellectuality presented them with the problems of science and metaphysics;—they behave as if practice should be judged by a measure of its own, whatever …

Of all that which was formerly held to be true, not one word is to be credited.

Everything which was formerly disdained as unholy, forbidden, contemptible, and fatal—all these flowers now bloom on the most charming paths of truth.

The whole of this old morality concerns us no longer: it contains not one idea which is still worthy of respect. We have outlived it—we are no longer sufficiently coarse and guileless to be forced to allow ourselves to be lied to in this way....

But he who believes in them and who honours them, refuses to acknowledge this aspect of them. All philosophers believe in these values, and one form their reverence takes is the endeavour to make a priori truths out of them.

The falsifying nature of reverence....

Reverence is the supreme test of intellectual honesty, but in the whole history of philosophy there is no such thing as intellectual honesty,—but the "love of goodness ..."