Friedrich Nietzsche

“ They smiled because they were amused and put into good humour by human sufferings; for a cruel mind enjoys to the utmost the gratifying consciousness of power. Thus the "most moral man" of the community was distinguished by the virtue of frequent suffering, of privation, of a hard mode of life and cruel castigations; not—to repeat it again and again—as a means of discipline and self-command or a longing for individiual happiness. It is a virtue, which should put the community into good odour with the evil gods, and steam up to them from their altars as an uninterupted propitiatory offering. ”

“ Why by something that filled the very bearer of the new idea with an awe and horror of himself, an, suppressing all remorse, urged him on to make himself its prophet and its martyr? While we hear it constantly asserted even in our days that, instead of a grain of salt, a grain of insanity had been given to genius, men of previous periods were more inclined to believe that, wherever madness appeared, a grain of genius and wisdom—something divine as they whispered into each other's ears—was to be found. ”

“ Who is the most moral man? On the one hand, he who lost frequently fulfils the law: who, like the Brahmin, carries the conscious-ness of it with him everywhere and into each minute particle of time, being ever ingenious in finding opportunities of fulfilling the law. On the other land, he who fulfils it even in the most trying cases. The most moral man is he who brings the greatest sacrifices to morality. ”

“ Nothing has been more clearly bought than that little portion of human reason and sense of liberty which now constitutes our pride. But it is this very pride which renders it almost impossible to us to feel in sympathy with those enormous periods of the "morality of custom," which precedence the "world's history" as the true and decisive part of history which has shaped the character of mankind when suffering, cruelty, hypocrisy, vengeance, and the denial of reason passed as virtues ”

“ And when the eloquence of somegreat penitentiary preacher for once disclosed all the secret suffering of the individual, the agonics of the "closet"; when, for instance, a Whitefield preached, “like a dying ran to the dying," now bitterly crying, now loudly and passionately stamping his feet, amid the most piercing and surprising sounds and without any fear of turning the whole force of his attack upon one single individual present and excluding him in an awful manner from the community—then, each time,the earth scored really to be transformed into the "field of misery." ”

“ The insignificance of the origin increases in proportion to our insight into the origin ; whereas the things nearest to, around, and within our- selves gradually begin to display colours and beauty, puzzles and riches of greater importance than the older humanity ever dreamt of. Formerly thinkers used to move furiously about like captured beasts, intently watching the bars of their cages, at leaping up against thein in order to break them: happy he who fancied that he could spy through a gap something of the outside, of the world to come and of the far away. ”

“ Perhaps a wholeinferno of criminals could not at the remotest distance even bring about this depressing, dismal after-effect so noxious to land and air, as that small, noble community of unruly, fantastic, half-mad people, geniuses, that can neither control themselves nor experience any possible enjoyment in themselves until they have lost themselves: whereas the criminal very often gives proof of extraordinary self-control, devotion and prudence, and keeps these qualities alive in those who fear him. ”

“ That is to say, for souls, all of vigour, vindictiveness, hostility, malice, suspicion, ready to face every terror and hardened through privation and morality? The enjoyment of cruelty: just as it is deemed a virtue, in such a soul and amid such conditions, to be ingenious and insatiable in cruelty. The community take delight in performing cruel deeds, throwing aside for once the gloom of constant dread and precaution. ”

“ He who, for thousands of years, has allowed the countless doubts and scruples to continue continue, as if they were necessary for the salvation of mankind, and who, nevertheless, holds out prospects of terrible consequences to follow a violation of truth?Would he not be a cruel God, if He had the truth and yet could quickly look down upon mankind,miserably worrying itself for the sake of truth?But perhaps He yet is a God of goodness—and Hewas only unable to express Himself more distinctly, Perhaps He was wanting in intelligence? ”

“ Paroxysm is like real life to them, their very " ego ": in everything else they see the opponents and preventers of paroxysm; be it of an intellectual, moral, religious, or artistic nature. Mankind owes to these eccentric maniacs much that is evil, for they are the insatiable sowers of the weed of discontent with one's self and one's neighbours, of the contempt of the age and the world, and especially of the world-weariness. ”

“ Refined cruelty as virtue.—This kind of morality entirely rests on our craving after distinction—so do not think too highly of it! What kind of craving is it, and what is its innermost meaning? We wish our sight to cause grief to our neighbour, and to excite his envy, the sense of impotence and of his degradation : we want to make him taste the bitterness of his fate by dripping on his toungue a drop of our honey, and by keenly and maliciously looking into his eyes while bestowing on him this supposed favour. ”

“ What is observance? A higher authority, which is obeyed, not because it prescribes what is useful to us, but simply because it prescribes. By what does this feeling we have towards observance differ from the general sentiment of fear? It is the awe inspired by a superior intellect which lays down prescriptions, by an inconceivable, undefined power, by something more than personal--there is superstition in this fear. ”

“ God who, in his love, ordains everything, as it will finally be best for us : a God who both gives and takes from its our virtue and happiness, so that, on the whole, everything happens as is right and meet, and there is no reason left why we should take life sadly or rail at it; in short, resignation and modesty deified—that is the best and most lifelike residuum of Christianity still extant. ”

“ These thousands of years we certainly do not recall to our minds in speaking, after the usual manner, of the world's history, this ridiculously small portion of human existence; and even in this very world's history," which, in truth, is nought but much noise about the latest news, there is truly no subject more important than the old, old tragedy of martyrs who tried to stir up the moral swamp. ”

“ The Jews, anation who, like the Greeks, and even more than they, loved and love life, had but given little attention to this idea: the conception of the complete death as the punishment of sinners, and the never-to-rise again as the severest threat— had already a strong effect on these strange people, who did not want to get rid of their bodies, but hoped, in their refined Egypticism, to preserve them forever. ”

“ Is it not in the nature of vulgar souls always to call an enemy evil? And should we call Eros an enemy? The sexual feelings have that in common with those of pity and worship that one being gratifies another by his own enjoyment—we do not too often meet with such a benevolent arrangement in nature. And we actually revile it and spoil it by an evil conscience! ”

“ It is incalculable how much suffering just the rarer, choicer, and more original minds must have undergone in the course of history owing to their ever being looked upon, nay, their looking upon themselves as the evil and dangerous. Originality of every kind has acquired a bad conscience under the supreme rule of the morality of custom ”

“ Who—save a few learned people—knows that it records among other things the history of one of the most ambitious and obtrusive souls, of a wind both superstitious and cunning—the history of St. Paul, the apostle? But for this remarkable story, for the aberrations and passions of such a mind, of such a soul, Christianity would not exist, we should hardly have heard of a small Jewish sect, whose teacher died on the cross. ”

“ The revelling in the most shadowy similes and images, the sport with those invisible, inaudible, imperceptible beings, was felt as a life in another, a higher world, springing up from the utter contempt of this perceptible, seductive and wicked world of ours. ”

“ We must not deceive ourselves as regards the motive of that moral law which exacts the hardest fulfilment as a test of morality. Self-denial is exacted, not because of its useful consequences for the individual, but in order that custom or observance, despite all individual counter tendencies and advantages, may appear to rule supreme. The individual must sacrifice himself-such is the commandment of the morality of custom. ”

“ A new conception of space.—Is it the things real or the things imaginary which have more highly contributed to human happiness? One thing is certain, namely, that the gulf between the highest pitch of happiness and the lowest depth of misery has been created only by menus of the things imaginary. Consequently this conception of space is being reduced further and further before the influence of science: just as through science we have been and are still being taught to look upon the earth as small, nay, upon the solar system as a mere point. ”

“ They had continued so unsophisticated as not to establish an "adequate relation” between guilt and misfortune. The guilt of their tragic heroes is, indeed, the small stone over which the latter stumble, and on whose account they occasionally break an arm or knock out an eye. The antique mode of thinking merely adds: “Surely he ought to have gone his way more deliberately and less overwhelmingly." But it was reserved for Christianity to say: "Here is a great misfortune, and a great, equally great, offence must be concealed behind it, though we do not clearly see it. ”

“ Conception of a morality of custom.—Compared with the mode of life which prevailed among mankind for whole thousands of years, we people of the present day are living in very immoral times. The authority of custom is marvellously enfeebled, and so highly refined and sublimated in the notion of morality, that we might just as well describe it as volatilised. ”

“ Who has the courage to look into the wilderness of the most bitter and superfluous mental agonies in which probably the most productive minds of all ages have suffered untold misery? Who would listen to the sighs. ”

“ Then one could see large, assembled crowds behave as in a fit of madness; many in convulsions of fear, others lying there unconscious, motionless; others again violently trembling or, for hours, rending the air with their piercing cries. ”

“ There is morality in matters in which no observance exists. The circle of morality ever shrinks, in proportion as life is less regulated by observance. The free man is immoral because he is determined in everything to depend upon himself and not upon observance. In every primitive state of mankind the word "evil" signifies as much as “individual," "free," "arbitrary," "unwonted," "unforeseen," "incalculable”. ”

“ Thus the poets retained a certain conventional licence of madness, even in times of a gentler mould—of which licence Solon, for instance, availed himself, when he incited the Athenians to reconquer Salamis. "How does one bring about madness, if one is not and dare not feign to be mad?" Almost all great intellects of the older civilisation lave yielded to this dreadful chain of reasoning. A Secret science of artifices and dietetic tricks, together with the consciousness of the innocence nay, sanctity of such meditations and designs, became traditional. ”

“ A believer whothus argues and thus feels oppressed, ought really to be forgiven for being more inclined to pity with the suffering God than with his “neighbour's"; for they are no longer his neighbours if that most isolated, most primeval being be also the greatest sufferer and more than any in need of comfort. All religions bear traces of the fact that they owe their origin to an early immature intellectuality of men—they all make very light of the obligation to speak the truth: they know nothing of a duty of God to be truthful and clear in his communications to mankind. ”

“ These are pedantic and, on the whole, most superfluous rules. (Take the Kamtshadales for instance, forbidding the snow to be scraped off the shoes with a knife; a coal to be stuck on a knife; an iron to be put into the fire—and enacting that every one trespassing in these matters shall suffer capital punishment.) Yet they bring home to them the continual presence of the custom and the perpetual necessity of adhering to it: they do so in support of that that great rule which is the commencement of civilisation: any custom is better than no custom. ”

“ First of all we have the so-called religious natures, which form the majority among the lovers of contemplation, and therefore represent their commonest species; these have at all times made it their aim to make life difficult and, if possible, intolerable to practical people: to darken the heavens, blot out the sun, suspect joy, depreciate hope, paralyse the active hand, all this they have understood just as they had their comforts, alms, charity and benedictions for times and feelings of wretchedness. ”

“ The contempt of causes, consequences and reality.—Unfortunate accidents which befall a community is, for instance, sudden storms, bad crops or plagues, lend all its members to suspect that some offences against custom have been committed, or that now practices will have to be invented to assuage a new demonic power and caprice. Hence this kind of suspicion and reflection shirks the very investigation into the true natural causes, and accepts the demonic cause as something understood. This is the one source of hereditary perversity in the human intellect ”

“ We associate the procreation of man with an evil conscience ! The final outcome of this diabolisation of Eros is a farce: gradually Eros, the "devil," became more interesting to mankind than all the angels and saints taken together, thanks to the mysterious mummery of the Church in all things erotic: she has brought it about that, even in our own time, the love story has become the one real interest that binds all classes together—with all exaggeration which the ancients could not comprehend and which will be succeeded by peals of laughter in years to come. ”

“ Animals and morality.—The finesses required in polite society, such as careful avoidance of everything ridiculous, incommon, presumptuous, the suppressing of virtues and our most cager desires, the immediate resignation, self-adaptation, self-depreciation—all these are, roughly speaking, to be found as social custom even in the lowest animal world—and only in this low depth are we able to discover the after-purpose of these uniable pre-cautions: one wishes to escape from one's pursuers and to be aided in the search after one's prey. ”

“ Good and evil nature.—At first men grafted their own personalities on nature, seeing everywhere them-selves and their kin—namely their own evil and capricious minds—hidden, as it were, among the clouds, thunder-storms, wild beasts, trees and herbs: it was at this stage that they invented "evil nature." ”