Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“ When one remembers that in almost all nations the philosopher is only a further development of the priestly type, this heirloom of priesthood, this fraud towards one’s self, no longer surprises one. When a man has a holy life-task, as for instance to improve, save, or deliver mankind, when a man bears God in his breast, and is the mouthpiece of imperatives from another world,—with such a mission he stands beyond the pale of all merely reasonable valuations. ”

“ Your whole life, like a sandglass, will always be reversed and will ever run out again,—a long minute of time will elapse until all those conditions out of which you were evolved return in the wheel of the cosmic process. 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. ”

“ Does anybody at last understand, will anybody understand what the Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian values, the attempt undertaken with all means, all instincts and all genius to make the opposite values, the noble values triumph,... Hitherto there has been only this great war: there has never yet been a more decisive question than the Renaissance,—my question is the question of the Renaissance:—there has never been a more fundamental, a more direct and a more severe attack, delivered with a whole front upon the centre of the foe. ”

“ With hostile calm he will first allow every kind of strange and new thing to come right up to him,—he will draw back his hand at its approach. To stand with all the doors of one’s soul wide open, to lie slavishly in the dust before every trivial fact, at all times of the day to be strained ready for the leap, in order to deposit one’s self, to plunge one’s self, into other souls and other things, in short, the famous “objectivity” of modern times, is bad taste, it is essentially vulgar and cheap. ”

“ Christianity is a system, a complete outlook upon the world, conceived as a whole. If its leading concept, the belief in God, is wrenched from it, the whole is destroyed; nothing vital remains in our grasp. Christianity presupposes that man does not and cannot know what is good or bad for him: the Christian believes in God who, alone, can know these things. Christian morality is a command, its origin is transcendental. ”

“ Nothing ever succeeds which exuberant spirits have not helped to produce. Surplus power, alone, is the proof of power.—A transvaluation of all values,—this note of interrogation which is so black, so huge, that it casts a shadow even upon him who affixes it,—is a task of such fatal import, that he who undertakes it is compelled every now and then to rush out into the sunlight in order to shake himself free from an earnestness that becomes crushing, far too crushing. This end justifies every means, every event on the road to it is a windfall. ”

“ But Rousseau—whither did he want to return? Rousseau this first modern man, idealist and canaille in one person; who was in need of moral “dignity,” in order even to endure the sight of his own person,—ill with unbridled vanity and wanton self-contempt; this abortion, who planted his tent on the threshold of modernity, also wanted a “return to nature”; but, I ask once more, whither did he wish to return? I hate Rousseau, even in the Revolution itself: the latter was the historical expression of this hybrid of idealist and canaille. ”

“ To attack at the decisive quarter, at the very seat of Christianity, and there to place noble values on the throne,—that is to say, to introduce them into the instincts, into the most fundamental needs and desires of those sitting there.... I see before me a possibility perfectly magic in its charm and glorious colouring—it seems to me to scintillate with all the quivering grandeur of refined beauty, that there is an art at work within it which is so divine, so infernally divine, that one might seek through millenniums in vain for another such possibility ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 celebrate the future and no longer the past! We must compose the myth poetry of the future! We must live in hopes!) ”

“ The human unit, the “individual,” as the people and the philosopher have always understood him, is certainly an error: he is nothing in himself, no atom, no “link in the chain,” no mere heritage from the past,—he represents the whole direct line of mankind up to his own life.... If he represent declining development, decay, chronic degeneration, sickness (—illnesses are on the whole already the outcome of decline, and not the cause thereof) , he is of little worth, and the purest equity would have him take away as little as possible from those who are lucky strokes of nature. ”

“ Now I would fain put the decisive question: [Pg 212] is there any difference at all between a lie and a conviction?—All the world believes that there is, but what in Heaven’s name does not all the world believe! Every conviction has its history, its preliminary stages, its period of groping and of mistakes: it becomes a conviction only after it has not been one for a long time, only after it has scarcely been one for a long time. ”

“ It is impossible for the Dionysian artist not to understand any suggestion; no outward sign of emotion escapes him, he possesses the instinct of comprehension and of divination in the highest degree, just as he is capable of the most perfect art of communication. He enters into every skin, into every passion: he is continually changing himself. Music as we understand it to-day is likewise a general excitation and discharge of the emotions; but, notwithstanding this, it is only the remnant of a much richer world of emotional expression, a mere residuum of Dionysian histrionism. ”

“ The only thing is that the death which takes place in the most contemptible circumstances, the death that is not free, the death which occurs at the wrong time, is the death of a coward. Out of the very love one bears to life, one should wish death to be different from this—that is to say, free, deliberate, and neither a matter of chance nor of surprise. ”

“ The Christian concept of God—God as the deity of the sick, God as a spider, God as spirit—is one of the most corrupt concepts of God that has ever been attained on earth. Maybe it represents the low-water mark in the evolutionary ebb of the godlike type God degenerated into the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yea! With God war is declared on life, nature, and the will to life! God is the formula for every calumny of this world and for every lie concerning a beyond! In God, nonentity is deified, and the will to nonentity is declared holy! ”

“ We should never forgive Christianity for having so abused the weakness of the dying man as to do violence to his conscience, or for having used his manner of dying as a means of valuing both man and his past—In spite of all cowardly prejudices, it is our duty, in this respect, above all to reinstate the proper—that is to say, the physiological, aspect of so-called natural death, which after all is perfectly “unnatural” and nothing else than suicide. One never perishes through anybody’s fault but one’s own. ”

“ Fancy a prince at the head of his legions, magnificent as the expression of the egoism and self-exaltation of his people,—but shameless enough to acknowledge himself a Christian!... What then does Christianity deny? What does it call “world”? “The world” to Christianity means that a man is a soldier, a judge, a patriot, that he defends himself, that he values his honour, that he desires his own advantage, that he is proud. ”

“ 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: consequently he is a Romanticist—for beneath all romanticism Rousseau’s instinct for revenge grunts and frets. ”

“ If on the other hand the world were something which continually renovated itself, it would then be understood to be something miraculous and free to create itself—in fact something divine. Eternal renovation presupposes that energy voluntarily increases itself, that it not only has the intention, but also the power, to avoid repeating itself or to avoid returning into a previous form, and that every instant it adjusts itself in every one of its movements to prevent such a contingency,—or that it was incapable of returning to a state it had already passed through. ”

“ The whole of the Occident no longer possesses those instincts from which institutions spring, out of which a future grows: maybe nothing is more opposed to its “modern spirit” than these things. People live for the present, the live at top speed,—they certainly live without any sense of responsibility; and this is precisely what they call “freedom.” Everything in institutions which makes them institutions, is scorned, loathed and repudiated: everybody is in mortal fear of a new slavery, wherever the word “authority” is so much as whispered. ”

“ But true philosophers despise the man who wishes, as also the “desirable” man—and all the desiderata and ideals of man in general. If a philosopher could be a nihilist, he would be one; for he finds only nonentity behind all human ideals. Or, not even nonentity, but vileness, absurdity, sickness, cowardice, fatigue and all sorts of dregs from out the quaffed goblets of his life.... How is it that man, who as a reality is so estimable, ceases from deserving respect the moment he begins to desire? ”

“ It is precisely the reverse of all struggle, of all consciousness of taking part in the fight, that has become instinctive here: the inability to resist is here converted into a morality (“resist not evil,” the profoundest sentence in the whole of the gospels, their key in a certain sense) , the blessedness of peace, of gentleness, of not being able to be an enemy. What is the meaning of “glad tidings”?—True life, eternal life has been found—it is not promised, it is actually here, it is in you; it is life in love, in love free from all selection or exclusion, free from all distance. ”

“ Let us generalise the case of the criminal; let us imagine creatures who for some reason or other fail to meet with public approval, who know that they are regarded neither as beneficent nor useful,—the feeling of the Chandala, who are aware that they are not looked upon as equal, but as proscribed, unworthy, polluted. The thoughts and actions of all such natures are tainted with a subterranean mouldiness; everything in them is of a paler hue than in those on whose existence the sun shines. ”

“ 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; for this he must have a God.—Such a God must be able to benefit and to injure him, he must be able to act the friend and the foe. He must be esteemed for his good as well as for his evil qualities. The monstrous castration of a God by making him a God only of goodness, would lie beyond the pale of the desires of such a community. ”

“ Socrates was a misunderstanding. The whole of the morality of amelioration—that of Christianity as well—was a misunderstanding. The most blinding light [Pg 16] of day: reason at any price; life made clear, cold, cautious, conscious, without instincts, opposed to the instincts, was in itself only a disease, another kind of disease—and by no means a return to “virtue,” to “health,” and to happiness. To be obliged to fight the instincts—this is the formula of degeneration: as long as life is in the ascending line, happiness is the same as instinct. ”

“ In the beautiful, man postulates himself as the standard of perfection; [Pg 75] in exceptional cases he worships himself as that standard. A species has no other alternative than to say “yea” to itself alone, in this way. Its lowest instinct, the instinct of self-preservation and self-expansion, still radiates in such sublimities. 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. ”

“ 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 Noon. ”

“ To draw up a law-book like Manu’s, is tantamount to granting a people mastership for the future, perfection for the future,—the right to aspire to the highest Art of Life. To that end it must be made unconscious; this is the object of every holy lie.—The order of castes, the highest, the dominating law, is only the sanction of a natural order, of a natural legislation of the first rank, over which no arbitrary innovation, no “modern idea” has any power. ”

“ MORALITY AS THE ENEMY OF NATURE 1
There is a time when all passions are simply fatal in their action, when they wreck their victims with the weight of their folly,—and there is a later period, a very much later period, when they marry with the spirit, when they “spiritualise” themselves. Formerly, owing to the stupidity inherent in passion, men waged war against passion itself: men pledged themselves to annihilate it,—all ancient moral-mongers were unanimous on this point, “il faut tuer les passions.” ”