Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“ The instincts of decadence have become master of the instincts of ascending life.... The will to nonentity has prevailed over the will to life!
Is this true? is there not perhaps a stronger guarantee of life and of the species in this victory of the weak and the mediocre?—is it not perhaps only a means in the collective movement of life, a mere slackening of the pace, a protective measure against something even more dangerous?
Suppose the strong were masters in all respects, even in valuing: let us try and think what their attitude would be towards illness, suffering, and sacrifice! ”

“ Out of respect for one's "honesty," which makes itself heard ever more and more imperiously, one ought to unlearn the shame which makes one deny and "explain away" all natural instincts. The extent to which one can dispense with virtue is the measure of one's strength; and a height may be imagined where the notion "virtue" is understood in such a way as to be reminiscent of virtù—the virtue of the Renaissance—free from moralic acid. But for the moment—how remote this ideal seems!
The reduction of the domain of morality is a sign of its progress. ”

“ While this procession passed before him, on its way to war and perhaps to death,—so wonderful in its vital strength and formidable courage, and so perfectly symbolic of a race that will conquer and prevail, or perish in the attempt,—Nietzsche was struck with the thought that the highest will to live could not find its expression in a miserable "struggle for existence," but in a will to war, a Will to Power, a will to overpower! ”

“ What I do not at all like in Jesus of Nazareth and His Apostle Paul, is that they stuffed so much into the heads of paltry people, as if their modest virtues were worth so much ado. We have had to pay dearly for it all; for they brought the most valuable qualities of both virtue and man into ill repute; they set the guilty conscience and the self-respect of noble souls at loggerheads, and they led the braver, more magnanimous, more daring, and more excessive tendencies of strong souls astray—even to self-destruction. ”

“ When morality—that is to say, refinement, prudence, bravery, and equity—have been stored up in the same way, thanks to the moral efforts of a whole succession of generations, the collective power of this hoard of virtue projects its rays even into that sphere where honesty is most seldom present—the sphere of intellect. When a thing becomes conscious, it is the sign of a state of ill-ease in the organism; something new has got to be found, the organism is not satisfied or adapted, it is subject to distress, suspense, and it is hypersensitive—precisely all this is consciousness.... ”

“ Now, no philosopher can be in any doubt as to what the type of perfection is in politics; it is, of course, Machiavellianism. But Machiavellianism which is pur, sans mélange, cru, vert, dans toute sa force, dans toute son âpreté, is superhuman, divine, transcendental, and can never be achieved by man—the most he can do is to approximate it. Even in this narrower kind of politics—in the politics of virtue—the ideal never seems to have been realised. Plato, too, only bordered upon it. ”

“ I test the power of a will according to the amount of resistance it can offer and the amount of pain and torture it can endure and know how to turn to its own advantage; I do not point to the evil and pain of existence with the finger of reproach, but rather entertain the hope that life may one day be more evil and more full of suffering than it has ever been. ”

“ If one should require a proof of how deeply and thoroughly the actually barbarous needs of man, even in his present state of tameness and "civilisation," still seek gratification, one should contemplate the "leitmotifs" of the whole of the evolution of philosophy:—a sort of revenge upon reality, a surreptitious process of destroying the values by means of which men live, a dissatisfied soul to which the conditions of discipline is one of torture, and which takes a particular pleasure in morbidly severing all the bonds that bind it to such a condition. ”

“ Nothing would then be more expensive than virtue: for by means of it the world would ultimately be turned into a hospital: and the last conclusion of wisdom would be, "everybody must be everybody else's nurse." Then we should certainly have attained to the "Peace on earth," so long desired! But how little "joy we should find in each other's company"! How little beauty, wanton spirits, daring, and danger! So few "actions" which would make life on earth worth living! ”

“ We are no Pascals, we are not particularly interested in the "Salvation of the soul," in our own happiness, and in our own virtue.—We have neither enough time nor enough curiosity to be so concerned with ourselves. Regarded more deeply, the case is again different, we thoroughly mistrust all men who thus contemplate their own navels: because introspection seems to us a degenerate form of the psychologist's genius, as a note of interrogation affixed to the psychologist's instinct: just as a painter's eye is degenerate which is actuated by the will to see for the sake of seeing. ”

“ Even Descartes had a notion of the fact that, according to a thoroughly Christian and moral attitude of mind, which includes a belief in a good God as the Creator of all things, the truthfulness of God guarantees the judgments of our senses for us. But for this religious sanction and warrant of our senses and our reason, whence should we obtain our right to trust in existence? That thinking must be a measure of reality,—that what cannot be the subject of thought, cannot exist,—is a coarse non plus ultra of a moral blind confidence (in the essential principle of truth at the root of all things) ”

“ Morality has always been a subject of misunderstanding: as a matter of fact, a certain species, which was constituted to act in a certain way, wished to justify itself by making its norm paramount.
"How must one act?" this is not a cause, but an effect. Morality follows, the ideal comes first....
On the other hand, the appearance of moral scruples (or in other words, the coming to consciousness of the values which guide action) betray a certain morbidness; strong ages and people do not ponder over their rights, nor over the principles of action, over instinct or over reason. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Supposing all the means of defence and protection, by means of which an ideal survives, are discovered, is it thereby refuted? It has merely availed itself of the means of which everything lives and grows—they are all "immoral."
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. ”

“ By our decrees we prevent this attitude of mind from breaking out and venting itself in a useless way—we are prudent when we prescribe such laws for ourselves; we are also moral in so doing.... Have you no idea—however vague—what sacrifices it has cost us, how much self-control, self-subjection, and hardness it has compelled us to exercise? We are vehement in our desires; there are times when we even feel as if we could devour each other.... But the "communal spirit" is master of us: have you observed that this is almost a definition of morality? ”

“ A morality and a religion of "love," the curbing of the self-affirming spirit, and a doctrine encouraging patience, resignation, helpfulness, and co-operation in word and deed may be of the highest value within the confines of such classes, even in the eyes of their rulers: for it restrains the feelings of rivalry, of resentment, and of envy,—feelings which are only too natural in the bungled and the botched,—and it even deifies them under the ideal of humility, of obedience, of slave-life, of being ruled, of poverty, of illness, and of lowliness. ”

“ What a morality or book of law creates: that deep instinct which renders automatism and perfection possible in life and in work.
But now we have reached the opposite point; yes, we wanted to reach it—the most extreme consciousness, through introspection on the part of man and of history: and thus we are practically most distant from perfection in Being, doing, and willing: our desires—even our will to knowledge—shows how prodigiously decadent we are. We are striving after the very reverse of what strong races and strong natures will have—understanding is an end.... ”

“ A virtuous man is of a lower species because, in the first place, he has no "personality," but acquires his value by conforming with a certain human scheme which has been once and for ever fixed. He has no independent value: he may be compared; he has his equals, he must not be an individual.
Reckoning up the qualities of the good man, why is it they appear pleasant to us? Because they urge us neither to war, to mistrust, to caution, to the accumulating of forces, nor to severity: our laziness, our good nature, and our levity, have a good time. ”

“ The struggle against Socrates, Plato, and all the Socratic schools, proceeds from the profound instinct that man is not made better when he is shown that virtue may be demonstrated or based upon reason.... This in the end is the niggardly fact, it was the agonal instinct in all these born dialecticians, which drove them to glorify their personal abilities as the highest of all qualities, and to represent every other form of goodness as conditioned by them. The anti-scientific spirit of all this "philosophy": it will never admit that it is not right. ”

“ The "good man" sees himself surrounded by evil, and, thanks to the continual onslaughts of the latter, his eye grows more keen, and in the end discovers traces of evil in every one of his acts. And thus he ultimately arrives at the conclusion, which to him is quite logical, that Nature is evil, that man is corrupted, and that being good is an act of grace (that is to say, it is impossible to man when he stands alone) . In short: he denies Life, he sees how "good," as the highest value, condemns Life.... ”

“ The resentment which the lowly feel against all those in high places, is continually turned to account: the fact that this teaching is revealed to them as the reverse of the wisdom of the world, against the power of the world, seduces them to it. This teaching convinces the outcasts and the botched of all sorts and conditions; it promises blessedness, advantages, and privileges to the most insignificant and most humble men; it fanaticises the poor, the small, and the foolish, and fills them with insane vanity, as though they were the meaning and salt of the earth. ”

“ The principle of love comes from the small community of Jewish people: a very passionate soul glows here, beneath the ashes of humility and wretchedness: it is neither Greek, Indian, nor German. The song in praise of love which Paul wrote is not Christian; it is the Jewish flare of that eternal flame which is Semitic. If Christianity has done anything essentially new in a psychological sense, it is this, that it has increased the temperature of the soul among those cooler and more noble races who were at one time at the head of affairs ”

“ Christianity is still possible at any moment. It is not bound to any one of the impudent dogmas that have adorned themselves with its name: 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. ”

“ Freedom from morality and from truth when enjoyed for that purpose which rewards every sacrifice: for the sake of making morality dominate—that is the canon. Moralists are in need of the attitudes of virtue, as also of the attitudes of truth; their error begins when they yield to virtue, when they lose control of virtue, when they themselves become moral or true. A great moralist is, among other things, necessarily a great actor; his only danger is that his pose may unconsciously become a second nature, just like his ideal, which is to keep his esse and his operari apart in a divine way ”

“ God loves us and wants nothing from us save love"; that is to say: all morality, obedience, and action, do not produce the same feeling of power and freedom as love does;—a man does nothing wicked from sheer love, but he does much more than if he were prompted by obedience and virtue alone.
Here is the happiness of the herd, the communal feeling in big things as in small, the living sentiment of unity felt as the sum of the feeling of life. Helping, caring for, and being useful, constantly kindle the feeling of power ”

“ Life no longer contains any problems;—the whole conception of the world is polluted by the notion of punishment; —Life itself, owing to the fact that the priests life is upheld as the non plus ultra of perfection, is transformed into a denial and pollution of life;—the concept "God" represents an aversion to Life, and even a criticism and a contemning of it. Truth is transformed in the mind, into priestly prevarication; the striving after truth, into the study of the Scriptures, into the way to become a theologian. ”

“ On the other hand, the present writer has done little else, hitherto, than reflect and meditate, like [Pg 2] an instinctive philosopher and anchorite, who found his advantage in isolation—in remaining outside, in patience, procrastination, and lagging behind; like a weighing and testing spirit who has already lost his way in every labyrinth of the future; like a prophetic bird-spirit that looks backwards when it would announce what is to come; like the first perfect European Nihilist, who, however, has already outlived Nihilism in his own soul—who has out-grown, overcome, and dismissed it. ”

“ The seventeenth century tries to banish all traces of the individual in order that the artist's work may resemble life as much as possible. The eighteenth century strives to create interest in the author by means of the work. The seventeenth century seeks art in art, a piece of culture; the eighteenth uses art in its propaganda for political and social reforms.
"Utopia," the "ideal man," the deification of Nature, the vanity of making one's own personality the centre of interest, subordination to the propaganda of social ideas, charlatanism—all this we derive from the eighteenth century. ”

“ Hegel's way of thinking is not so very far removed from that of Goethe: see the latter on the subject of Spinoza, for instance. The will to deify the All and Life, in order to find both peace and happiness in contemplating them: Hegel looks for reason everywhere—in the presence of reason man may be submissive and resigned. In Goethe we find a kind of fatalism which is almost joyous and confiding, which neither revolts nor weakens, which strives to make a totality out of itself, in the belief that only in totality does everything seem good and justified, and find itself resolved. ”