Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“ The fact that the character of existence is misunderstood, is the profoundest and the highest secret motive behind everything relating to virtue, science, piety, and art. To be blind to many things, to see many things falsely, to fancy many things: Oh, how clever man has been in those circumstances in which he believed he was anything but clever! Love, enthusiasm, "God"—are but subtle forms of ultimate Self-deception; they are but seductions to life and to the belief in life! ”

“ The more lofty philosophical man who is surrounded by loneliness, not because he wishes to be alone, but because he is what he is, and cannot find his equal: what a number of dangers and torments are reserved for him, precisely at the present time, when we have lost our belief in the order of rank, and consequently no longer know how to understand or honour this isolation! Formerly the sage almost sanctified himself in the consciences of the mob by going aside in this way; to-day the anchorite sees himself as though enveloped in a cloud of gloomy doubt and suspicions. ”

“ Do ye also want a light, ye most concealed, strongest and most undaunted men of the blackest midnight?—This world is the Will to Power—and nothing else! And even ye yourselves are this will to power—and nothing besides! ”

“ All questions of strength: to what extent ought one to try and prevail against the preservative measures of society and the latter's prejudices?—to what extent ought one to unfetter one's terrible qualities, through which so many go to the dogs?—to what extent ought one to run counter to truth, and take up sides with its most questionable aspects?—to what extent ought one to oppose suffering, self-contempt, pity, disease, vice, when it is always open to question whether one can ever master them (what does not kill us makes us stronger....) ”

“ The passions which say yea. I ride, happiness, health, the love of the sexes, hostility and war, reverence, beautiful attitudes, manners, strong will, the discipline of lofty spirituality, the will to power, and gratitude to the Earth and to Life: all that is rich, that would fain bestow, and that refreshes, gilds, immortalises, and deifies Life—the whole power of the virtues that glorify—all declaring things good, saying yea, and doing yea. ”

“ At present, and probably for some time to come, one will seek such colossally creative men, such really great men, as I understand them, in vain: they will be lacking, until, after many disappointments, we are forced to begin to understand why it is they are lacking, and that nothing bars with greater hostility their rise and development, at present and for some time to come, than that which is now called the morality in Europe. Just as if there were no other kind of morality, and could be no other kind, than the one we have already characterised as herd-morality. ”

“ Metaphysics, morality, religion, science, in this book, all these things are regarded merely as different forms of falsehood: by means of them we are led to believe in life. "Life, must inspire confidence"; the task which this imposes upon us is enormous. In order to solve, this problem man must already be a liar in his heart, but he must above all else be an artist. And he is that. Metaphysics, religion, morality, science, all these things are but the offshoot of his will to art, to falsehood, to a flight from "truth," to a denial of "truth." ”

“ Do thy instincts impel thee to attack or to defend? The rest of mankind, all those whose instincts are not warlike, desire peace, concord, freedom, "equal rights": these things are but names and steps for one and the same thing. Such men only wish to go where it is not necessary for them to defend themselves,—such men become discontented with themselves when they are obliged to offer resistance: they would fain create circumstances in which war is no longer necessary. ”

“ Whenever an "effect" is noticeable, the masses gather in a crowd round it; to hear the inferior and the poor in spirit having their say is a terrible ear-splitting torment for him who knows and trembles at the thought, that the fate of man depends upon the success of its highest types. From the days of my childhood I have reflected upon the sage's conditions of existence, and I will not conceal my happy conviction that in Europe he has once more become possible—perhaps only for a short time. ”

“ And, at any rate, when a man loves, he is a good liar about himself and to himself: he seems to himself transfigured, stronger, richer, more perfect; he is more perfect.... Art here acts as an organic function: we find it present in the most angelic instinct "love"; we find it as the greatest stimulus of life—thus art is sublimely utilitarian, even in the fact that it lies.... But we should be wrong to halt at its power to lie: it does more than merely imagine; it actually transposes values. And it not only transposes the feeling for values: the lover actually has a greater value ”

“ Let us halt a moment before this symptom of highest culture, I call it the pessimism of strength. Man now no longer requires a "justification of evil"; justification is precisely what he abhors: he enjoys evil, pur, cru; he regards purposeless evil as the most interesting kind of evil. If he had required a God in the past, he now delights in cosmic disorder without a God, a world of accident, to the essence of which terror, ambiguity, and seductiveness belong. ”

“ The right to punish (or society's means of defence) has been arrived at only through a misuse of the word "right": a right is acquired only by contract, but self-defence and self-preservation do not stand upon the basis of a contract. A people ought at least, with quite as much justification, to be able to regard its lust of power, either in arms, commerce, trade, or colonisation, as a right the right of growth, perhaps.... When the instincts of a society ultimately make it give up war and renounce conquest, it is decadent: it is ripe for democracy and the rule of shopkeepers. ”

“ We are not the result of an eternal design, of a will, of a desire: there is no attempt being made with us to attain to an "ideal of perfection," to an "ideal of happiness," to an "ideal of virtue,"—and we are just as little the result of a mistake on God's part in the presence of which He ought to feel uneasy (a thought which is known to be at the very root of the Old Testament) . There is not a place nor a purpose nor a sense to which we can attribute our existence or our kind of existence. ”

“ The degree of resistance which has to be continually overcome in order to remain at the top, is the measure of freedom, whether for individuals or for societies: freedom being understood as positive power, as will to power. The highest form of individual freedom, of sovereignty, would, according to this, in all probability be found not five feet away from its opposite—that is to say, where the danger of slavery hangs over life, like a hundred swords of Damocles. ”

“ Art is the alleviation of the man of action,—of him who not only sees the terrible and questionable character of existence, but also lives it, will live it,—of the tragic and warlike man, the hero. Art is the alleviation of the sufferer,—as the way to states in which pain is willed, is transfigured, is deified, where suffering is a form of great ecstasy. ”

“ Does this belief in the common fancies of men really alter mankind? Or is the whole body of ideas and valuations only an expression in itself of unknown changes? Are there really such things as will, purposes, thoughts, values? Is the whole of conscious life perhaps no more than mirage? ”

“ We must not make men "better," we must not talk to them about morality in any form as if "morality in itself," or an ideal kind of man in general, could be taken for granted; but we must create circumstances in which stronger men are necessary, such as for their part will require a morality (or, better still: a bodily and spiritual discipline) which makes men strong, and upon which they will consequently insist! As they will need one so badly, they will have it.
We must not let ourselves be seduced by blue eyes and heaving breasts: greatness of soul has absolutely nothing romantic about it. ”

“ All methods, all the hypotheses on which the science of our day depends, were treated with the profoundest contempt for centuries: on their account a man used to be banished from the society of respectable people—he was held to be an "enemy of God," a reviler of the highest ideal, a madman.
We had the whole pathos of mankind against us,—our notion of what "truth" ought to be, of what the service of truth ought to be, our objectivity, our method, our calm, cautious and distrustful manner were altogether despicable.... ”

“ But while I say this I see above me, and below the stars, the glittering rat's-tail of errors which hitherto has represented the greatest inspiration of man: "All happiness is the result of virtue all virtue is the result of free will"! ”

“ The misunderstanding of love. There is a slavish love which subordinates itself and gives itself away—which idealises and deceives itself; there is a divine species of love which despises and loves at the same time, and which remodels and elevates the thing it loves.
The object is to attain that enormous energy of greatness which can model the man of the future by means of discipline and also by means of the annihilation of millions of the bungled and botched, and which can yet avoid going to ruin at the sight of the suffering created thereby, the like of which has never been seen before. ”

“ I see all philosophers and the whole of science on their knees before a reality which is the reverse of "the struggle for life," as Darwin and his school understood it—that is to say, wherever I look, I see those prevailing and surviving, who throw doubt and suspicion upon life and the value of life.—The error of the Darwinian school became a problem to me: how can one be so blind as to make this mistake? ”

“ Man seeks "the truth": a world that does not contradict itself, that does not deceive, that does not change, a real world—a world in which there is no suffering: contradiction, deception, variability—-the causes of suffering! He does not doubt that there is such a thing as a world as it ought to be; he would fain find a road to it. (Indian criticism: even the ego is apparent and not real.)
Whence does man derive the concept of reality? —Why does he make variability, deception, contradiction, the origin of suffering; why not rather of his happiness? ”

“ Altruism is sought in the very roots of life. Altruism and egoism are both based upon the essence of life and nature.
The disappearance of the opposition between them is dreamt of as a future possibility. Continued adaptation, it is hoped, will merge the two into one.
At last it is seen that altruistic actions are merely a species of the egoistic—and that the degree to which one loves and spends one's self is a proof of the extent of one's individual power and personality. In short, that the more evil man can be made, the better he is, and that one cannot be the one without the other. ”

“ My thoughts are not concerned with the degree of freedom which should be granted to the one or to the other or to all, but with the degree of power which the one or the other should exercise over his neighbour or over all; and more especially with the question to what extent a sacrifice of freedom, or even enslavement, may afford the basis for the cultivation, of a superior type. In plain words: how could one sacrifice the development of mankind in order to assist a higher species than man to come into being. ”

“ Now, the history of every culture shows a diminution of this fear of the accidental, of the uncertain, and of the unexpected. Culture means precisely, to learn to reckon, to discover causes, to acquire the power of forestalling events, to acquire a belief in necessity. With the growth of culture, man is able to dispense with that primitive form of submission to evil (called religion or morality) , and that "justification of evil." Now he wages war against "evil,"—he gets rid of it. ”

“ Even when values seem to determine the actions of a man, they are, as a matter of fact, doing something quite different! In short, granting that a certain conformity of means to end might be demonstrated in the action of nature, without the assumption of a ruling ego: could not our notion of purposes, and our will, etc., be only a symbolic language standing for something quite different—that is to say, something not-willing and unconscious? only the thinnest semblance of that natural conformity of means to end in the organic world, but not in any way different therefrom? ”

“ To learn to respect things which people about us respect, as if we had no standard or right of our own to determine values; the strain of appraising things as others appraise them, counter to the whisperings of our inner taste, which also has a conscience of its own, becomes a terribly subtle kind of constraint: and if in the end no explosion takes place which bursts all the bonds of love and morality at once, then such a spirit becomes withered, dwarfed, feminine, and objective. ”

“ No morality will countenance order of rank among men, and the jurists know nothing of a communal conscience. The principle of individualism rejects really great men, and demands the most delicate vision for, and the speediest discovery of, a talent among people who are almost equal; and inasmuch as every one has some modicum of talent in such late and civilised cultures (and can, therefore, expect to receive his share of honour) , there is a more general buttering-up of modest merits to-day than there has ever been. This gives the age the appearance of unlimited justice. ”