The Gay Science

“And she answered with a tender voice: “Let us be good friends.”— But what I have told you here, dear reader, that is not an event of yesterday or the day before.... For time is infinite, but the things in time, the concrete bodies, are finite. They may indeed disperse into the smallest particles; but these particles, the atoms, have their determinate number, and the number of configurations that, all of themselves, are formed out of them is also determinate. Now, however long a time may pass, according to the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal play of repetition, all configurations that have previously existed on this earth must yet meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again.... And thus it will happen one day that a man will be born again, just like me, and a woman will be born, just like Mary—only that it is to be hoped that the head of this man may contain a little less foolishness—and in a better land they will meet and contemplate each other a long time; and finally the woman will give her hand to the man and say with a tender voice: “Let us be good friends”.

For a psychologist there are few questions that are as attractive as that concerning the relation of health and philosophy, and if he should himself become ill, he will bring all of his scientific curiosity into his illness. For assuming that one is a person, one necessarily also has the philosophy that belongs to that person; but there is a big difference. In some it is their deprivations that philosophize; in others, their riches and strengths. The former need their philosophy, whether it be as a prop, a sedative, medicine, redemption, elevation, or self-alienation. For the latter it is merely a beautiful luxury—in the best cases, the voluptuousness of a triumphant gratitude that eventually still has to inscribe itself in cosmic letters on the heaven of concepts. “But in the former case, which is more common, when it is distress that philosophizes, as is the case with all sick thinkers—and perhaps sick thinkers are more numerous in the history of philosophy—what will become of the thought itself when it is subjected to the pressure of sickness? This is the question that concerns the psychologist, and here an experiment is possible.

“Every philosophy that ranks peace above war, every ethic with a negative definition of happiness, every metaphysics and physics that knows some finale, some final state of some sort, every predominantly aesthetic or religious craving for some Apart, Beyond, Outside, Above, permits the question whether it was not sickness that inspired the philosopher. The unconscious disguise of physiological needs under the cloaks of the objective, ideal, purely spiritual goes to frightening lengths—and often I have asked myself whether, taking a large view, philosophy has not been merely an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body. Behind the highest value judgments that have hitherto guided the history of thought, there are concealed misunderstandings of the physical constitution—of individuals or classes or even whole races. All those bold insanities of metaphysics, especially answers to the question about the value of existence, may always be considered first of alt as the symptoms of certain bodies. And if such world affirmations or world negations tout court lack any grain of significance when measured scientifically, they are the more valuable for the historian and psychologist as hints or symptoms of the body, of its success or failure, its plenitude, power, and autocracy in history, or of its frustrations, weariness, impoverishment, its premonitions of the end, its will to the end. I am still waiting for a philosophical physician in the exceptional sense of that word—one who has to pursue the problem of the total health of a people, time, race or of humanity—to muster the courage to push my suspicion to its limits and to risk the proposition: what was at stake in all philosophizing hitherto was not at all “truth” but something else—let us say, health, future, growth, power, life. You see that I do not want to take leave ungratefully from that time of severe sickness whose profits I have not yet exhausted even today. I am very conscious of the advantages that my fickle health gives me over all robust squares. A philosopher who has traversed many kinds of health, and keeps traversing them, has passed through an equal number of philosophies; he simply cannot keep from transposing his states every time into the most spiritual form and distance; this art of transfiguration is philosophy. We philosophers are not free to divide body from soul as the people do; we are even less free to divide soul from spirit. We are not thinking frogs, nor objectifying and registering mechanisms with their innards removed: constantly, we have to give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and, like mothers, endow them with all we have of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and catastrophe. Life—that means for us constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame—also everything that wounds us; we simply can do no other. And as for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it? Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit, being the teacher of the great suspicion that turns every U into an X, a real, genuine X, that is the letter before the penultimate one. Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time—on which we are burned, as it were, with green wood—compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and to put aside all trust, everything good-natured, everything that would interpose a veil, that is mild, that is medium—things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such pain makes us “better”; but I know that it makes us more profound. Whether we learn to pit our pride, our scorn, our will power against it, equaling the American Indian who, however tortured, repays his torturer with the malice of his tongue; or whether we withdraw from pain into that Oriental Nothing—called Nirvana—into mute, rigid, deaf resignation, self-forgetting, self-extinction; out of such long and dangerous exercises of self-mastery one emerges as a different person, with a few more question marks—above all with the will henceforth to question further, more deeply, severely, harshly, evilly and quietly than one had questioned heretofore. The trust in life is gone: life itself has become a problem. Yet one should not jump to the conclusion that this necessarily makes one gloomy. Even love of life is still possible, only one loves differently. It is the love for a woman that causes doubts in us. The attraction of everything problematic, the delight in an x, however, is so great in such more spiritual, more spiritualized men that this delight flares up again and again like a bright blaze over all the distress of what is problematic, over all the danger of uncertainty, and even over the jealousy of the lover. We know a new happiness. In the end, lest what is most important remain unsaid: from such abysses, from such severe sickness, also from the sickness of severe suspicion, one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin, more ticklish and malicious, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a tenderer tongue for all good things, with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more child-like and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before. How repulsive pleasure is now, that crude, musty, brown pleasure as it is understood by those who like pleasure, our “educated” people, our rich people, and our rulers! How maliciously we listen now to the big county-fair boom-boom with which the “educated” person and city dweller today permits art, books, and music to rape him and provide “spiritual pleasures”—with the aid of spirituous liquors! How the theatrical scream of passion now hurts our ears, how strange to our taste the whole romantic uproar and tumult of the senses have become, which the educated mob loves, and all its aspirations after the elevated, inflated, and exaggerated! No, if we convalescents still need art, it is another kind of art—a mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial art that, like a pure flame, licks into unclouded skies. Above all, an art for artists, for artists only! We know better afterward what above all is needed for this: cheerfulness, any cheerfulness, my friends—also as artists: let me prove it. There are a few things we now know too well, we knowing ones: oh, how we now learn to forget well, and to be good at not knowing, as artists! And as for our future this bad taste, this will to truth, to “truth at any price,” this youthful madness in the love of truth, have lost their charm for us: for that we are too experienced, too serious, too merry, too burned, too profound. We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn; we have lived too much to believe this. Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and “know” everything.

“Is it true that God is present everywhere?” a little girl asked her mother; “I think that's indecent”—a hint for philosophers! One should have more respect for the bashfulness with which nature has hidden behind riddles and iridescent uncertainties. Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not letting us see her reasons? Perhaps her name is—to speak Greek—Baubo? Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity. And is not this precisely what we are again coming back to, we daredevils of the spirit who have climbed the highest and most dangerous peak of present thought and looked around from up there—we who have looked down from there? Are we not, precisely in this respect, Greeks? Adorers of forms, of tones, of words? And therefore—artists?” Invitation

“Take a chance and try my fare; It will grow on you, I swear; Soon it will taste good to you. If by then you should want more, All the things I’ve done before Will inspire things quite new.” Undaunted

“Where you stand, dig deep and pry! Down there is the well. Let the obscurantists cry:

“Down there’s only—hell!”” “ Dialog

“A. Was I ill? Have I got well? Who was my doctor? Can you tell? Oh, my memory is rotten! B. Only now you're truly well.” Those are well who have forgotten” Worldly Wisdom

“Do not stay in the field! Nor climb out of sight. The best view of the world Is from a medium height.” Vademecum—Vadetecum

“Lured by my style and tendency, you follow and come after me? Follow your own self faithfully— take time—and thus you follow me.” Scorn

“There is much I drop and spill; I am full of scorn, you think. If your beaker is too full, There is much you drop and spill Without scorning what you drink.” The Good Man

“Better a whole-hearted feud Than a friendship that is glued.” Up

“If you want to get to the peak, you ought To climb without giving it too much thought. ” For your Consideration

“Double pain is easier to bear Than single pain: Do you accept my dare?” Against Airs

“Those who inflate themselves are cursed When pricked by a small pin to burst.” Request

“The minds of others I know well; But who I am, I cannot tell: My eye is much too close to me, I am not what I saw and see. It would be quite a benefit If only I could sometimes sit Farther away; but my foes are Too distant; close friends, still too far; Between my friends and me, the middle Would do. My wish? You guess my riddle. ” The Wanderer

“No path, abysses, death is not so still!”— You wished it, left the path by your own will. Now remain cool and clear, O stranger; For you are lost if you believe in danger.” The Unfree Man

“A. He stands and harks: what does he hear? What sound is ringing in his ear? What struck him down? What mortal fear? B. Who once wore chains, will always think That he is followed by their clink.” The Solitary

“I hate to follow and I hate to lead. Obey? Oh no! And govern? No indeed! Only who dreads himself inspires dread. And only those inspiring dread can lead. Even to lead myself is not my speed. I love to lose myself for a good while, Like animals in forests and the sea, To sit and think on some abandoned isle, And lure myself back home from far away, Seducing myself to come back to me.” Admonition

“What you want is fame? Then note the price: All claim To honor you must sacrifice. ” Judgments of the Weary

They hate the sun, find steep the grade, And love trees only for their shade. ” Lost His Head „Why is she clever now and so refined? On her account a man's out of his mind, His head was good before he took this whirl: He lost his wits—to the aforesaid girl. ” Human, All Too Human: A Book „You’re sad and shy when looking at the past, But trust the future when yourself you trust: Are you some kind of eagle in pursuit? Or just Minerva’s favorite hootootoot?” Star Morals „Called a star's orbit to pursue, What is the darkness, star, to you? Roll on in bliss, traverse this age— Its misery far from you and strange. Let farthest world your light secure. Pity is sin you must abjure. But one command is yours: be pure!

Whether I contemplate men with benevolence or with an evil eye, I always find them concerned with a single task, all of them and every one of them in particular: to do what is good for the preservation of the human race. Not from any feeling of love for the race, but merely because nothing in them is older, stronger, more inexorable and unconquerable than this instinct—because this instinct constitutes the essence of our species, our herd. It is easy enough to divide our neighbors quickly, with the usual myopia, from a mere five paces away, into useful and harmful, good and evil men; but in any large-scale accounting, when we reflect on the whole a little longer, we become suspicious of this neat division and finally abandon it. Even the most harmful man may really be the most useful when it comes to the preservation of the species; for he nurtures either in himself or in others, through his effects, instincts without which humanity would long have become feeble or rotten. Hatred, the mischievous delight in the misfortunes of others, the lust to rob and dominate, and whatever else is called evil belongs to the most amazing economy of the preservation of the species. To be sure, this economy is not afraid of high prices, of squandering, and it is on the whole extremely foolish. Still it is proven that it has preserved our race so far. I no longer know whether you, my dear fellow man and neighbor, are at all capable of living in a way that would damage the species; in other words, “unreasonably” and “badly.”

Gradually, man has become a fantastic animal that has to fulfill one more condition of existence than any other animal: man has to believe, to know, from time to time why he exists; his race cannot flourish without a periodic trust in life—without faith in reason in life.

I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are under- weight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without “first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this great majority.” But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress—as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower. Among some pious people I found a hatred of reason and was well disposed to them for that; for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual conscience. But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing—that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody. Some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my type of injustice.

The strongest and most evil spirits have so far done the most to advance humanity: again and again they relumed the passions that were going to sleep—all ordered society puts the passions to sleep—and they re- awakened again and again the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of the pleasure in what is new, daring, untried; they compelled men to pit opinion against opinion, model against model. Usually by force of arms, by toppling boundary markers, by violating pieties-but also by means of new religions and moralities. In every teacher and preacher of what is new we encounter the same “wickedness” that makes conquerors notorious, even if its’ expression is subtler and it does not immediately set the muscles in motion, and therefore also does not make one that notorious. What is new, however, is always evil, being that which wants to conquer and overthrow the old boundary markers and the old pieties; and only what is old is good. The good men are in all ages those who dig the old thoughts, digging deep and getting them to bear fruit—the farmers of the spirit. But eventually all land is exploited, and the ploughshare of evil must come again and again. Nowadays there is a profoundly erroneous moral doctrine that is celebrated especially in England: this holds that judgments of “good” and “evil” sum up experiences of what is “expedient” and “inexpedient.” One holds that what is called good preserves the species, while what is called evil harms the species. In truth, however, the evil instincts are expedient, species-preserving, and indispensable to as high a degree as the good ones; their function is merely different.

Thus they reach for moral philosophies that preach some categorical imperative, or they ingest a goodly piece of religion, as Mazzini did, for example. Because they desire the unconditional confidence of others, they need first of all to develop unconditional self-confidence on the basis of some ultimate and indisputable commandment that is inherently sublime, and they want to feel like, and be accepted as, its servants and instruments.

Whoever feels that his dignity is incompatible with the thought of being the instrument of a prince or a party or sect or, even worse, of a financial power—say, because he is after all the descendant of an old and proud family—but who nevertheless wants to or must be such an instrument before himself and before the public, requires pompous principles that can be mouthed at any time; principles of some unconditional obligation to which one may submit without shame. Refined servility clings to the categorical imperative and is the mortal enemy of those who wish to deprive duty of its unconditional character; that is what decency demands of them, and not only decency.

Reflecting has lost all the dignity of its form: the ceremony and solemn gestures of reflecting have become ridiculous, and an old-style wise man would be considered intolerable. We think too fast, even while walking or on the way, or while engaged in other things, no matter how serious the subject. We require little preparation, not even much silence: it is as if we carried in our heads an unstoppable machine that keeps working even under the most unfavorable circumstances. Formerly, one could tell simply by looking at a person that he wanted to think—it was probably a rare occurrence—that he now wished to become wiser and prepared himself for a thought: he set his face as for prayer and stopped walking; yes, one even stood still for hours in the middle of the road when the thought arrived—on one leg or two legs. That seemed to be required by the dignity of the matter.

Countless things that humanity acquired in earlier stages, but so feebly and embryonically that nobody could perceive this acquisition, suddenly emerge into the light much later—perhaps after centuries; meanwhile they have become strong and ripe. Some ages seem to lack altogether some talent or some virtue, as certain individuals do, too. But just wait for their children and grandchildren, if you have time to wait that long: they bring to light what was hidden in their grandfathers and what their grandfathers themselves did not suspect. Often the son already betrays his father—and the father understands himself better after he has a son. All of us harbor concealed gardens and plantings; and, to use another metaphor, we are, all of us, growing volcanoes that approach the hour of their eruption; but how near or distant that is, nobody knows—not even God.

I prefer to understand the rare human beings of an age as suddenly emerging late ghosts of past cultures and their powers—as atavisms of a people and its mores: that way one really can understand a little about them. Now they seem strange, rare, extraordinary and whoever feels these powers in himself must nurse, defend, honor, and cultivate them against another world that resists them, until he becomes either a great human being or a mad and eccentric one—or perishes early

Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and hence also what is most unfinished and unstrong. Consciousness gives rise to countless errors that lead an animal or man to perish sooner than necessary, “exceeding destiny,” as Homer puts it. If the conserving association of the instincts were not so very much more powerful, and if it did not serve on the whole as a regulator, humanity would have to perish of its misjudgments and its fantasies with open eyes, of its lack of thoroughness and its credulity—in short, of its consciousness; rather, without the former, humanity would long have disappeared. Before a function is fully developed and mature it constitutes a danger for the organism, and it is good if during the interval it is subjected to some tyranny. Thus consciousness is tyrannized—not least by our pride in it. One thinks that it constitutes the kernel of man; what is abiding, eternal, ultimate, and most original in him. One takes consciousness for a determinate magnitude. One denies its growth arid its intermittences. One takes it for the “unity of the organism. This ridiculous overestimation and misunderstanding of consciousness has the very useful consequence that it prevents an all too fast development of consciousness. Believing that they possess consciousness, men have not exerted themselves very much to acquire it; and things haven’t changed much in this respect. To this day the task of incorporating knowledge and making it instinctive is only beginning to dawn on the human eye and is not yet clearly discernible; it is a task that is seen only by those who have comprehended that so far we have incorporated only our errors and that all our consciousness relates to errors.

What? The aim of science should be to give men as much pleasure and as little displeasure as possible? But what if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other—that whoever wanted to learn to “jubilate up to the heavens” would also have to be prepared for “depression unto death”? And that is how things may well be. At least the Stoics believed that this was how things were, and they were consistent when they also desired as little pleasure as possible, in order to get as little displeasure as possible out of life. (When they kept saying “The virtuous man is the happiest man,” this was both the school's eye-catching sign for the great mass and a casuistic subtlety for the subtle.) To this day you have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief—and in the last analysis socialists and politicians of all parties have no right to promise their people more than that—or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet. If you decide for the former and desire to diminish and lower the level of human pain, you also have to diminish and lower the level of their capacity for joy. Actually, science can promote either goal. So far it may still be better known for its power of depriving man of his joys and making him colder, more like a statue, more stoic. But it might yet be found to be the great dispenser of pain. And then its counterforce might be found at the same time: its immense capacity for making new galaxies of joy flare up.

Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one’s power upon others; that is all one desires in such cases. One hurts those whom one wants to feel one’s power, for pain is a much more efficient means to that end than pleasure; pain always raises the question about its origin while pleasure is inclined to stop with itself without looking back. We benefit and show benevolence to those who are already dependent on us in some way (which means that they are used to thinking of us as causes); we want to increase their power because in that way we increase ours, or we want to show them how advantageous it is to be in our power; that way they will become more satisfied with their condition and more hostile to and willing to fight against the enemies of our power. Whether benefiting or hurting others involves sacrifices for us does not affect the ultimate value of our actions. Even if we offer our lives, as martyrs do for their church, this is a sacrifice that is offered for our desire for power or for the purpose of preserving our feeling of power. Those who feel “I possess Truth”—how many possessions would they not abandon in order to save this feeling! What would they not throw over- board to stay “on top”—which means, above the others who lack “the Truth”! Certainly the state in which we hurt others is rarely as agreeable, in an unadulterated way, as that in which we benefit others; it is a sign that we are still lacking power, or it shows a sense of frustration in the face of this poverty; it is accompanied by new dangers and uncertainties for what power we do possess, and clouds our horizon with the prospect of revenge, scorn, punishment, and failure. It is only for the most irritable and covetous devotees of the feeling of power that it is perhaps more pleasurable to imprint the seal of power on a recalcitrant brow—those for whom the sight of those who are already subjected (the objects of benevolence) is a burden and boredom. What is decisive is how one is accustomed to spice one's life: it is a matter of taste whether one prefers the slow or the sudden, the assured or the dangerous and audacious increase of power; one seeks this or that spice depending on one’s temperament. An easy prey is something contemptible for proud natures. They feel good only at the sight of unbroken men who might become their enemies and at the sight of all possessions that are hard to come by. Against one who is suffering they are often hard because he is not worthy of their aspirations and pride; but they are doubly obliging toward their peers whom it would be honorable to fight if the occasion should ever arise. Spurred by the good feeling of this perspective, the members of the knightly caste became accustomed to treating each other with exquisite courtesy. Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests; for them easy prey—and that is what all who suffer are—is enchanting. Pity is praised as the virtue of prostitutes.

Our love of our neighbor—is it not a lust for new possessions? And likewise our love of knowledge, of truth, and altogether any lust for what is new? Gradually we become tired of the old, of what we safely possess, and we stretch out our hands again. Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some more distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession. Our pleasure in ourselves tries to maintain itself by again and again changing something new into ourselves; that is what possession means. To become tired of some possession means tiring of ourselves. (One can also suffer of an excess—the lust to throw away or to distribute can also assume the honorary name of “love.”) When we see somebody suffer, we like to exploit this opportunity to take possession of him; those who become his benefactors and pity him, for example, do this and call the lust for a new possession that he awakens in them “love”; and the pleasure they feel is comparable to that aroused by the prospect of a new conquest.

Here and there on earth we may encounter a kind of continuation of love in which this possessive craving of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and lust for possession—a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them. But who knows such love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is friendship.

In our relations with people who are bashful about their feelings, we must be capable of dissimulation; they feel a sudden hatred against anyone who catches them in a tender, enthusiastic, or elevated feeling, as if he had seen their secrets. If you want to make them feel good at such moments, you have to make them laugh or voice some cold but witty sarcasm; then their feeling freezes and they regain power over themselves. But I am giving you the moral before telling the story.

The Greek philosophers went through life feeling secretly that there were far more slaves than one might think—meaning that everybody who was not a philosopher was a slave. Their pride overflowed at the thought that even the most powerful men on earth belonged among their slaves. This pride, too, is alien and impossible for us; not even metaphorically does the word “slave” possess its full power for us.

The poison of which weaker natures perish strengthens the strong—nor do they call it poison.

A man’s virtues are called good depending on their probable consequences not for him but for us and society: the praise of virtues has always been far from “selfless,” far from “unegoistic.” Otherwise one would have had to notice that virtues (like industriousness, obedience, chastity, filial piety, and justice) are usually harmful for those who possess them, being instincts that dominate them too violently and covetously and resist the efforts of reason to keep them in balance with their other instincts. When you have a virtue, a real, whole virtue (and not merely a mini-instinct for some virtue), you are its victim. But your neighbor praises your virtue precisely on that account. One praises the industrious even though they harm their eyesight or the spontaneity and freshness of their spirit. One honors and feels sorry for the youth who has worked himself into the ground because one thinks: “For society as a whole the loss of even the best individual is merely a small sacrifice. Too bad that such sacrifices are needed! But it would be far worse if the individual would think otherwise and considered his preservation and development more important than his work in the service of society.” Thus one feels sorry for the youth not for his own sake but because a devoted instrument, ruthless against itself—a so-called “good man”—has been lost to society by his death. Perhaps one gives some thought to the question whether it would have been more useful for society if he had been less ruthless against himself and had preserved himself longer. One admits that there would have been some advantage in that, but one considers the other advantage—that a sacrifice has been made and that the attitude of the sacrificial animal has once again been confirmed for all to see—greater and of more lasting significance. Thus what is really praised when virtues are praised is, first, their instrumental nature and, secondly, the instinct in every virtue that refuses to be held in check by the over-all advantage for the individual himself—in sum, the unreason in virtue that leads the individual to allow himself to be transformed into a mere function of the whole. The praise of virtue is the praise of something that is privately harmful—the praise of instincts that deprive a human being of his noblest selfishness and the strength for the highest autonomy. To be sure, for educational purposes and to lead men to incorporate virtuous habits one emphasizes effects of virtue that make it appear as if virtue and private advantage were sisters; and some such relationship actually exists. Blindly raging industriousness, for example!—this typical virtue of an instrument—is represented as the way to wealth and honor and as the poison that best cures boredom and the passions, but one keeps silent about its dangers, its extreme dangerousness. That is how education always proceeds: one tries to condition an individual by various attractions and advantages to adopt a way of thinking and behaving that, once it has become a habit, instinct, and passion, will dominate him to his own ultimate disadvantage but “for the general good.” How often I see that blindly raging industriousness does create wealth and reap honors while at the same time depriving the organs of their subtlety, which alone would make possible the—enjoyment of wealth and honors; also that this chief antidote to boredom and the passions at the same time blunts the senses and leads the spirit to resist new attractions. (The most industrious of all ages—ours—does not know how to make anything of all its industriousness and money, except always still more money and still more industriousness; for it requires more genius to spend than to acquire.— Well, we shall have our “grandchildren”!)” If this education succeeds, then every virtue of an individual is a public utility and a private disadvantage, measured against the supreme private goal—probably some impoverishment of the spirit and the senses or even a premature decline. Consider from this point of view, one by one, the virtues of obedience, chastity, filial piety, and justice. The praise of the selfless, the self-sacrificial, the virtuous—that is, of those who do not apply their whole strength and reason to their own preservation, development, elevation, promotion, and the expansion of their power, but rather live, in relation to themselves, modestly and thoughtlessly, perhaps even with indifference or irony—this praise certainly was not born from the spirit of selflessness. The “neighbor” praises selfless- ness because it brings him advantages. If the neighbor himself were “selfless” in his thinking, he would repudiate this diminution of strength, this mutilation for his benefit; he would work against the development of such inclinations, and above all he would manifest his selflessness by not calling it good! This indicates the fundamental contradiction in the morality that is very prestigious nowadays: the motives of this morality stand opposed to its principle. What this morality considers its proof is refuted by its criterion of what is moral. In order not to contravene its own morality, the demand “You shall renounce yourself and sacrifice yourself” could be laid down only by those who thus renounced their own advantage and perhaps brought about their own destruction through the demanded sacrifice of individuals. But as soon as the neighbor (or society) recommends altruism for the sake of its utility, it applies the contradictory principle. “You shall seek your advantage even at the expense of everything else”—and thus one preaches, in the same breath, a “Thou shalt” and “Thou shalt not.

That is reason enough to tell of the poet who wrote on his door: “Whoever enters here, honors me; whoever does not—pleases me.” What a courteous way of expressing a discourtesy! And perhaps this poet is altogether right to be discourteous: it is said that his poems are better than the poet. Let him write many more then and withdraw from the world as much as possible—which is, after all, the meaning of his civil incivility. Conversely, a prince is always worth more than his “verse,” even if—but what am I saying? We are chatting and the whole court thinks that we are already at work and racking our brains: there is no window in which anyone ever sees a light burn before ours.

All I concede is that cruelty now becomes more refined and that its older forms henceforth offend the new taste; but the art of wounding and torturing others with words and looks reaches its supreme development in times of corruption: it is only now that malice and the delight in malice are born. The men of corruption are witty and slanderous; they know of types of murder that require neither daggers nor assault; they also know that whatever is said well is believed.

The times of corruption are those when the apples fall from the tree: I mean the individuals, for they carry the seeds of the future and are the authors of the spiritual colonization and origin of new states and communities. Corruption is merely a nasty word for the autumn of a people.

There is a stupid humility that is not at all rare, and those afflicted with it are altogether unfit to become devotees of knowledge. As soon as a person of this type perceives something striking, he turns on his heel, as it were, and says to himself: “You have made a mistake. What is the matter with your senses? This cannot, may not, be the truth.” And then, instead of looking and listening again, more carefully, he runs away from the striking thing, as if he had been intimidated, and tries to remove it from his mind as fast as he can. For his inner canon says: “I do not want to see anything that contradicts the prevalent opinion. Am I called to discover new truths? There are too many old ones, as it is.

What is life?— Life—that is: continually shedding something that wants to die. Life—that is; being cruel and inexorable against everything about us that is growing old and weak—and not only about us. Life—that is, then: being without reverence for those who are dying, who are wretched, who are ancient? Constantly being a murderer?—And yet old Moses said: “Thou shalt not kill.

At times, our strengths propel us so far forward that we can no longer endure our weaknesses and perish from them. We may even foresee this outcome without wishing to have it otherwise. Thus we become hard against everything in us that desires consideration, and our greatness is also our lack of compassion.

When people in France began to attack the Aristotelian unities and others therefore began to defend them, one could see once again what is to be seen so often but what people hate to see: one lied, mendaciously inventing reasons for these laws, simply to avoid admitting that one had become used to these laws and no longer wanted things to be different. The same process occurs, and always has occurred, in every prevalent morality and religion: the reasons and purposes for habits are always lies that are added only after some people begin to attack these habits and to ask for reasons and purposes. At this point the conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest: they add lies.

Famous men who need their fame, like all politicians, for example, never choose allies and friends without ulterior motives: from one they desire the reflected splendor of his virtue; from another the fear inspired by some of the dubious qualities that everybody associates with him; from someone else they steal the reputation of his leisure, his lying in the sun, because it serves their own purposes to appear inattentive and idle at times (this conceals the fact that they actually lie in wait); now they need a dreamer near them, now an expert, now a thinker, now a pedant, as if he were their alter ego; but soon they do not need them any more.

Buying and selling have become common, like the art of reading and writing. Everybody has practiced it even if he is no tradesman, and gets more practice every day—just as formerly, when men were more savage, everybody was a hunter and practiced that art day after day. Then hunting was common; but eventually it became a privilege of the powerful and noble; it lost its everyday character and its commonness because it ceased to be necessary; it became a matter of moods and luxury. The same might happen some day to buying and selling.

Every great human being exerts a retroactive force: for his sake all of history is placed in the balance again, and a thousand secrets of the past crawl out of their hiding places-into his sunshine. There is no way of telling what may yet become part of history. Perhaps the past is still essentially undiscovered! So many retroactive forces are still needed!

Thinking in a way that is not customary is much less the result of a superior intellect than it is the result of strong, evil inclinations that detach and isolate one, and that are defiant, nasty, and malicious. Heresy is the pendant of witchcraft and surely no more harmless and least of all anything essentially venerable. Heretics and witches are two species of evil human beings; what they have in common is that they also feel that they are evil but are impelled by an unconquerable lust to harm what is dominant (whether people or opinions). The Reformation, which was in a way a re-doubled intensification of the medieval spirit, at a time when that was no longer accompanied by a good conscience, produced both in the greatest abundance.

The change in general taste is more powerful than that of opinions. Opinions, along with all proofs, refutations, and the whole intellectual masquerade, are merely symptoms of the change in taste and most certainly not what they are still often supposed to be, its causes.

at bottom the masses are willing to submit to slavery of any kind, if only the higher-ups constantly legitimize themselves as higher, as born to command—by having noble manners. The most common man feels that nobility cannot be improvised and that one has to honor in it the fruit of long periods of time. But the lack of higher manners and the notorious vulgarity of manufacturers with their ruddy, fat hands give him the idea that it is only accident and luck that have elevated one person above another. Well, then, he reasons: let us try accident and luck! let us throw the dice! And thus socialism is born.

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions—as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. To be annoyed or feel remorse because something goes wrong—that he leaves to those who act because they have received orders and who have to reckon with a beating when his lordship is not satisfied with the result.

Looking for work in order to be paid: in civilized countries today almost all men are at one in doing that. For all of them work is a means and not an end in itself. Hence they are not very refined in their choice of work, if only it pays well. But there are, if only rarely, men who would rather perish than work without any pleasure in their work. They are choosy, hard to satisfy, and do not care for ample rewards, if the work itself is not the reward of rewards. Artists and contemplative men of all kinds belong to this rare breed, but so do even those men of leisure who spend their lives hunting, traveling, or in love affairs and adventures. All of these desire work and misery if only it is associated with pleasure, and the hardest, most difficult work if necessary. Otherwise, their idleness is resolute, even if it spells impoverishment, dishonor, and danger to life and limb. They do not fear boredom as much as work without pleasure; they actually require a lot of boredom if their work is to succeed. For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable “windless calm” of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds. They have to bear it and must wait for its effect on them. Precisely this is what lesser natures cannot achieve by any means. To ward off boredom at any cost is vulgar, no less than work without pleasure. Perhaps Asians are distinguished above Europeans by a capacity for longer, deeper calm; even their opiates have a slow effect and require patience, as opposed to the disgusting suddenness of the European poison, alcohol.

It is a serious mistake to study the penal code of a people as if it gave expression to the national character. The laws do not betray what a people are but rather what seems to them foreign, strange, uncanny, outlandish. The laws refer to the exceptions to the morality of mores and the severest penalties are provided for what accords with the mores of a neighboring people. Thus the Wahhabis know only two mortal sins: having a god other than the Wahhabi god, and smoking (which they call “the infamous way of drinking”). “And what about murder and adultery?” asked the Englishman who found this out, amazed. “God is gracious and merciful,” replied the old chief. Thus the old Romans had the notion that a woman could incur only two mortal sins: adultery and—drinking wine. Old Cato thought that kissing among relatives had been made part of mores only to keep women under control in this matter. The meaning of the kiss? Does she smell of wine? Women caught with wine were actually put to death—certainly not only because women under the influence of alcohol sometimes lose the ability to say No. What the Romans feared above all was the orgiastic and Dionysian cult that afflicted the women of Southern Europe from time to time when wine was still new in Europe: this struck the Romans as a monstrous foreign invasion that overturned the basis of the European sensibility; it seemed treason against Rome, the incorporation of what was foreign.

The general lack of experience of pain of both kinds and the relative rarity of the sight of anyone who is suffering have an important consequence; pain is now hated much more than was the case formerly; one speaks much worse of it; indeed, one considers the existence of the mere thought of pain scarcely endurable and turns it into a reproach against the whole of existence. The emergence of pessimistic philosophies is by no means a sign of great and terrible misery. No. these question marks about the value of all life are put up in ages in which the refinement and alleviation of existence make even the inevitable mosquito bites of the soul and the body seem much too bloody and malignant and one is so poor in real experiences of pain that one would like to consider painful general ideas as suffering of the first order. There is a recipe against pessimistic philosophers and the excessive sensitivity that seems to me the real “misery of the present age”—but this recipe may sound too cruel and might itself be counted among the signs that lead people to judge that “existence is something evil.” Well, the recipe against this ‘misery’ is: misery.

The magnanimous person—or at least the type of magnanimity that has always been considered most impressive—appears to me as an extremely vengeful person who beholds satisfaction so close at hand and who drains it so fully and thoroughly to the last drop, in anticipation, that a tremendous and quick nausea follows this quick orgy, and he now rises “above himself,” as they say, and forgives his enemy, and even blesses and honors him. With this violence against himself, with this scorn for his lust for revenge that a moment ago was still so powerful, he merely yields to a new impulse that has now attained power over him (nausea), and he does this just as impatiently and orgiastically as he anticipated a moment earlier the delight in revenge, draining it in his imagination. Magnanimity contains the same degree of egoism as does revenge, but egoism of a different quality.

The reproaches of conscience are weak even in the most conscientious people compared to the feeling: “This or that is against the morals of your society.” A cold look or a sneer on the face of those among whom and for whom one has been educated is feared even by the strongest. What is it that they are really afraid of? Growing solitude! This is the argument that rebuts even the best arguments for a person or cause.—Thus the herd instinct speaks up in us.

I favor any skepsis to which I may reply: “Let us try it!” But I no longer wish to hear anything of all those things and questions that do not permit any experiment. This is the limit of my “truthfulness”; for there courage has lost its right

What we know about ourselves and remember is not so decisive for the happiness of our life as people suppose. One day that which others know about us (or think they know) assaults us—and then we realize that this is more powerful. It is easier to cope with a bad conscience than to cope with a bad reputation.

Where the poor power of the eye can no longer see the evil impulse as such because it has become too subtle, man posits the realm of goodness; and the feeling that we have now entered the realm of goodness excites all those impulses which had been threatened and limited by the evil impulses, like the feeling of security, of comfort, of benevolence. Hence, the duller the eye, the more extensive the good. Hence the eternal cheerfulness of the common people and of children. Hence the gloominess and grief—akin to a bad conscience—of the great thinkers.

Appearance is for me that which lives and is effective and goes so far in its self-mockery that it makes me feel that this is appearance and will-o’-the-wisp and a dance of spirits and nothing more—that among all these dreamers, I, too, who “know,” am dancing my dance; that the knower is a means for prolonging the earthly dance and thus belongs to the masters of ceremony of existence; and that the sublime consistency and inter-relatedness of all knowledge perhaps is and will be the highest means to preserve the universality of dreaming and the mutual comprehension of all dreamers and thus also the continuation of the dream.

What makes a person “noble”? Certainly not making sacrifices, for those frantic with lust also make sacrifices. Certainly not following some passion, for there are contemptible passions. Certainly not doing something for others, without selfishness; perhaps nobody is more consistently selfish than those who are noble. Rather: the passion that attacks those who are noble is peculiar, and they fail to realize this. It involves the use of a rare and singular standard and almost a madness; the feeling of heat in things that feel cold to everybody else; the discovery of values for which no scales have been invented yet; offering sacrifices on altars that are dedicated to an unknown god; a courage without any desire for honors; a self-sufficiency that overflows and gives to men and things. Hitherto, it was rarity and a lack of awareness of this rarity that made a person noble. But we should note that this standard involved an unfair judgment concerning everything usual, near, and indispensable-in short, that which most preserves the species and was the rule among men hitherto: all this was slandered on the whole in favor of the exceptions. To become the advocate of the rule—that might be the ultimate form and refinement in which noblemindedness reveals itself on earth.

You sober people who feel well armed against passion and fantasies and would like to turn your emptiness into a matter of pride and an ornament: you call yourselves realists and hint that the world really is the way it appears to you. As if reality stood unveiled before you only, and you yourselves were perhaps the best part of it—O you beloved images of Sais! But in your unveiled state are not even you still very passionate and dark creatures compared to fish, and still far too similar to an artist in love? And what is “reality” for an artist in love? You are still burdened with those estimates of things that have their origin in the passions and loves of former centuries. Your sobriety still contains a secret and inextinguishable drunkenness. Your love of “reality,” for example—oh, that is a primeval “love.” Every feeling and sensation contains a piece of this old love; and some fantasy, some prejudice, some unreason, some ignorance, some fear, and ever so much else has contributed to it and worked on it. That mountain there! That cloud there! What is “real” in that? Subtract the phantasm and every human contribution from it, my sober friends! If you can! If you can forget your descent, your past, your training—all of your humanity and animality. There is no “reality” for us—not for you either, my sober friends. We are not nearly as different as you think, and perhaps our good will to transcend intoxication is as respectable as your faith that you are altogether incapable of intoxication.

This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realize that what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are. The reputation, name, and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for—originally almost always wrong and arbitrary, thrown over things like a dress and altogether foreign to their nature and even to their skin—all this grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be part of the thing and turns into its very body. What at first was appearance becomes in the end, almost invariably, the essence and is effective as such. How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts for real, so-called “reality.” We can destroy only as creators. —But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new “things.”

All great noise leads us to move happiness into some quiet distance. When a man stands in the midst of his own noise, in the midst of his own surf of plans and projects, then he is apt also to see quiet, magical beings gliding past him and to long for their happiness and seclusion: women. He almost thinks that his better self dwells there among the women, and that in these quiet regions even the loudest surf turns into deathly quiet, and life itself into a dream about life. Yet! Yet! Noble enthusiast, even on the most beautiful sailboat there is a lot of noise, and unfortunately much small and petty noise. The magic and the most powerful effect of women is, in philosophical language, action at a distance, actio in distans; but this requires first of all and above all—distance.

Love forgives the lover even his lust.

All women are subtle in exaggerating their weaknesses; they are inventive when it comes to weaknesses in order to appear as utterly fragile ornaments who are hurt even by a speck of dust. Their existence is supposed to make men feel clumsy, and guilty on that score. Thus they defend themselves against the strong and “the law of the jungle.

Someone took a youth to a sage and said: “Look, he is being corrupted by women.” The sage shook his head and smiled, “It is men,” said he, “that corrupt women; and all the failings of women should be atoned by and improved in men. For it is man who creates for himself the image of woman, and woman forms herself according to this image.

You are too kindhearted about women,” said one of those present; “you do not know them.” The sage replied: “Will is the manner of men; willingness that of women. That is the law of the sexes—truly, a hard law for women. All of humanity is innocent of its existence; but women are doubly innocent. Who could have oil and kindness enough for them?

Damn oil! Damn kindness!” someone else shouted out of the crowd; “women need to be educated better!”—“Men need to be educated better,” said the sage and beckoned to the youth to follow him. —The youth, however, did not follow him.

If someone cannot defend himself and therefore does not want to, we do not consider this a disgrace; but we have little respect for anyone who lacks both the capacity and the good will for revenge—regardless of whether it is a man or a woman. Would a woman be able to hold us (or, as they say, “enthral” us) if we did not consider it quite possible that under certain circumstances she could wield a dagger (any kind of dagger) against us? Or against herself—which in certain cases would be a cruder revenge (Chinese revenge).

Animals do not think about females as men do; they consider the female the productive being. Paternal love does not exist among them; merely something like love for the children of a beloved and a kind of getting used to them. The females find in their children satisfaction for their desire to dominate, a possession, an occupation, something that is wholly intelligible to them and can be chattered with: the sum of all this is what mother love is; it is to be compared with an artist’s love for his work. Pregnancy has made women kinder, more patient, more timid, more pleased to submit; and just so does spiritual pregnancy produce the character of the contemplative type, which is closely related to the feminine character: it consists of male mothers.—Among animals the male sex is considered the beautiful sex.

A man who held a newborn child in his hands approached a holy man. “What shall I do with this child?” he asked; “it is wretched, misshapen, and does not have life enough to die.” “Kill it!” shouted the holy man with a terrible voice; “and then hold it in your arms for three days and three nights to create a memory for yourself: never again will you beget a child this way when it is not time for you to beget.” —When the man had heard this, he walked away, disappointed, and many people reproached the holy man because he had counseled cruelty; for he had counseled the man to kill the child. “But is it not cruder to let it live?” asked the holy man.

Those poor women always fail who in the presence of the man they love become restless and unsure of themselves and talk too much. For what seduces men most surely is a certain secretive and phlegmatic tenderness.

In good society one must never wish to be solely and entirely right, which is what all pure logic aims at

In those ancient times in which poetry came into existence, the aim was utility, and actually a very great utility. When one lets rhythm permeate speech—the rhythmic force that reorders all the atoms of a sentence, bids one choose one's words with care, and gives one's thoughts a new color, making them darker, stranger, and more remote—the utility in question was superstitious. Rhythm was meant to impress the gods more deeply with a human petition, for it was noticed that men remember a verse much better than ordinary speech. It was also believed that a rhythmic tick-tock was audible over greater distances; a rhythmical prayer was supposed to get closer to the ears of the gods. Above all, men desired the utility of the elemental and overpowering effect that we experience in ourselves as we listen to music: rhythm is a compulsion; it engenders an unconquerable urge to yield and join in; not only our feet follow the beat but the soul does, too—probably, one surmised, the soul of the gods as well! Thus one tried to compel the gods by using rhythm and to force their hand: poetry was thrown at them like a magical snare.

Whoever finds enough tragedy and comedy in himself, probably does best when he stays away from the theater. Or if he makes an exception, the whole process, including the theater, the audience, and the poet, will strike him as the really tragic or comical spectacle, while the play that is performed will mean very little to him by comparison.

does not everything that we take seriously betray us? It always shows what has weight for us and what does not.

What good is all the art of our works of art if we lose that higher art, the art of festivals? Formerly, all works of art adorned the great festival road of humanity, to commemorate high and happy moments. Now one uses works of art to lure aside from the great via dolorosa of humanity those who are wretched, exhausted, and sick, and to offer them a brief lustful moment—a little intoxication and madness.

I also would not believe a biography of Plato, written by himself—anymore than Rousseau’s or the Vita Nuova of Dante

It is noteworthy that the great masters of prose have almost always been poets, too—if not publicly than at least secretly, in the “closet”.

War is the father of all good things; war is also the father of good prose. Four very strange and truly poetic human beings in this century have attained mastery in prose, for which this century was not made otherwise—for lack of poetry, as I have suggested. Not including Goethe, who may fairly be claimed by the century that produced him, I regard only Giacomo Leopardi, Prosper Mérimée, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walter Savage Landor, the author of Imaginary Conversations, as worthy of being called masters of prose.

But why do you write?— A: I am not one of those who think with an inky pen in their hand, much less one of those who in front of an open inkwell abandon themselves to their passions while they sit in a chair and stare at the paper. I am annoyed by and ashamed of my writing; writing is for me a pressing and embarrassing need, and to speak of it even in a parable disgusts me. B: But why, then, do you write?— A: Well, my friend, to be quite frank: so far, I have not discovered any other way of getting rid of my thoughts.— B: And why do you want to get rid of them?— A: Why I want to? Do I want to? I must. —B: Enough! Enough!

No sacrifice can be too great for that: one must be capable of sacrificing one's dearest friend for it, even if he should also be the most glorious human being, an ornament of the world, a genius without peer—if one loves freedom as the freedom of great souls and he threatens this kind of freedom. That is what Shakespeare must have felt. The height at which he places Caesar is the finest honor that he could bestow on Brutus: that is how he raises beyond measure Brutus’s inner problem as well as the spiritual strength that was able to cut this knot.

What happens when barbarians come into contact with a higher culture—the lower culture always accepts first of all the vices, weaknesses, and excesses and only then, on that basis, finds a certain attraction in the higher culture and eventually, by way of the vices and weaknesses that it has acquired, also accepts some of the overflow of what really has value—that can also be observed nearby, without traveling to remote barbarian tribes. Of course, what we see near us is somewhat refined and spiritualized and not quite so palpable. What do Schopenhauer’s German followers generally accept first of all from their master? In comparison with his superior culture, they must surely feel barbarous enough to be initially fascinated and seduced by him like barbarians. Is it his sense for hard facts, his good will for clarity and reason, which so often makes him appear so English and un-German?

Men have to learn to pay homage no less than to feel contempt. Anyone who breaks new paths and who has led many others onto new paths, discovers with some amazement how clumsy and poor these people are in their capacity for expressing gratitude—and how rarely gratitude achieves expression at all. It almost seems that whenever gratitude wants to speak, she begins to gag, clears her throat, and falls silent before she has got out a word. The way in which a thinker gets some notion of the effects of his ideas and of their transforming, revolutionary power, is almost a comedy; at times it seems as if those who have felt this effect actually feel insulted and as if they could express what they consider their threatened self-reliance only by—bad manners. Whole generations are required merely to invent a polite convention for thanks; and it is only very late that we reach the moment when gratitude acquires a kind of spirit and genius. By then, there is usually also someone who becomes the recipient of great gratitude, not only for the good he himself has done but above all for the treasure of what is best and highest that has gradually been accumulated by his predecessors.

Wherever there was a court, there were laws governing good speech and thus also laws about style for all who wrote.

That some books are so valuable and so royal that whole generations of scholars are well employed if their labors to preserve these books in a state that is pure and intelligible—philology exists in order to fortify this faith again and again. It presupposes that there is no lack of those rare human beings (even if one does not see them) who really know how to use such valuable books—presumably those who write, or could write, books of the same type. I mean that philology presupposes a noble faith—that for the sake of a very few human beings, who always “will come” but are never there, a very large amount of fastidious and even dirty work needs to be done first: all of it is work in usum Delphinorum.

I believe that the sound of the German language during the Middles Ages and especially after that was profoundly rustic and vulgar. During the last few centuries it has become a little more elegant primarily because one was compelled to imitate so many French, Italian, and Spanish sounds, which was especially true of the German (and Austrian) nobility who simply could not manage with their mother tongue. But in spite of this practice, German must have sounded intolerably vulgar to Montaigne or, even more so, Racine; and to this day, German travelers in the midst of an Italian mob still sound very rude, woodsy, and hoarse, as if they came from smoky rooms and impolite regions.

Becoming accustomed to certain sounds has a profound effect on character; soon one acquires the words and phrases and eventually also the ideas that go with these sounds

If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue, then the realization of general untruth and mendaciousness that now comes to us through science—the realization that delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation—would be utterly unbearable. Honesty would lead to nausea and suicide. But now there is a counterforce against our honesty that helps us to avoid such consequences: art as the good will to appearance. We do not always keep our eyes from rounding off something and, as it were, finishing the poem; and then it is no longer eternal imperfection that we carry across the river of becoming—then we have the sense of carrying a goddess, and feel proud and childlike as we perform this service. As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us, and art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon. At times we need a rest from ourselves by looking upon, by looking down upon, ourselves and, from an artistic distance, laughing over ourselves or weeping over ourselves. We must discover the hero no less than the fool in our passion for knowledge; we must occasionally find pleasure in our folly, or we cannot continue to find pleasure in our wisdom. Precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious human beings—really, more weights than human beings—nothing does us as much good as a fool’s cap: we need it in relation to ourselves—we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish, and blissful art lest we lose the freedom above things that our ideal demands of us. It would mean a relapse for us, with our irritable honesty, to get involved entirely in morality and, for the sake of the over-severe demands that we make on ourselves in these matters, to become virtuous monsters and scarecrows. We should be able also to stand above morality—and not only to stand with the anxious stiffness of a man who is afraid of slipping and falling any moment, but also to float above it and play. How then could we possibly dispense with art—and with the fool?— And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourselves, you do not yet belong with us.

After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. —And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.

Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being. Where should it expand? On what should it feed? How could it grow and multiply? We have some notion of the nature of the organic; and we should not reinterpret the exceedingly derivative, late, rare, accidental, that we perceive only on the crust of the earth and make of it something essential, universal, arid eternal, which is what those people do who call the universe an organism. This nauseates me. Let us even beware of believing that the universe is a machine: it is certainly not constructed for one purpose, and calling it a “machine” does it far too much honor. “Let us beware of positing generally and everywhere anything as elegant as the cyclical movements of our neighboring stars; even a glance into the Milky Way raises doubts whether there are not far coarser and more contradictory movements there, as well as stars with eternally linear paths, etc. The astral order in which we live is an exception; this order and the relative duration that depends on it have again made possible an exception of exceptions: the formation of the organic. The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms. Judged from the point of view of our reason, unsuccessful attempts are by all odds the rule, the exceptions are not the secret aim, and the whole musical box repeats eternally its tune which may never be called a melody—and ultimately even the phrase “unsuccessful attempt” is too anthropomorphic and reproachful. But how could we reproach or praise the universe? Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites; it is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things; it does not by any means strive to imitate man. None of our aesthetic and moral judgments apply to it. Nor does it have any instinct for self-preservation or any other instinct; and it does not observe any laws either. Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word “accident” has meaning. Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type. Let us beware of thinking that the world eternally creates new things. There are no eternally enduring substances; matter is as much of an error as the God of the Eleatics. But when shall we ever be done with our caution and care? When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to “naturalize” humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?

Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith, which were continually inherited, until they became almost part of the basic endowment of the species, include the following: that there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself. It was only very late that such propositions were denied and doubted; it was only very late that truth emerged—as the weakest form of knowledge. It seemed that one was unable to live with it: our organism was prepared for the opposite; all its higher functions, sense perception and every kind of sensation worked with those basic errors which had been incorporated since time immemorial. Indeed, even in the realm of knowledge these propositions became the norms according to which “true” and “untrue” were determined—down to the most remote regions of logic. Thus the strength of knowledge does not depend on its degree of truth but on its age, on the degree to which it has been incorporated, on its character as a condition of life. Where life and knowledge seemed to be at odds there was never any real fight, but denial and doubt were simply considered madness. Those exceptional thinkers, like the Eleatics, who nevertheless posited and clung to the opposites of the natural errors, believed that it was possible to live in accordance with these opposites: they invented the sage as the man who was unchangeable and impersonal, the man of the universality of intuition who was One and All at the same time, with a special capacity for his inverted knowledge: they had the faith that their knowledge was also the principle of life. But in order to claim all of this, they had to deceive themselves about their own state: they had to attribute to themselves, fictitiously, impersonality and changeless duration; they had to misapprehend the nature of the knower; they had to deny the role of the impulses in knowledge; and quite generally they had to conceive of reason as a completely free and spontaneous activity. They shut their eyes to the fact that they, too, had arrived at their propositions through opposition to common sense, or owing to a desire for tranquillity, for sole possession, or for dominion. The subtler development of honesty and skepticism eventually made these people, too, impossible; their ways of living and judging were seen to be also dependent upon the primeval impulses and basic errors of all sentient existence. This subtler honesty and skepticism came into being wherever two contradictory sentences appeared to be applicable to life because both were compatible with the basic errors, and it was therefore possible to argue about the higher or lower degree of utility for life; also wherever new propositions, though not useful for life, were also evidently not harmful to life: in such cases there was room for the expression of an intellectual play impulse, and honesty and skepticism were innocent and happy like all play. Gradually, the human brain became full of such judgments and convictions, and a ferment, struggle, and lust for power developed in this tangle. Not only utility and delight but every kind of impulse took sides in this fight about “truths.” The intellectual fight became an occupation, an attraction, a profession, a duty, something dignified—and eventually knowledge and the striving for the true found their place as a need among other needs. Henceforth not only faith and conviction but also scrutiny, denial, mistrust, and contradiction became a power; all “evil” instincts were subordinated to knowledge, employed in her service, and acquired the splendor of what is permitted, honored, and useful—and eventually even the eye and innocence of the good. Thus knowledge became a piece of life itself, and hence a continually growing power—until eventually knowledge collided with those primeval basic errors: two lives, two powers, both in the same human being. A thinker is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for their first fight, after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power. Compared to the significance of this fight, everything else is a matter of indifference: the ultimate question about the conditions of life has been posed here, and we confront the first attempt to answer this question by experiment. To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment.

Explanation” is what we call it, but it is “description” that distinguishes us from older stages of knowledge and science. Our descriptions are better—we do not explain any more than our predecessors. We have uncovered a manifold one-after-another where the naive man and inquirer of older cultures saw only two separate things. “Cause” and “effect” is what one says; but we have merely perfected the image of becoming without reaching beyond the image or behind it. In every case the series of “causes” confronts us much more completely, and we infer: first, this and that has to precede in order that this or that may then follow—but this does not involve any comprehension. In every chemical process, for example, quality appears as a “miracle,” as ever; also, every locomotion; nobody has “explained” a push. But how could we possibly explain anything? We operate only with things that do not exist: lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time spans, divisible spaces. How should explanations be at all possible when we first turn everything into an image, our image! It will do to consider science as an attempt to humanize things as faithfully as possible; as we describe things and their one-after-another, we learn how to describe ourselves more and more precisely. Cause and effect: such a duality probably never exists; in truth we are confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces, just as we perceive motion only as isolated points and then infer it without ever actually seeing it. The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us; actually, it is sudden only for us. In this moment of suddenness there is an infinite number of processes that elude us. An intellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum and a flux and not, as we do, in terms of an arbitrary division and dismemberment, would repudiate the concept of cause and effect and deny all conditionality.

As soon as we see a new image, we immediately construct it with the aid of all our previous experiences, depending on the degree of our honesty and justice. All experiences are moral experiences, even in the realm of sense perception.

Man has been educated by his errors. First, he always saw himself only incompletely; second, he endowed himself with fictitious attributes; third, he placed himself in a false order of rank in relation to animals and nature; fourth, he invented ever new tables of goods and always accepted them for a time as eternal and unconditional: as a result of this, now one and now another human impulse and state held first place and was ennobled because it was esteemed so highly. If we removed the effects of these four errors, we should also remove humanity, humaneness, and “human dignity.

Wherever we encounter a morality, we also encounter valuations and an order of rank of human impulses and actions. These valuations and orders of rank are always expressions of the needs of a community and herd: whatever benefits it most—and second most, and third most—that is also considered the first standard for the value of all individuals. Morality trains the individual to be a function of the herd and to ascribe value to himself only as a function. The conditions for the preservation of different communities were very different; hence there were very different moralities. Considering essential changes in the forms of future herds and communities, states and societies, we can prophesy that there will yet be very divergent moralities. Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

During the longest and most remote periods of the human past, the sting of conscience was not at all what it is now. Today one feels responsible only for one’s will and actions, and one finds one's pride in oneself. All our teachers of law start from this sense of self and pleasure in the individual as if this had always been the fount of law. But during the longest period of the human past nothing was more terrible than to feel that one stood by oneself. To be alone, to experience things by oneself, neither to obey nor to rule, to be an individual—that was not a pleasure but a punishment; one was sentenced “to individuality.” Freedom of thought was considered discomfort itself. While we experience law and submission as compulsion and loss, it was egoism that was formerly experienced as something painful and as real misery. To be a self and to esteem oneself according to one’s own weight and measure—that offended taste in those days. An inclination to do this would have been considered madness; for being alone was associated with every misery and fear. In those days, “free will” was very closely associated with a bad conscience; and the more unfree one’s actions were and the more the herd instinct rather than any personal sense found expression in an action, the more moral one felt. Whatever harmed the herd, whether the individual had wanted it or not wanted it, prompted the sting of conscience in the individual—and in his neighbor, too, and even in the whole herd.— There is no point on which we have learned to think and feel more differently.

Is it virtuous when a cell transforms itself into a function of a stronger cell? It has no alternative. And is it evil when the stronger cell assimilates the weaker? It also has no alternative; it follows necessity, for it strives for superabundant substitutes and wants to regenerate itself. Hence we should make a distinction in benevolence between the impulse to appropriate and the impulse to submit, and ask whether it is the stronger or the weaker that feels benevolent. Joy and desire appear together in the stronger that wants to transform something into a function; joy and the wish to be desired appear together in the weaker that wants to become a function. Pity is essentially of the former type: an agreeable impulse of the instinct for appropriation at the sight of what is weaker. But it should be kept in mind that “strong” and “weak” are relative concepts.

In many people I find an overwhelmingly forceful and pleasurable desire to be a function: they have a very refined sense for all those places where precisely they could “function” and push in those directions. Examples include those women who transform themselves into some function of a man that happens to be underdeveloped in him, and thus become his purse or his politics or his sociability. Such beings preserve themselves best when they find a fitting place in another organism; if they fail to do this, they become grumpy, irritated, and devour themselves.

The popular medical formulation of morality that goes back to Ariston of Chios, “virtue is the health of the soul,” would have to be changed to become useful, at least to read: “your virtue is the health of your soul.” For there is no health as such, and all attempts to define a thing that way have been wretched failures. Even the determination of what is healthy for your body depends on your goal, your horizon, your energies, your impulses, your errors, and above all on the ideals and phantasms of your soul. Thus there are innumerable healths of the body; and the more we allow the unique and incomparable to raise its head again, and the more we abjure the dogma of the “equality of men,” the more must the concept of a normal health, along with a normal diet and the normal course of an illness, be abandoned by medical men. Only then would the time have come to reflect on the health and illness of the soul, and to find the peculiar virtue of each man in the health of his soul. In one person, of course, this health could look like its opposite in another person. Finally, the great question would still remain whether we can really dispense with illness—even for the sake of our virtue—and whether our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge in particular does not require the sick soul as much as the healthy, and whether, in brief, the will to health alone, is not a prejudice, cowardice, and perhaps a bit of very subtle barbarism and backwardness.

We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live—by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody now could endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error.

In antiquity the dignity and recognition of science were diminished by the fact that even her most zealous disciples placed the striving for virtue first, and one felt that knowledge had received the highest praise when one celebrated it as the best means to virtue. It is something new in history that knowledge wants to be more than a mere means.

In the horizon of the infinite.— We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us—indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom—and there is no longer any “land.”

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? — Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is, there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us — for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto. Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.” It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”

Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial.

Every thoughtless person supposes that will alone is effective; that willing is something simple, a brute datum, underivable, and intelligible by itself. He is convinced that when he does something—strike something, for example—it is he that strikes, and that he did strike because he willed it. He does not see any problem here; the feeling of will seems sufficient to him not only for the assumption of cause and effect but also for the faith that he understands their relationship. He knows nothing of the mechanism of what happened and of the hundredfold fine work that needs to be done to bring about the strike, or of the incapacity of the will in itself to do even the tiniest part of this work. The will is for him a magically effective force; the faith in the will as the cause of effects is the faith in magically effective forces. Now man believed originally that wherever he saw something happen, a will had to be at work in the background as a cause, and a personal, willing being. Any notion of mechanics was far from his mind. But since man believed, for immense periods of time, only in persons (and not in substances, forces, things, and so forth), the faith in cause and effect became for him the basic faith that he applies wherever anything happens—and this is what he still does instinctively: it is an atavism of the most ancient origin. The propositions, “no effect without a cause,” “every effect in turn a cause” appear as generalizations of much more limited propositions; “no effecting without willing”; “one can have an effect only on beings that will”; “no suffering of an effect is ever pure and without consequences, but all suffering consists of an agitation of the will” (toward action, resistance, revenge, retribution). But in the pre-history of humanity both sets of propositions were identical: the formed were not generalizations of the latter, but the latter were commentaries on the former. When Schopenhauer assumed that all that has being is only a willing, he enthroned a primeval mythology. It seems that he never even attempted an analysis of the will because, like everybody else, he had faith in the simplicity and immediacy of all willing—while willing is actually a mechanism that is so well practiced that it all but escapes the observing eye. Against him I posit these propositions: First, for will to come into being an idea of pleasure and displeasure is needed. Second, when a strong stimulus is experienced as pleasure or displeasure, this depends on the interpretation of the intellect which, to be sure, generally does this work without rising to our consciousness: one and the same stimulus can be interpreted as pleasure or displeasure. Third, it is only in intellectual beings that pleasure, displeasure, and will are to be found; the vast majority of organisms has nothing of the sort.

Prayer has been invented for those people who really never have thoughts of their own and who do not know any elevation of the soul or at least do not notice it when it occurs: what are they to do at sacred sites and in all significant situations in life, where calm and some sort of dignity are called for? To keep them at least from disturbing others, the wisdom of all founders of religions, small as well as great, has prescribed to them the formulas of prayers—as mechanical work for the lips that takes some time and requires some exertion of the memory as well as the same fixed posture for hands, feet, and eyes. “Let them, like the Tibetans, keep chewing the cud of their “om mane padme hum” innumerable times or, as in Benares, count the name of the god off their fingers, Ram-Ram-Ram (and so on, with or without charm), or honor Vishnu with his thousand names, or Allah with his ninety-nine; or let them use prayer mills and rosaries; the main thing is that this work fixes them for a time and makes them tolerable to look at. Their kind of prayer has been invented for the benefit of the pious who do know thoughts and elevations of their own. But even this type has weary hours when a sequence of venerable words and sounds and a pious routine are welcome. But suppose these rare human beings— the religious person is an exception in every religion—know what to do in such cases; the poor in spirit do not know what to do, and if one forbade them their prayer-rattling one would deprive them of their religion—as Protestantism shows us more and more by the day. What religion wants from the masses is no more than that they should keep still with their eyes, hands, legs, and other organs; that way they become more beautiful for a while and—look more like human beings.

”God himself cannot exist without wise people,” said Luther with good reason. But “God can exist even less without unwise people”—that our good Luther did not say

The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

When Christianity came into being, the craving for suicide was immense—and Christianity turned it into a lever of its power. It allowed only two kinds of suicide, dressed them up with the highest dignity and the highest hopes, and forbade all others in a terrifying manner. Only martyrdom and the ascetic’s slow destruction of his body were permitted.

If God wished to become an object of love, he should have given up judging and justice first of all; a judge, even a merciful judge, is no object of love. The founder of Christianity was not refined enough in his feelings at this point—being a Jew.

Buddha says: “Do not flatter your benefactor!” Repeat this saying in a Christian church; right away it clears the air of everything Christian.

For an individual to posit his own ideal and to derive from it his own law, joys, and rights—that may well have been considered hitherto as the most outrageous human aberration and as idolatry itself. The few who dared as much always felt the need to apologize to themselves, usually by saying; “It wasn’t I! Not I! But a god through me.” The wonderful art and gift of creating gods—polytheism—was the medium through which this impulse could discharge, purify, perfect, and ennoble itself; for originally it was a very undistinguished impulse, related to stubbornness, disobedience, and envy. Hostility against this impulse to have an ideal of one’s own was formerly the central law of all morality. There was only one norm, man; and every people thought that it possessed this one ultimate norm. But above and outside, in some distant overworld, one was permitted to behold a plurality of norms; one god was not considered a denial of another god, nor blasphemy against him. It was here that the luxury of individuals was first permitted; it was here that one first honored the rights of individuals. The invention of gods, heroes, and overmen of all kinds, as well as near-men and undermen, dwarfs, fairies, centaurs, satyrs, demons, and devils was the inestimable preliminary exercise for the justification of the egoism and sovereignty of the individual: the freedom that one conceded to a god in his relation to other gods—one eventually also granted to oneself in relation to laws, customs, and neighbors. Monotheism, on the other hand, this rigid consequence of the doctrine of one normal human type—the faith in one normal god beside whom there are only pseudo-gods—was perhaps the greatest danger that has yet confronted humanity. It threatened us with the premature stagnation that, as far as we can see, most other species have long reached; for all of them believe in one normal type and ideal for their species, and they have translated the morality of mores definitively into their own flesh and blood. In polytheism the free-spiriting and many-spiriting of man attained its first preliminary form—the strength to create for ourselves our own new eyes—and ever again new eyes that are even more our own; hence man alone among all the animals has no eternal horizons and perspectives.

Danger for vegetarians.— A diet that consists predominantly of rice leads to the use of opium and narcotics, just as a diet that consists predominantly of potatoes leads to the use of liquor. But it also has subtler effects that include ways of thinking and feeling that have narcotic effects, This agrees with the fact that those who promote narcotic ways of thinking and feelings, like some Indian gurus, praise a diet that is entirely vegetarian and would like to impose that as a law upon the masses. In this way they want to create and increase the need that they are in a position to satisfy.

Where someone rules, there are masses; and where we find masses we also find a need to be enslaved. Where men are enslaved, there are few individuals, and these are opposed by herd instincts and conscience.

On the critique of saints.— To have a virtue, must one really wish to have it in its most brutal form—as the Christian saints wished—and needed—it? They could endure life only by thinking that the sight of their virtue would engender self-contempt in anyone who saw them. But a virtue with that effect I call brutal.

Of the origin of religion.— The metaphysical need is not the origin of religions, as Schopenhauer supposed, but merely a late offshoot. Under the rule of religious ideas, one has become accustomed to the notion of “another world (behind, below, above)”—and when religious ideas are destroyed one is troubled by an uncomfortable emptiness and deprivation. From this feeling grows once again “another world,” but now merely a metaphysical one that is no longer religious. But what first led to the positing of “another world” in primeval times was not some impulse or need but an error in the interpretation of certain natural events, a failure of the intellect.

Different types of dangerous lives.— You have no idea what you are living through; you rush through life as if you were drunk and now and then fall down some staircase. But thanks to your drunkenness you never break a limb; your muscles are too relaxed and your brain too benighted for you to find the stones of these stairs as hard as we do. For us life is more dangerous: we are made of glass; woe unto us if we merely bump ourselves! And all is lost if we fall!

Mentiri.— Watch out! He reflects—in a moment he will be ready with a lie. This is a stage of civilization represented by whole peoples. Just consider what the Romans meant when they used the word mentiri.

An inconvenient trait.— To find everything profound—that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one’s eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.

Every virtue has its age.— Anyone who is unyielding nowadays will often have a bad conscience due to his honesty; for being unyielding is a virtue that does not belong to the same age as the virtue of honesty.

Egoism is the law of perspective applied to feelings: what is closest appears large and weighty, and as one moves farther away size and weight decrease

What is best about a great victory is that it liberates the victor from the fear of defeat. “Why not be defeated some time, too?” he says to himself; “Now I am rich enough for that.

Those who seek rest.— The spirits who seek rest I recognize by the many dark objects with which they surround themselves: those who want to sleep make their room dark or crawl into a cave. —A hint for those who do not know what it is that they seek most, but who would like to know.

If one renounces something thoroughly and for a long time and then accidentally encounters it again, one may almost think that one has discovered it—and how much happiness is there in discovery! Let us be wiser than the serpents who lie too long in the same sunlight.

Whatever in nature and in history is of my own kind, speaks to me, spurs me on, and comforts me; the rest I do not hear or forget right away. We are always only in our own company.

One speaks of being sick of man only when one can no longer digest him and yet has one’s stomach full of him. Misanthropy comes of an all too greedy love of man and “cannibalism”; but who asked you to swallow men like oysters, Prince Hamlet?

Courage before the enemy Is one thing and does not rule out cowardice or indecisiveness and confusion. That is how Napoleon judged “the most courageous person” he knew: Murat. It follows that some people need open enemies if they are to rise to the level of their own virtue, virility, and cheerfulness.

When the gratitude of many to one throws away all shame, we behold fame.

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.

Parliamentarianism — that is, public permission to choose between five basic political opinions—flatters and wins the favor of all those who would like to seem independent and individual, as if they fought for their opinions. Ultimately, however, it is indifferent whether the herd is commanded to have one opinion or permitted to have five. Whoever deviates from the five public opinions and stands apart will always have the whole herd against him.

Who has had the most convincing eloquence so far? The drum roll; and as long as the kings command that, they remain the best orators and rabble rousers

In Germany, higher men lack one great means of education: the laughter of higher men, for in Germany these do not laugh.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings—always darker, emptier, and simpler.

Those who live alone do not speak too loud nor write too loud, for they fear the hollow echo—the critique of the nymph Echo. And all voices sound different in solitude.

How close work and the worker are now even to the most leisurely among us! The royal courtesy of the saying “We are all workers” would have been cynical and indecent as recently as the reign of Louis XIV.

He is a thinker; that means, he knows how to make things simpler than they are.

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.

Look! Look! He is running away from people, but they follow after him because he is running ahead of them: they are herd through and through.

Limits of our hearing.— One hears only those questions for which one is able to find answers.

Better watch out!— There is nothing we like so much to communicate to others as the seal of secrecy—along with what lies under it.

Chagrin of the proud.— The proud feel chagrined even by those who advance them: they are angry with the horses of their carriage.

Applause.— In applause there is always a kind of noise—even when we applaud ourselves.

There is no lack of courtesy in using a stone to knock on a door when there is no bell”; that is how beggars feel and all who suffer some sort of distress; but nobody agrees with them

Need is considered the cause why something came to be; but in truth it is often merely an effect of what has come to be.

He is envious; let us hope that he will not have children, for he would envy them because he cannot be a child anymore.

There is a way of asking us for our reasons that leads us not only to forget our best reasons but also to conceive a stubborn aversion to ail reasons This way of asking makes people very stupid and is a trick used by tyrannical people.

One should not try to excel one’s father’s industriousness; that makes one sick.

To be able to afford a secret enemy—that is a luxury for which the morality of even elevated spirits is usually not rich enough.

The way to happiness.— A sage asked a fool about the way to happiness. The fool answered instantly as if he had merely been asked about the way to the nearest town: “Admire yourself and live in the street.” “No,” replied the sage, “you are asking too much; it is quite sufficient to admire oneself.” The fool shot back: “But how can one constantly admire without constantly feeling contempt?

Virtue bestows happiness and a kind of bliss only on those who have not lost their faith in their virtue—not on those subtler souls whose virtue consists in a profound mistrust of themselves and of all virtue. Ultimately, then, “faith makes blessed” here, too, and not—mark it well—virtue.

Anyone with a very loud voice is almost incapable of thinking subtleties.

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does afterward

I do not love people who have to explode like bombs in order to have any effect at all. When one is near them one is always in danger of suddenly losing one’s hearing, if not more than that

The purpose of punishment is to improve those who punish; that is the last resort of the apologists for punishment.

The sacrificial animal does not share the spectators’ ideas about sacrifice, but one has never let it have its say.

Fathers and sons have much more consideration for each other than mothers and daughters.

The poet considers the liar a foster brother whom he did out of his milk. Hence his brother remained weak and wretched and never even attained a good conscience.

Our eyes are also intended for hearing,” said an old father confessor who had become deaf; “and among the blind he that has the longest ears is king.”

I fear that the animals consider man as a being like themselves that has lost in a most dangerous way its sound animal common sense; they consider him the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal

Evil has always had great effects in its favor. And nature is evil. Let us therefore be natural.” That is the secret reasoning of those who have mastered the most spectacular effects, and they have all too often been considered great human beings

We say the strongest things simply, provided only that we are surrounded by people who believe in our strength: such an environment educates one to attain “simplicity of style.” The mistrustful speak emphatically; the mistrustful also make others emphatic.

He cannot control himself, and from that a poor woman infers that it will be easy to control him and casts her net for him. Soon she will be his slave.

Those who want to mediate between two resolute thinkers show that they are mediocre; they lack eyes for seeing what is unique. Seeing things as similar and making things the same is the sign of weak eyes.

Obstinately, he clings to something that he has come to see through; but he calls it “faithfulness.”

His whole nature fails to persuade; that is because he has never remained silent about any of his good deeds.

Those who are slow to know suppose that slowness is of the essence of knowledge.

Either we have no dreams or our dreams are interesting. We should learn to arrange our waking life the same way: nothing or interesting.

The most dangerous point of view.— What I do or do not do now is as important for everything that is yet to come as is the greatest event of the past: in this tremendous perspective of effectiveness all actions appear equally great and small.

Must not anyone who wants to move the crowd be an actor who impersonates himself? Must he not first translate himself into grotesque obviousness and then present his whole person and cause in this coarsened and simplified version?

Polite.— “He is so polite.” — Yes, he always carries a biscuit for Cerberus and is so timid that he thinks everyone is Cerberus, even you and I. That is his “politeness.

He is utterly without envy, but there is no merit in that, for he wants to conquer a country that nobody has possessed and scarcely anyone has even seen.

A single joyless person is enough to create constant discouragement and cloudy skies for a whole household, and it is a miracle if there is not one person like that. Happiness is not nearly so contagious a disease. Why?

I would not build a house for myself, and I count it part of my good fortune that I do not own a house. But if I had to, then I should build it as some of the Romans did—right into the sea. I should not mind sharing a few secrets with this beautiful monster

Suum cuique.— However great the greed of my desire for knowledge may be, I still cannot take anything out of things that did not belong to me before; what belongs to others remains behind. How is it possible for a human being to be a thief or robber?

Origin of “good” and “bad.”— Improvements are invented only by those who can feel that something is not good.

Even one’s thoughts one cannot reproduce entirely in words.

Let us introduce the refinement and rigor of mathematics into all sciences as far as this is at all possible, not in die faith that this will lead us to know things but in order to determine our human relation to things. Mathematics is merely the means for general and ultimate knowledge of man.

Every habit lends our hand more wit but makes our wit less handy.

What good is a book that does not even carry us beyond all books?

The sigh of the search for knowledge.— “Oh, my greed! There is no selflessness in my soul but only an all-coveting self that would like to appropriate many individuals as so many additional pairs of eyes and hands—a self that would like to bring back the whole past, too, and that will not lose anything that it could possibly possess. Oh, my greed is a flame! Oh, that I might be reborn in a hundred beings!” —Whoever does not know this sigh from firsthand experience does not know the passion of the search for knowledge.

Although the shrewdest judges of the witches and even the witches themselves were convinced of the guilt of witchery, this guilt nevertheless did not exist. This applies to all guilt.

Magnificent characters suffer very differently from what their admirers imagine. They suffer most keenly from the ignoble and petty agitations of some evil moments—briefly, from their doubts about their own magnificence—not from the sacrifices and martyrdoms that their task demands from them. As long as Prometheus feels pity for men and sacrifices himself for them, he is happy and great; but when he becomes envious of Zeus and the homage paid to him by mortals, then he suffers.

Better a debtor than pay with a coin that does not bear our image!” says our sovereignty

One day we reach our goal, and now point with pride to the long travels we undertook to reach it. In fact, we were not even aware of traveling. But we got so far because we fancied at every point that we were at home.

If you are always profoundly occupied, you are beyond all embarrassment.

A: “What? You want no imitators?” B: “I do not want to have people imitate my example; I wish that everybody would fashion his own example, as I do.” A: “So?

All people who have depth find happiness in being for once like flying fish, playing on the peaks of waves; what they consider best in things is that they have a surface: their skin-coveredness—sit venia verbo.

Some do not know how rich they are until they experience how rich people steal from them.

The denial of chance.— No victor believes in chance.

From paradise.— “Good and evil are the prejudices of God”—said the snake.

Multiplication table.— One is always wrong, but with two, truth begins.— One cannot prove his case, but two are irrefutable.

What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them. —Those with originality have for the most part also assigned names.

Sub specie aeterni.— A: “You are moving away faster and faster from the living; soon they will strike your name from their rolls.”— B: “That is the only way to participate in the privilege of the dead.”— A: “What privilege?”— B: “To die no more.

When we are in love we wish that our defects might remain concealed—not from vanity but to keep the beloved from suffering. Indeed, the lover would like to seem divine— and this, too, not from vanity.

What we do is never understood but always only praised or censured.

With a great goal one is superior even to justice, not only to one’s deeds and one’s judges.

What makes one heroic?— Going out to meet at the same time one’s highest suffering and one’s highest hope.

In what do you believe?— In this, that the weights of all things must be determined anew.

What does your conscience say?— “You shall become the person you are.

Where are your greatest dangers?— In pity.

What do you love in others?— My hopes

Whom do you call bad?— Those who always want to put to shame

What do you consider most humane?— To spare someone shame

What is the seal of liberation?— No longer being ashamed in front of oneself

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought; hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year—what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the wholesome day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

There is a certain high point in life: once we have reached that, we are, for all our freedom, once more in the greatest danger of spiritual unfreedom, and no matter how much we have faced up to the beautiful chaos of existence and denied it all providential reason and goodness, we still have to pass our hardest test. For it is only now that the idea of a personal providence confronts us with the most penetrating force, and the best advocate, the evidence of our eyes, speaks for it—now that we can see how palpably always everything that happens to us turns out for the best. Every day and every hour, life seems to have no other wish than to prove this proposition again and again. Whatever it is, bad weather or good, the loss of a friend, sickness, slander, the failure of some letter to arrive, the spraining of an ankle, a glance into a shop, a counter-argument, the opening of a book, a dream, a fraud—either immediately or very soon after it proves to be something that “must not be missing”; it has a profound significance and use precisely for us. Is there any more dangerous seduction that might tempt one to renounce one’s faith in the gods of Epicurus who have no care and are unknown, and to believe instead in some petty deity who is full of care and personally knows every little hair on our head and finds nothing nauseous in the most miserable small service? Well, I think that in spite of all this we should leave the gods in peace as well as the genii who are ready to serve us, and rest content with the supposition that our own practical and theoretical skill in interpreting and arranging events has now reached its high point. Nor should we conceive too high an opinion of this dexterity of our wisdom when at times we are excessively surprised by the wonderful harmony created by the playing of our instrument—a harmony that sounds too good for us to dare to give the credit to ourselves. Indeed, now and then someone plays with us—good old chance; now and then chance guides our hand, and the wisest providence could not think up a more beautiful music than that which our foolish hand produces then.

Living in the midst of this jumble of little lanes, needs, and voices gives me a melancholy happiness: how much enjoyment, impatience, and desire, how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life comes to light every moment! And yet silence will soon descend on all these noisy, living, life-thirsty people. How his shadow stands even now behind everyone, as his dark fellow traveler! It is always like the last moment before the departure of an emigrants’ ship: people have more to say to each other than ever, the hour is late, and the ocean and its desolate silence are waiting impatiently behind all of this noise—so covetous and certain of their prey. And all and everyone of them suppose that the heretofore was little or nothing while the near future is everything; and that is the reason for all of this haste, this clamor, this outshouting and overreaching each other. Everyone wants to be the first in this future—and yet death and deathly silence alone are certain and common to all in this future. How strange it is that this sole certainty and common element makes almost no impression on people, and that nothing is further from their minds than the feeling that they form a brotherhood of death. It makes me happy that men do not want at all to think the thought of death! I should like very much to do something that would make the thought of life even a hundred times more appealing to them.

We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did—and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see each other again; perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us. That we have to become estranged is the law above us; by the same token we should also become more venerable for each other—and the memory of our former friendship more sacred. There is probably a tremendous but invisible stellar orbit in which our very different ways and goals may be included as small parts of this path; let us rise up to this thought. But our life is too short and our power of vision too small for us to be more than friends in the sense of this sublime possibility. —Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies.

Architecture for the search for knowledge.— One day, and probably soon, we need some recognition of what above all is lacking in our big cities: quiet and wide, expansive places for reflection. Places with long, high-ceilinged cloisters for bad or all too sunny weather where no shouting or noise of carriages can reach and where good manners would prohibit even priests from praying aloud—buildings and sites that would altogether give expression to the sublimity of thoughtfulness and of stepping aside. The time is past when the church possessed a monopoly on reflection, when the vita contemplativa always had to be first of all a vita religiosa; and everything built by the church gives expression to that idea. I do not see how we could remain content with such buildings even if they were stripped of their churchly purposes. The language spoken by these buildings is far too rhetorical and unfree, reminding us that they are houses of God and ostentatious monuments of some supramundane intercourse; we who are godless could not think our thoughts in such surroundings. We wish to see ourselves translated into stone and plants, we want to take walks in ourselves when we stroll around these buildings and gardens.

the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is—to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer. At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due; it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!

Faith in oneself.— Few people have faith in themselves. Of these few, some are endowed with it as with a useful blindness or a partial eclipse of their spirit (what would they behold if they could see to the bottom of themselves!), while the rest have to acquire it. Everything good, fine, or great they do is first of all an argument against the skeptic inside them. They have to convince or persuade him, and that almost requires genius. These are the great self-dissatisfied people.

Excelsior.— “You will never pray again, never adore again, never again rest in endless trust; you do not permit yourself to stop before any ultimate wisdom, ultimate goodness, ultimate power, while unharnessing your thoughts; you have no perpetual guardian and friend for your seven solitudes; you live without a view of mountains with snow on their peaks and fire in their hearts; there is no avenger for you any more nor any final improver; there is no longer any reason in what happens, no love in what will happen to you; no resting place is open any longer to your heart, where it only needs to find and no longer to seek; you resist any ultimate peace; you will the eternal recurrence of war and peace: man of renunciation, all this you wish to renounce? Who will give you the strength for that? Nobody yet has had this strength!” There is a lake that one day ceased to permit itself to flow off; it formed a dam where it had hitherto flown off; and ever since this lake is rising higher and higher. Perhaps this very renunciation will also lend us the strength needed to bear this renunciation; perhaps man will rise ever higher as soon as he ceases to flow out into a god.

Delight in blindness.— “My thoughts,” said the wanderer to his shadow, “should show me where I stand; but they should not betray to me where I am going. I love my ignorance of the future and do not wish to perish of impatience and of tasting promised things ahead of time.”

Embark!— Consider how every individual is affected by an overall philosophical justification of his way of living and thinking: he experiences it as a sun that shines especially for him and bestows warmth, blessings, and fertility on him; it makes him independent of praise and blame, self-sufficient, rich, liberal with happiness and good will; incessantly it refashions evil into good, leads all energies to bloom and ripen, and does not permit the petty weeds of grief and chagrin to come up at all. In the end one exclaims: How I wish that many such new suns were yet to be created! Those who are evil or unhappy and the exceptional human being—all these should also have their philosophy, their good right, their sunshine! What is needful is not pity for them. We must learn to abandon this arrogant fancy, however long humanity has hitherto spent learning and practicing it. What these people need is not confession, conjuring of souls, and forgiveness of sins; what is needful is a new justice! And a new watchword. And new philosophers. The moral earth, too, is round. The moral earth, too, has its antipodes. The antipodes, too, have the right to exist. There is yet another world to be discovered— and more than one. Embark, philosophers!

one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry and art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight. For the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy.

Is it our fault that we were born for the air, clean air, we rivals of the beams of light, and that we wish we could ride on ethereal dust specks like these beams—not away from the sun but toward the sun! That, however, we cannot do. Let us therefore do what alone we can do: bring light to the earth, be “the light of the earth”! And to that end we have our wings and our speed and severity; for this are we virile and even terrible like fire. Let those be terrified by us who do not know how to gain warmth and light from us!

Against the slanderers of nature.— I find those people disagreeable in whom every natural inclination immediately becomes a sickness, something that disfigures them or is downright infamous: it is they that have seduced us to hold that man’s inclinations and instincts are evil. They are the cause of our great injustice against our nature, against all nature. There are enough people who might well entrust themselves to their instincts with grace and without care; but they do not, from fear of this imagined “evil character” of nature. That is why we find so little nobility among men; for it will always be the mark of nobility that one feels no fear of oneself, expects nothing infamous of oneself, flies without scruple where we feel like flying, we freeborn birds. Wherever we may come there will always be freedom and sunlight around us.

Brief habits.— I love brief habits and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things and states, down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitternesses. My nature is designed entirely for brief habits, even in the needs of my physical health and altogether as far as I can see at all—from the lowest to the highest. I always believe that here is something that will give me lasting satisfaction—brief habits, too, have this faith of passion, this faith in eternity—and that I am to be envied for having found and recognized it; and now it nourishes me at noon and in the evening and spreads a deep contentment all around itself and deep into me so that I desire nothing else, without having any need for comparisons, contempt, or hatred. But one day its time is up; the good thing parts from me, not as something that has come to nauseate me but peacefully and sated with me as I am with it—as if we had reason to be grateful to each other as we shook hands to say farewell. Even then something new is waiting at the door, along with my faith—this indestructible fool and sage!—that this new discovery will be just right, and that this will be the last time. That is what happens to me with dishes, ideas, human beings, cities, poems, music, doctrines, ways of arranging the day, and life styles. “Enduring habits I hate. I feel as if a tyrant had come near me and as if the air I breathe had thickened when events take such a turn that it appears that they will inevitably give rise to enduring habits; for example, owing to an official position, constant association with the same people a permanent domicile, or unique good health. Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits. Most intolerable, to be sure, and the terrible par excellence would be for me a life entirely devoid of habits, a life that would demand perpetual improvisation. That would be my exile and my Siberia.

A firm reputation used to be extremely useful; and wherever society is still dominated by the herd instinct it is still most expedient for every one to pretend that his character and occupation are unchangeable, even if at bottom they are not. “One can depend on him, he remains the same”: in all extremities of society this is the sort of praise that means the most. Society is pleased to feel that the virtue of this person, the ambition of that one, and the thoughtfulness and passion of the third provide it with a dependable instrument that is always at hand; society honors this instrumental nature, this way of remaining faithful to oneself, this unchangeability of views, aspirations, and even faults and lavishes its highest honors upon it. Such esteem, which flourishes and has flourished everywhere alongside the morality of mores, breeds “character” and brings all change, all re-learning, all self-transformation into ill repute. However great the advantages of this way of thinking may be elsewhere, for the search after knowledge no general judgment could be more harmful, for precisely the good will of those who seek knowledge to declare themselves at any time dauntlessly against their previous opinions and to mistrust everything that wishes to become firm in us is thus condemned and brought into ill repute. Being at odds with “a firm reputation,” the attitude of those who seek knowledge is considered dishonorable while the petrification of opinions is accorded a monopoly on honor! Under the spell of such notions we have to live to this day. How hard it is to live when one feels the opposition of many millennia all around. It is probable that the search after knowledge was afflicted for many millennia with a bad conscience, and that the history of the greatest spirits must have contained a good deal of self-contempt and secret misery.

The ability to contradict.— Everybody knows nowadays that the ability to accept criticism and contradiction is a sign of high culture. Some people actually realize that higher human beings desire and provoke contradiction in order to receive some hint about their own injustices of which they are as yet unaware. But the ability to contradict, the attainment of a good conscience when one feels hostile to what is accustomed, traditional, and hallowed—that is still more excellent and constitutes what is really great, new, and amazing in our culture; this is the step of steps of the liberated spirit: Who knows that?

Sigh.— I caught this insight on the way and quickly seized the rather poor words that were closest to hand to pin it down lest it fly away again. And now it has died of these arid words and shakes and flaps in them—and I hardly know any more when I look at it how I could ever have felt so happy when I caught this bird.

What one should learn from artists.— How can we make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not? And I rather think that in themselves they never are. Here we could learn something from physicians, when for example they dilute what is bitter or add wine and sugar to a mixture—but even more from artists who are really continually trying to bring off such inventions and feats. Moving away from things until there is a good deal that one no longer sees and there is much that our eye has to add if we are still to see them at all; or seeing things around a corner and as cut out and framed; or to place them so that they partially conceal each other and grant us only glimpses of architectural perspectives; or looking at them through tinted glass or in the light of the sunset; or giving them a surface and skin that is not fully transparent—all this we should learn from artists while being wiser than they are in other matters. For with them this subtle power usually comes to an end where art ends and life begins; but we want to be the poets of our life—first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters.

The fancy of the contemplatives.— What distinguishes the higher human beings from the lower is that the former see and hear immeasurably more, and see and hear thoughtfully—and precisely this distinguishes human beings from animals, and the higher animals from the lower. For anyone who grows up into the heights of humanity the world becomes ever fuller; ever more fishhooks are cast in his direction to capture his interest; the number of things that stimulate him grows constantly, as does the number of different kinds of pleasure and displeasure: The higher human being always becomes at the same time happier and unhappier. But he can never shake off a delusion: He fancies that he is a spectator and listener who has been placed before the great visual and acoustic spectacle that is life; he calls his own nature contemplative and overlooks that he himself is really the poet who keeps creating this life. Of course, he is different from the actor of this drama, the so-called active type; but he is even less like a mere spectator and festive guest in front of the stage. As a poet, he certainly has vis contemplativa and the ability to look back upon his work, but at the same time also and above all vis creativa, which the active human being lacks, whatever visual appearances and the faith of all the world may say. We who think and feel at the same time are those who really continually fashion something that had not been there before: the whole eternally growing world of valuations, colors, accents, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations. This poem that we have invented is continually studied by the so-called practical human beings (our actors) who learn their roles and translate everything into flesh and actuality, into the everyday. Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature—nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present—and it was we who gave and bestowed it. Only we have created the world that concerns man!— But precisely this knowledge we lack, and when we occasionally catch it for a fleeting moment we always forget it again immediately; we fail to recognize our best power and underestimate ourselves, the contemplatives, just a little. We are neither as proud nor as happy as we might be.

Two who are happy.— Truly, in spite of his youth, this is a great improviser of life who amazes even the subtlest observer; for he never seems to make a mistake although he continually takes the greatest risk. One is reminded of those masters of musical improvisation whose hands the listener would also like to credit with divine infallibility although here and there they make a mistake as every mortal does. But they are practiced and inventive and ready at any moment to incorporate into their thematic order the most accidental tone to which the flick of a finger or a mood has driven them, breathing a beautiful meaning and a soul into an accident. Here is an altogether different person: at bottom, everything he desires and plans goes wrong. What he has occasionally set his heart upon has brought him several times to the edge of the abyss and within a hair of destruction; and if he escaped that, it was certainly not merely “with a black eye.” Do you suppose that he feels unhappy about that? He made up his mind long ago not to take his own desires and plans too seriously, “If I do not succeed at this,” he says to himself, “I may perhaps succeed at that; and on the whole I do not know whether I do not have more reason to be grateful to my failures than to any success. Was I made to be stubborn and to have horns like a bull? What constitutes the value and result of life for me lies elsewhere; my pride as well as my misery lie elsewhere. I know more about life because I have so often been on the verge of losing it; and precisely for that reason I get more out of life than any of you”.

By doing we forego.— At bottom I abhor all those moralities which say: “Do not do this! Renounce! Overcome yourself!” But I am well disposed toward those moralities which goad me to do something and do it again, from morning till evening, and then to dream of it at night, and to think of nothing except doing this well, as well as I alone can do it. When one lives like that, one thing after another that simply does not belong to such a life drops off. Without hatred or aversion one sees this take its leave today and that tomorrow, like yellow leaves that any slight stirring of the air takes off a tree. He may not even notice that it takes its leave; for his eye is riveted to his goal—forward, not sideward, backward, downward. What we do should determine what we forego; by doing we forego—that is how I like it, that is my placitum. But I do not wish to strive with open eyes for my own impoverishment; I do not like negative virtues—virtues whose very essence it is to negate and deny oneself something.

Self-control.— Those moralists who command man first of all and above all to gain control of himself thus afflict him with a peculiar disease; namely, a constant irritability in the face of all natural stirrings and inclinations—as it were, a kind of itching. Whatever may henceforth push, pull, attract, or impel such an irritable person from inside or outside, it will always seem to him as if his self-control were endangered. No longer may he entrust himself to any instinct or free wingbeat; he stands in a fixed position with. gesture that wards off. armed against himself, with sharp and mistrustful eyes—the eternal guardian of his castle, since he has turned himself into a castle. Of course, he can achieve greatness this way. But he has certainly become insufferable for others, difficult for himself, and impoverished and cut off from the most beautiful fortuities of his soul. Also from all further instruction. For one must be able to lose oneself occasionally if one wants to learn something from things different from oneself.

Stoics and Epicureans.— The Epicurean selects the situation, the persons, and even the events that suit his extremely irritable, intellectual constitution; he gives up all others, which means almost everything, because they would be too strong and heavy for him to digest. The Stoic, on the other hand, trains himself to swallow stones and worms, slivers of glass and scorpions without nausea; he wants his stomach to become ultimately indifferent to whatever the accidents of existence might pour into it: he reminds one of that Arabian sect of the Assaua whom one encounters in Algiers: like these insensitive people, he, too, enjoys having an audience when he shows off his insensitivity, while the Epicurean would rather dispense with that, having his “garden”! For those with whom fate attempts improvisations—those who live in violent ages and depend on sudden and mercurial people—Stoicism may indeed be advisable. But anyone who foresees more or less that fate permits him to spin a long thread does well to make Epicurean arrangements. That is what all those have always done whose work is of the spirit. For this type it would be the loss of losses to be deprived of their subtle irritability and be awarded in its place a hard Stoic hedgehog skin.

In favor of criticism.— Now something that you formerly loved as a truth or probability strikes you as an error; you shed it and fancy that this represents a victory for your reason. But perhaps this error was as necessary for you then, when you were still a different person—you are always a different person—as are all your present “truths,” being a skin, as it were, that concealed and covered a great deal that you were not yet permitted to see. What killed that opinion for you was your new life and not your reason: you no longer need it, and now it collapses and unreason crawls out of it into the light like a worm. When we criticize something, this is no arbitrary and impersonal event; it is, at least very often, evidence of vital energies in us that are growing and shedding a skin. We negate and must negate because something in us wants to live and affirm—something that we perhaps do not know or see as yet. —This is said in favor of criticism.

The history of every day.— What is the history of every day in your case? Look at your habits that constitute it: are they the product of innumerable little cowardices and lazinesses or of your courage and inventive reason? However different these two cases are, people might very well praise you equally and you might actually profit them equally this way and that. But praise and profit and respectability may suffice those who merely wish to have a good conscience—but not you who try the heart and reins and make even conscience an object of science!

”To be sure, times used to be more ‘beautiful’ when anyone with a halfway new idea could still feel so indispensable that he would go out into the street and shout at everyone: ‘Behold, the kingdom of heaven is at hand!’—I should not miss myself if I were not there. All of us are dispensable.” But, to repeat it, that is not how we think when we are bold; then we don't think of this.

I have given a name to my pain and call it “dog.” It is just as faithful, just as obtrusive and shameless, just as entertaining, just as clever as any other dog—and I can scold it and vent my bad mood on it, as others do with their dogs, servants, and wives.

Prophetic human beings.— You have no feeling for the fact that prophetic human beings are afflicted with a great deal of suffering; you merely suppose that they have been granted a beautiful “gift,” and you would even like to have it yourself. But I shall express myself in a parable. How much may animals suffer from the electricity in the air and the clouds! We see how some species have a prophetic faculty regarding the weather; monkeys, for example (as may be observed even in Europe, and not only in zoos—namely, on Gibraltar). But we pay no heed that it is their pains that make them prophets. When a strong positive electrical charge, under the influence of an approaching cloud that is as yet far from visible, suddenly turns into negative electricity and a change of the weather is impending, these animals behave as if an enemy were drawing near and prepare for defense or escape; most often they try to hide: They do not understand bad weather as a kind of weather but as an enemy whose hand they already feel.

Looking back.— The true pathos of every period of our life rarely becomes clear to us as long as we live in this period; then we always assume that it is the only state that is possible and reasonable for us and—to speak with the Greeks and adopt their distinction—an ethos and not a pathos. A few musical chords reminded me today of a winter and a house and an extremely solitary life, as well as the feeling in which I lived at that time: I thought that I might go on living that way forever. But now I comprehend that it was wholly pathos and passion and thus comparable to this painful and bold music that was so certain that there was some comfort. That sort of thing one must not have for years or for eternities; otherwise one would become too “supra-terrestrial” for this planet.

Wisdom in pain.— There is as much wisdom in pain as there is in pleasure: both belong among the factors that contribute the most to the preservation of the species. If pain did not, it would have perished long ago; that it hurts is no argument against it but its essence. In pain I hear the captain’s command; “Take in the sails!” The bold seafarer “man” must have mastered the art of doing a thousand things with his sails; otherwise he would be done for in no time, and the ocean would swallow him. We must learn to live with diminished energies, too: As soon as pain gives its safety signal the time has come to diminish them; some great danger or other, a storm is approaching, and we are well advised to “inflate” ourselves as little as possible. True, there are people who hear precisely the opposite command when great pain approaches: Their expression is never prouder, more warlike, and happier than it is when a storm comes up; indeed, pain itself gives them their greatest moments. This is the heroic type, the great pain bringers of humanity, those few or rare human beings who need the very same apology that pain itself needs—and truly, one should not deny it to them. They contribute immensely to the preservation and enhancement of the species, even if it were only by opposing comfortableness and by not concealing how this sort of happiness nauseates them.

As interpreters of our experiences.— One sort of honesty has been alien to all founders of religions and their kind: They have never made their experiences a matter of conscience for knowledge. “What did I really experience? What happened in me and around me at that time? Was my reason bright enough? Was my will opposed to all deceptions of the senses and bold in resisting the fantastic?” None of them has asked such questions, nor do any of our dear religious people ask them even now. On the contrary, they thirst after things that go against reason, and they do not wish to make it too hard for themselves to satisfy it. So they experience “miracles” and “rebirths” and hear the voices of little angels! But we, we others who thirst after reason, are determined to scrutinize our experiences as severely as a scientific experiment—hour after hour, day after day. We ourselves wish to be our experiments and guinea pigs.

What I want is more; I am no seeker. I want to create for myself a sun of my own.

New caution.— Let us stop thinking so much about punishing, reproaching, and improving others! We rarely change an individual, and if we should succeed for once, something may also have been accomplished, unnoticed: we may have been changed by him. Let us rather see to it that our own influence on all that is yet to come balances and outweighs his influence. Let us not contend in a direct fight—and that is what all reproaching, punishing, and attempts to improve others amount to. Let us rather raise ourselves that much higher. Let us color our own example ever more brilliantly. Let our brilliance make them look dark. No, let us not become darker ourselves on their account, like all those who punish others and feel dissatisfied. Let us sooner step aside. Let us look away.

Good luck in fate.— The greatest distinction that fate can bestow on us is to let us fight for a time on the side of our opponents. With that we are predestined for a great victory.

In media vita.— No, life has not disappointed me, On the contrary, I find it truer, so more desirable and mysterious every year—ever since the day when the great liberator came to me; the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge—and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery. —And knowledge itself: let it be something else for others; for example, a bed to rest on, or the way to such a bed, or a diversion, or a form of leisure—for me it is a world of dangers and victories in which heroic feelings, too, find places to dance and play. “Life as a means to knowledge”—with this principle in one's heart one can live not only boldly but even gaily, and laugh gaily, too. And who knows how to laugh anyway and live well if he does not first know a good deal about war and victory?

Who will attain anything great if he does not find in himself the strength and the will to inflict great suffering? Being able to suffer is the least thing; weak women and even slaves often achieve virtuosity in that. But not to perish of internal distress and uncertainty when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of this suffering-that is great, that belongs to greatness.

The physicians of the soul and pain.— All preachers of morals as well as all theologians share one bad habit; all of them try to con men into believing that they are in a very bad way and need some ultimate, hard, radical cure. Because humanity has listened to these teachers much too eagerly for whole centuries, something of this superstition that they are in a very bad way has finally stuck. Now they are only too ready to sigh, to find nothing good in life and to sulk together, as if life were really hard to endure. Actually, they are overwhelmingly sure of their life and in love with it, and they know innumerable ruses and subtle tricks to vanquish what is disagreeable and to pull the fangs of pain and misfortune. It seems to me that people always exaggerate when they speak of pain and misfortune, as if it were a requirement of good manners to exaggerate here, while one keeps studiously quiet about the fact that there are innumerable palliatives against pain, such as anaesthesia or the feverish haste of thoughts, or a quiet posture, or good or bad memories, purposes, hopes, and many kinds of pride and sympathy that almost have the same effect as anaesthetics—and at the highest degrees of pain one automatically loses consciousness. We know quite well how to drip sweetnesses upon our bitternesses, especially the bitternesses of the soul; we find remedies in our courage and sublimity as well as the nobler deliria of submission and resignation. A loss is a loss for barely one hour; somehow it also brings us some gift from heaven—new strength, for example, or at least a new opportunity for strength. What fantasies about the inner “misery” of evil people moral preachers have invented! What lies they have told us about the unhappiness of passionate people! “Lies” is really the proper word here; for they knew very well of the over-rich happiness of this kind of human being, but they kept a deadly silence about it because it refuted their theory according to which all happiness begins only after the annihilation of passion and the silencing of the will. Finally, regarding the prescription of all these physicians of the soul and their praise of a hard, radical cure, it should be permitted to ask: Is our life really painful and burdensome enough to make it advantageous to exchange it for a Stoic way of life and petrification? We are not so badly off that we have to be as badly off as Stoics.

Taking seriously.— In the great majority, the intellect is a clumsy, gloomy, creaking machine that is difficult to start. They call it “taking the matter seriously” when they want to work with this machine and think well. How burdensome they must find good thinking! The lovely human beast always seems to lose its good spirits when it thinks well; it becomes “serious.” And “where laughter and gaiety are found, thinking does not amount to anything”: that is the prejudice of this serious beast against all “gay science.” —Well then, let us prove that this is a prejudice.

Leisure and idleness.— There is something of the American Indians, something of the ferocity peculiar to the Indian blood, in the American lust for gold; and the breathless haste with which they work—the distinctive vice of the new world—is already beginning to infect old Europe with its ferocity and is spreading a lack of spirituality like a blanket. Even now one is ashamed of resting, and prolonged reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in one’s hand, even as one eats one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always “might miss out on something.” “Rather do anything than nothing”: this principle, too, is merely a string to throttle all culture and good taste. Just as all forms are visibly perishing by the haste of the workers, the feeling for form itself, the ear and eye for the melody of movements are also perishing. The proof of this may be found in the universal demand for gross obviousness in all those situations in which human beings wish to be honest with one another for once—in their associations with friends, women, relatives, children, teachers, pupils, leaders, and princes: One no longer has time or energy for ceremonies, for being obliging in an indirect way, for esprit in conversation, and for any otium at all. Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating others. Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time than someone else. Hours in which honesty is permitted have become rare, and when they arrive one is tired and does not only want to “let oneself go” but actually wishes to stretch out as long and wide and ungainly as one happens to be. This is how people now write letters, and the style and spirit of letters will always be the true “sign of the times. If sociability and the arts still offer any delight, it is the kind of delight that slaves, weary of their work, devise for themselves. How frugal our educated—and uneducated—people have become regarding “joy”! How they are becoming increasingly suspicious of all joy! More and more, work enlists all good conscience on its side; the desire for joy already calls itself a “need to recuperate” and is beginning to be ashamed of itself. “One owes it to one's health”—that is what people say when they are caught on an excursion into the country. Soon we may well reach the point where people can no longer give in to the desire for a vita contemplativa (that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience. Well, formerly it was the other way around; it was work that was afflicted with the bad conscience. A person of good family used to conceal the fact that he was working if need compelled him to work. Slaves used to work, oppressed by the feeling that they were doing something contemptible: “doing” itself was contemptible. “Nobility and honor are attached solely to otium and bellum,” that was the ancient prejudice.

A thinker needs no applause and clapping of hands, if only he is assured of his own hand-clapping; without that he cannot do. Are there people who can dispense with that also and altogether with every kind of applause? I doubt it. Even about the wisest of men, Tacitus, who did not slander the wise, said: quando etiam sapientibus gloriae cupido novissima exuitur—which with him means, never.

For the longest time, conscious thought was considered thought itself. Only now does the truth dawn on us that by far the greatest part of our spirit's activity remains unconscious and unfelt. But I suppose that these instincts which are here contending against one another understand very well how to make themselves felt by, and how to hurt, one another. This may well be the source of that sudden and violent exhaustion that afflicts all thinkers (it is the exhaustion on a battlefield). Indeed, there may be occasions of concealed heroism in our warring depths, but certainly nothing divine that eternally rests in itself, as Spinoza supposed. Conscious thinking, especially that of the philosopher, is the least vigorous and therefore also the relatively mildest and calmest form of thinking; and thus precisely philosophers are most apt to be led astray about the nature of knowledge.

One must learn to love.— This is what happens to us in music: First one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life. Then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity. Finally there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing; and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it. But that is what happens to us not only in music. That is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fair-mindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way; for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned.

“How many people know how to observe something? Of the few who do, how many observe themselves? Everybody is farthest away—from himself”; all who try the reins know this to their chagrin, and the maxim “know thyself!” addressed to human beings by a god, is almost malicious. That the case of self-observation is indeed as desperate as that is attested best of all by the manner in which almost everybody talks about the essence of moral actions—this quick, eager, convinced, and garrulous manner with its expression, its smile, and its obliging ardor! One seems to have the wish to say to you: “But my dear friend, precisely this is my specialty. You have directed your question to the one person who is entitled to answer you. As it happens, there is nothing about which I am as wise as about this. To come to the point: when a human being judges ‘this is right’ and then infers ‘therefore it must be done,’ and then proceeds to do what he has thus recognized as right and designated as necessary—then the essence of his action is moral.” But my friend, you are speaking of three actions instead of one. When you judge “this is right,” that is an action, too. Might it not be possible that one could judge in a moral and in an immoral manner? Why do you consider this, precisely this, right?

Because this is what my conscience tells me; and the voice of conscience is never immoral, for it alone determines what is to be moral.” But why do you listen to the voice of your conscience? And what gives you the right to consider such a judgment true and infallible? For this faith—is there no conscience for that? Have you never heard of an intellectual conscience? A conscience behind your “conscience”? Your judgment “this is right” has a pre-history in your instincts, likes, dislikes, experiences, and lack of experiences. “How did it originate there?” you must ask, and then also: “What is it that impels me to listen to it?” You can listen to its commands like a good soldier who hears his officer’s command. Or like a woman who loves the man who commands. Or like a flatterer and coward who is afraid of the commander. Or like a dunderhead who obeys because no objection occurs to him. In short, there are a hundred ways in which you can listen to your conscience. But that you take this or that judgment for the voice of conscience—in other words, that you feel something to be right—may be due to the fact that you have never thought much about yourself and simply have accepted blindly that what you had been told ever since your childhood was right; or it may be due to the fact that what you call your duty has up to this point brought you sustenance and honors—and you consider it “right” because it appears to you as your own “condition of existence” (and that you have a right to existence seems irrefutable to you). For all that, the firmness of your moral judgment could be evidence of your personal abjectness, of impersonality; your “moral strength” might have its source in your stubbornness—or in your inability to envisage new ideals. And, briefly, if you had thought more subtly, observed better, and learned more, you certainly would not go on calling this “duty” of yours and this “conscience” of yours duty and conscience. Your understanding of the manner in which moral judgments have originated would spoil these grand words for you, just as other grand words, like “sin” and “salvation of the soul” and “redemption”have been spoiled for you. — This term tickles my ear and makes me laugh despite your serious presence. It makes me think of the old Kant who had obtained the “thing in itself” by stealth—another very ridiculous thing!—and was punished for this when the “categorical imperative” crept stealthily into his heart and led him astray—back to “God,” “soul,” “freedom,” and “immortality,” like a fox who loses his way and goes astray back into his cage. Yet it had been his strength and cleverness that had broken open the cage! What? You admire the categorical imperative within you? This “firmness” of your so-called moral judgment? This “un-conditional” feeling that “here everyone must judge as I do”? Rather admire your selfishness at this point. And the blindness, pettiness, and frugality of your selfishness. For it is selfish to experience one’s own judgment as a universal law; and this selfishness is blind, petty, and frugal because it betrays that you have not yet discovered yourself nor created for yourself an ideal of your own, your very own—for that could never be somebody else's and much less that of all, all! Anyone who still judges “in this case everybody would have to act like this” has not yet taken five steps toward self-knowledge. Otherwise he would know that there neither are nor can be actions that are the same; that every action that has ever been done was done in an altogether unique and irretrievable way, and that this will be equally true of every future action; that all regulations about actions relate only to their coarse exterior (even the most inward and subtle regulations of all moralities so far); that these regulations may lead to some semblance of sameness, but really only to some semblance; that as one contemplates or looks back upon any action at all, it is and remains impenetrable; that our opinions about “good” and “noble” and “great” can never be proved true by our actions because every action is unknowable; that our opinions, valuations, and tables of what is good certainly belong among the most powerful levers in the involved mechanism of our actions, but that in any particular case the law of their mechanism is indemonstrable. Let us therefore limit ourselves to the purification of our opinions and valuations and to the creation of our own new tables of what is good, and let us stop brooding about the “moral value of our actions”! Yes, my friends, regarding all the moral chatter of some about others it is time to feel nauseous. Sitting in moral judgment should offend our taste. Let us leave such chatter and such bad taste to those who have nothing else to do but drag the past a few steps further through time and who never live in the present—which is to say the many, the great majority. We, however, want to become those we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves. To that end we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order to be able to be creators in this sense—while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been based on ignorance of physics or were constructed so as to contradict it. Therefore: long live physics! And even more so that which compels us to turn to physics—our honesty!

The will to suffer and those who feel pity.— Is it good for you yourselves to be above all full of pity? And is it good for those who suffer? But let us leave the first question unanswered for a moment. Our personal and profoundest suffering is incomprehensible and inaccessible to almost everyone; here we remain hidden from our neighbor, even if we eat from one pot. But whenever people notice that we suffer, they interpret our suffering super-Sly. It is the very essence of the emotion of pity that it strips away from the suffering of others whatever is distinctively personal. Our “benefactors” are, more than our enemies, people who make our worth and will smaller. When people try to benefit someone in distress, the intellectual frivolity with which those moved by pity assume the role of fate is for the most part outrageous; one simply knows nothing of the whole inner sequence and intricacies that are distress for me or for you. The whole economy of my soul and the balance effected by “distress,” the way new springs and needs break open, the way in which old wounds are healing, the way whole periods of the past are shed—all such things that may be involved in distress are of no concern to our dear pitying friends; they wish to help and have no thought of the personal necessity of distress, although terrors, deprivations, impoverishments, midnights, adventures, risks, and blunders are as necessary for me and for you as are their opposites. It never occurs to them that, to put it mystically, the path to one's own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one's own hell. No, the “religion of pity” (or “the heart”) commands them to help, and they believe that they have helped most when they have helped most quickly. If you, who adhere to this religion, have the same attitude toward yourselves that you have toward your fellow men; if you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you even for an hour and if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible distress way ahead of time; if you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that besides your religion of pity you also harbor another religion in your heart that is perhaps the mother of the religion of pity: the religion of comfortableness. How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable and benevolent people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together. But now back to the first question! How is it at all possible to keep to one’s own way? Constantly, some clamor or other calls us aside; rarely does our eye behold anything that does not require us to drop our own preoccupation instantly to help. I know, there are a hundred decent and praiseworthy ways of losing my own way, and they are truly highly “moral”! Indeed, those who now preach the morality of pity even take the view that precisely this and only this is moral—to lose one’s own way in order to come to the assistance of a neighbor. I know just as certainly that I only need to expose myself to the sight of some genuine distress and I am lost. And if a suffering friend said to me, “Look, I am about to die; please promise me to die with me,” I should promise it; and the sight of a small mountain tribe fighting for its liberty would persuade me to offer it my hand and my life—if for good reasons I may choose for once two bad examples. All such arousing of pity and calling for help is secretly seductive, for our “own way” is too hard and demanding and too remote from the love and gratitude of others, and we do not really mind escaping from it—and from our very own conscience—to flee into the conscience of the others and into the lovely temple of the “religion of pity.” As soon as any war breaks out anywhere, there also breaks out precisely among the noblest people a pleasure that, to be sure, is kept secret: Rapturously, they throw themselves into the new danger of death because the sacrifice for the fatherland seems to them to offer the long desired permission—to dodge their goal; war offers them a detour to suicide, but a detour with a good conscience. And while I shall keep silent about some points, I do not want to remain silent about my morality which says to me: Live in seclusion so that you can live for yourself. Live in ignorance about what seems most important to your age. Between yourself and today lay the skin of at least three centuries. And the clamor of today, the noise of wars and revolutions should be a mere murmur for you. You will also wish to help—but only those whose distress you understand entirely because they share with you one suffering and one hope—your friends—and only in the manner in which you help yourself. I want to make them bolder, more persevering, simpler, gayer. I want to teach them what is understood by so few today, least of all by these preachers of pity: to share not suffering but joy.

Vita femina— For seeing the ultimate beauties of a work, no knowledge or good will is sufficient; this requires the rarest of lucky accidents: The clouds that veil these peaks have to lift for once so that we see them glowing in the sun. Not only do we have to stand in precisely the right spot in order to see this, but the unveiling must have been accomplished by our own soul because it needed some external expression and parable, as if it were a matter of having something to hold on to and retain control of itself. But it is so rare for all of this to coincide that I am inclined to believe that the highest peaks of everything good, whether it be a work, a deed, humanity, or nature, have so far remained concealed and veiled from the great majority and even from the best human beings. But what does unveil itself for us, unveils itself for us once only. The Greeks, to be sure, prayed: “Everything beautiful twice and even three times!” They implored the gods with good reason, for ungodly reality gives us the beautiful either not at all or once only. I mean to say that the world is overfull of beautiful things but nevertheless poor, very poor when it comes to beautiful moments and unveilings of these things. But perhaps this is the most powerful magic of life: it is covered by a veil interwoven with gold, a veil of beautiful possibilities, sparkling with promise, resistance, bashfulness, mockery, pity, and seduction. Yes, life is a woman

we must overcome even the Greeks!

The greatest weight.— What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

Incipit tragoedia.— When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and Lake Urmi and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not tire of that. But at last his heart changed—and one rooming he rose with the dawn, stepped before the sun, and spoke to it thus:​“You great star, what would your happiness be if you did not have those for whom you shine? For ten years you have climbed up to my cave; You would have become weary of your light and of the journey had it not been for me and my eagle and my serpent; but we waited for you every morning, took your overflow from you, and blessed you for it. Behold, I am sick of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to receive it; I want to give away and distribute until the wise among men enjoy their folly once again and the poor their riches. For that I must descend to the depths, as you do in the evening when you go behind the sea and still bring light to the underworld, you over-rich star. Like you I must go under,73 as men put it to whom I wish to descend. Bless me then, you calm eye that can look without envy even upon an all too great happiness. Bless the cup that wants to overflow in order that the water may flow from it golden and carry the reflection of your rapture everywhere. Behold, this cup wants to become empty again, and Zarathustra wants to become man again,”—Thus Zarathustra began to go under.

The meaning of our cheerfulness.—The greatest recent event—that “God is dead,” that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable—is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. For the few at least, whose eyes—the suspicion in whose eyes is strong and subtle enough for this spectacle, some sun seems to have set and some ancient and profound trust has been turned into doubt; to them our old world must appear daily more like evening, more mistrustful, stranger, “older.” But in the main one may say: The event itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude’s capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet. Much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event really means—and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it; for example, the whole of our European morality. This long plenitude and sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm that is now impending—who could guess enough of it today to be compelled to play the teacher and advance proclaimer of this monstrous logic of terror, the prophet of a gloom and an eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth? Even we born guessers of riddles who are, as it were, waiting on the mountains, posted between today and tomorrow stretched in the contradiction between today and tomorrow, we firstlings and premature births of the coming century, to whom the shadows that must soon envelop Europe really should have appeared by now—why is it that even we look forward to the approaching gloom without any real sense of involvement and above all without any worry and fear for ourselves? Are we perhaps still too much under the impression of the initial consequences of this event—and these initial consequences, the consequences for ourselves, are quite the opposite of what one might perhaps expect: They are not at all sad and gloomy but rather like a new and scarcely describable kind of light, happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement, dawn” Indeed, we philosophers and “free spirits” feel, when we hear the news that “the old god is dead,” as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an “open sea.”

In science convictions have no rights of citizenship, as one says with good reason. Only when they decide to descend to the modesty of hypotheses, of a provisional experimental point of view, of a regulative fiction, they may be granted admission and even a certain value in the realm of knowledge—though always with the restriction that they remain under police supervision, under the police of mistrust. —But does this not mean, if you consider it more precisely, that a conviction may obtain admission to science only when it ceases to be a conviction? Would it not be the first step in the discipline of the scientific spirit that one would not permit oneself any more convictions? Probably this is so; only we still have to ask: To make it possible for this discipline to begin, must there not be some prior conviction—even one that is so commanding and unconditional that it sacrifices all other convictions to itself? We see that science also rests on a faith; there simply is no science “without presuppositions.” The question whether truth is needed must not only have been affirmed in advance, but affirmed to such a degree that the principle, the faith, the conviction finds expression: “Nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it everything else has only second-rate value.” This unconditional will to truth—what is it? Is it the will not to allow oneself to be deceived? Or is it the will not to deceive? For the will to truth could be interpreted in the second way, too—if only the special case “I do not want to deceive myself” is subsumed under the generalization “I do not want to deceive.” But why not deceive? But why not allow oneself to be deceived? Note that the reasons for the former principle belong to an altogether different realm from those for the second. One does not want to allow oneself to be deceived because one assumes that it is harmful, dangerous, calamitous to be deceived. In this sense, science would be a long-range prudence, a caution, a utility; but one could object in all fairness: How is that? Is wanting not to allow oneself to be deceived really less harmful, less dangerous, less calamitous? What do you know in advance of the character of existence to be able to decide whether the greater advantage is on the side of the unconditionally mistrustful or of the unconditionally trusting? But if both should be required, much trust as well as much mistrust, from where would science then be permitted to take its unconditional faith or conviction on which it rests, that truth is more important than any other thing, including every other conviction? Precisely this conviction could never have come into being if both truth and untruth constantly proved to be useful, which is the case. Thus—the faith in science, which after all exists undeniably, cannot owe its origin to such a calculus of utility; it must have originated in spite of the fact that the disutility and dangerousness of “the will to truth,” of “truth at any price” is proved to it constantly. “At any price”: how well we understand these words once we have offered and slaughtered one faith after another on this altar! Consequently, “will to truth” does not mean “I will not allow myself to be deceived” but— there is no alternative—“I will not deceive, not even myself”; and with that we stand on moral ground. For you only have to ask yourself carefully, "Why do you not want to deceive?" especially if it should seem— and it does seem! — as if life aimed at semblance, meaning error, deception, simulation, delusion, self-delusion, and when the great sweep of life has actually always shown itself to be on the side of the most unscrupulous polytropoi. Charitably interpreted, such a resolve might perhaps be a quixotism, a minor slightly mad enthusiasm; but it might also be something more serious, namely, a principle that is hostile to life and destructive.—“Will to truth”— that might be a concealed will to death. Thus the question “Why science?” leads back to the moral problem: Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are “not moral”? No doubt, those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm this “other world”—look, must they not by the same token negate its counterpart, this world, our world?—But you will have gathered what I am driving at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests — that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine. —But what if this should become more and more incredible, if nothing should prove to be divine any more unless it were error, blindness, the lie—if God himself should prove to be our most enduring lie?—

Morality as a problem.— The lack of personality always takes its revenge: A weakened, thin, extinguished personality that denies itself is no longer fit for anything good—least of all for philosophy. “Selflessness” has no value either in heaven or on earth. All great problems demand great love, and of that only strong, round, secure spirits who have a firm grip on themselves are capable. It makes the most telling difference whether a thinker has a personal relationship to his problems and finds in them his destiny, his distress, and his greatest happiness, or an “impersonal” one, meaning that he can do no better than to touch them and grasp them with the antennae of cold, curious thought. In the latter case nothing will come of it; that much one can promise in advance, for even if great problems should allow themselves to be grasped by them they would not permit frogs and weaklings to hold on to them; such has been their taste from time immemorial—a taste, incidentally, that they share with all redoubtable females.

nobody up to now has examined the value of that most famous of all medicines which is called morality; and the first step would be—for once to question it. Well then, precisely this is our task

Our question mark.— But you do not understand this? Indeed, people will have trouble understanding us. We are looking for words; perhaps we are also looking for ears. Who are we anyway? If we simply called ourselves, using an old expression, godless, or unbelievers, or perhaps immoralists, we do not believe that this would even come close to designating us: We are all three in such an advanced stage that one—that you, my curious friends—could never comprehend how we feel at this point. Ours is no longer the bitterness and passion of the person who has torn himself away and still feels compelled to turn his unbelief into a new belief, a purpose, a martyrdom. We have become cold, hard, and tough in the realization that the way of this world is anything but divine; even by human standards it is not rational, merciful, or just. We know it well, the world in which we live is ungodly, immoral, “inhuman”; we have interpreted it far too long in a false and mendacious way, in accordance with the wishes of our reverence, which is to say, according to our needs. For man is a reverent animal. But he is also mistrustful; and that the world is not worth what we thought it was, that is about as certain as anything of which our mistrust has finally got hold. The more mistrust, the more philosophy. We are far from claiming that the world is worth less; indeed it would seem laughable to us today if man were to insist on inventing values that were supposed to excel the value of the actual world. This is precisely what we have turned our backs on as an extravagant aberration of human vanity and unreason that for a long time was not recognized as such. It found its final expression in modern pessimism, and a more ancient and stronger expression in the teaching of Buddha; but it is part of Christianity also, if more doubtfully and ambiguously so but not for that reason any less seductive. The whole pose of “man against the world,” of man as a “world-negating” principle, of man as the measure of the value of things, as judge of the world who in the end places existence itself upon his scales and finds it wanting—the monstrous insipidity of this pose has finally come home to us and we are sick of it. We laugh as soon as we encounter the juxtaposition of “man and world,” separated by the sublime presumption of the little word “and.” But look, when we laugh like that, have we not simply carried the contempt for man one step further? And thus also pessimism, the contempt for that existence which is knowable by us? Have we not exposed ourselves to the suspicion of an opposition—an opposition between the world in which we were at home up to now with our reverences that perhaps made it possible for us to endure life, and another world that consists of us—an inexorable, fundamental, and deepest suspicion about ourselves that is more and more gaining worse and worse control of us Europeans and that could easily confront coming generations with the terrifying Either/Or: “Either abolish your reverences or—yourselves!” The latter would be nihilism; but would not the former also be—nihilism?—This is our question mark.

Believers and their need to believe.— How much one needs a faith in order to flourish, how much that is “firm” and that one does not wish to be shaken because one clings to it, that is a measure of the degree of one’s strength (or, to put the point more clearly, of one’s weakness). Christianity, it seems to me, is still needed by most people in old Europe even today; therefore it still finds believers. For this is how man is: An article of faith could be refuted before him a thousand times—if he needed it, he would consider it “true” again and again, in accordance with that famous “proof of strength” of which the Bible speaks.

Faith is always coveted most and needed most urgently where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive sign of sovereignty and strength. In other words, the less one knows bow to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely—a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. From this one might perhaps gather that the two world religions, Buddhism and Christianity, may have owed their origin and above all their sudden spread to a tremendous collapse and disease of the will. And that is what actually happened: both religions encountered a situation in which the will had become diseased, giving rise to a demand that had become utterly desperate for some “thou shall” Both religions taught fanaticism in ages in which the will had become exhausted, and thus they offered innumerable people some support, a new possibility of willing, some delight in willing. For fanaticism is the only “strength of the will” that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain, being a sort of hypnotism of the whole system of the senses and the intellect for the benefit of an excessive nourishment (hypertrophy) of a single point of view and feeling that henceforth becomes dominant—which the Christian calls his faith. Once a human being reaches the fundamental conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes “a believer.” Conversely, one could conceive of such a pleasure and power of self-determination, such a freedom of the will that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence.

Where the feeling finds expression “Now this has been proved and I am done with it,” it is generally the ancestor in the blood and instinct of the scholar who approves from his point of view “the finished job”; the faith in a proof is merely a symptom of what in a hard-working family has for ages been considered “good workmanship.” One example: When the sons of clerks and office workers of every kind, whose main task it has always been to bring order into diverse materials, to distribute it over different files, and in general to schematize things, become scholars, they manifest a tendency to consider a problem almost as solved when they have merely schematized it. There are philosophers who are fundamentally merely schematizers; for them the formal aspect of their fathers’ occupation has become content. The talent for classifications, for tables of categories, betrays something; one pays a price for being the child of one’s parents.

nothing is more democratic than logic; it is no respecter of persons and makes no distinction between crooked and straight noses. (Incidentally, Europe owes the Jews no small thanks for making people think more logically and for establishing cleanlier intellectual habits— nobody more so than the Germans who are a lamentably déraisonnable race who to this day are still in need of having their “heads washed” first. Wherever Jews have won influence they have taught men to make finer distinctions, more rigorous inferences, and to write in a more luminous and cleanly fashion; their task was ever to bring a people “to listen to raison.”)

That our modern natural sciences have become so thoroughly entangled in this Spinozistic dogma (most recently and worst of all, Darwinism with its incomprehensibly onesided doctrine of the “struggle for existence”) is probably due to the origins of most natural scientists: In this respect they belong to the “common people”; their ancestors were poor and undistinguished people who knew the difficulties of survival only too well at firsthand. The whole of English Darwinism breathes something like the musty air of English overpopulation, like the smell of the distress and overcrowding of small people. But a natural scientist should come out of his human nook; and in nature it is not conditions of distress that are dominant but overflow and squandering, even to the point of absurdity. The struggle for existence is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the will to life. The great and small struggle always revolves around superiority, around growth and expansion, around power—in accordance with the will to power which is the will of life.

The common people revere an altogether different human type when they construct their ideal of “the sage,” and they are amply entitled to lavish the best words and honors on this type—namely, the mild, serious and simple-minded, chaste priestly type and what is related to it. When the common people stand in awe of wisdom, their praise is intended for this type. And to whom would the common people have more reason to show gratitude than these men who belong to them and come from among them but as men who are consecrated, selected, and sacrificed for the welfare of the common people—they themselves believe that they are being sacrificed to God. It is to these men that the common people can spill their hearts with impunity, to them one can get rid of one’s secrets, worries, and worse matters (for as a human being “communicates himself” he gets rid of himself, and when one “has confessed” one forgets). It is a deep need that commands this; for the filth of the soul also requires sewers with pure and purifying waters in them, it requires rapid streams of love and strong, humble, pure hearts who are willing to perform such a service of non-public hygiene, sacrificing themselves—for this does involve a sacrifice, and a priest is and remains a human sacrifice. The common people attribute wisdom to such serious men of “faith” who have become quiet, meaning that they have acquired knowledge and are “certain” compared to one’s own uncertainty

Who would want to deny them this word and this reverence?—But it is also fair, conversely, when philosophers consider priests as still “common people” and not men of knowledge—above all, because they simply do not believe in any “men of knowledge”; in this belief, or rather superstition, they smell the “common people.” It was modesty that invented the word “philosopher” in Greece and left the magnificent overweening presumption in calling oneself wise to the actors of the spirit—the modesty of such monsters of pride and sovereignty as Pythagoras, as Plato—.

How morality is scarcely dispensable.— A naked human being is generally a shameful sight. I am speaking of us Europeans (and not even of female Europeans!). Suppose that, owing to some magician’s malice, the most cheerful company at table suddenly saw itself disrobed and undressed; I believe that not only their cheerfulness would vanish and that the strongest appetite would be discouraged—it seems that we Europeans simply cannot dispense with that masquerade which one calls clothes. Now consider the way “moral man” is dressed up, how he is veiled behind moral formulas and concepts of decency—the way our actions are benevolently concealed by the concepts of duty, virtue, sense of community, honorableness, self-denial—should the reasons for all this not be equally good? I am not suggesting that all this is meant to mask human malice and villainy—the wild animal in us; my idea is, on the contrary, that it is precisely as tame animals that we are a shameful sight and in need of the moral disguise, that the “inner man” in Europe is not by a long shot bad enough to show himself without shame (or to be beautiful). The European disguises himself with morality because he has become a sick, sickly, crippled animal that has good reasons for being “tame”; for he is almost an abortion, scarce half made up, weak, awkward. It is not the ferocity of the beast of prey that requires a moral disguise but the herd animal with its profound mediocrity, timidity, and boredom with itself. With morality the European dresses up—let us confess it!—to look nobler, more important, more respectable, “divine”—

On the origin of religions.— The distinctive invention of the founders of religions is, first: to posit a particular kind of life and everyday customs that have the effect of a disciplina voluntatis and at the same time abolish boredom—and then: to bestow on this life style an interpretation that makes it appear to be illuminated by the highest value so that this life style becomes something for which one fights and under certain circumstances sacrifices one’s life. Actually, the second of these two inventions is more essential. The first, the way of life, was usually there before, but alongside other ways of life and without any sense of its special value. The significance and originality of the founder of a religion usually consists of his seeing it, selecting it, and guessing for the first time to what use it can be put, how it can be interpreted. Jesus (or Paul), for example, found how small people lived in the Roman province—a modest, virtuous, pinched life. He offered an exegesis, he read the highest meaning and value into it—and with this also the courage to despise every other way of life, the quiet Herrnhut fanaticism, the secret, subterranean self-confidence that grows and grows and finally is ready “to overcome the world” (that is, Rome and the upper classes throughout the Empire). Buddha likewise found a human type, in his case scattered through all classes and social strata of his people, that was good and good-natured from inertia (and above all inoffensive); also from inertia, this type lived abstinently, almost without needs. He understood how such a human type must inevitably roll, with its whole vis inertiae, into a faith that promises to prevent the recurrence of terrestrial troubles (meaning work and action in general). To understand that was his genius. To become the founder of a religion one must be psychologically infallible in one’s knowledge of a certain average type of souls who have not yet recognized that they belong together. It is he that brings them together. The founding of a religion therefore always becomes a long festival of recognition.—

The problem of consciousness (more precisely, of becoming conscious of something) confronts us only when we begin to comprehend how we could dispense with it; and now physiology and the history of animals place us at the beginning of such comprehension (it took them two centuries to catch up with Leibniz’s suspicion which soared ahead). For we could think, feel, will, and remember, and we could also “act” in every sense of that word, and yet none of all this would have to “enter our consciousness” (as one says metaphorically). The whole of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in a mirror. Even now, for that matter, by far the greatest portion of our life actually takes place without this mirror effect; and this is true even of our thinking, feeling, and willing life, however offensive this may sound to older philosophers. For what purpose, then, any consciousness at all when it is in the main superfluous? Now, if you are willing to listen to my answer and the perhaps extravagant surmise that it involves, it seems to me as if the subtlety and strength of consciousness always were proportionate to a man’s (or animal’s) capacity for communication, and as if this capacity in turn were proportionate to the need for communication. But this last point is not to be understood as if the individual human being who happens to be a master in communicating and making understandable his needs must also be most dependent on others in his needs. But it does seem to me as if it were that way when we consider whole races and chains of generations; Where need and distress have forced men for a long time to communicate and to understand each other quickly and subtly, the ultimate result is an excess of this strength and art of communication-as it were, a capacity that has gradually been accumulated and now waits for an heir who might squander it. (Those who are called artists are these heirs; so are orators, preachers, writers—all of them people who always come at the end of a long chain, “late born” every one of them in the best sense of that word and, as I have said, by their nature squanderers.) Supposing that this observation is correct, I may now proceed to the surmise that consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication; that from the start it was needed and useful only between human beings (particularly between those who commanded and those who obeyed); and that it also developed only in proportion to the degree of this utility. Consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings; it is only as such that it had to develop; a solitary human being who lived like a beast of prey would not have needed it. That our actions, thoughts, feelings, and movements enter our own consciousness—at least a part of them—that is the result of a “must” that for a terribly long time lorded it over man. As the most endangered animal, he needed help and protection, he needed his peers, he had to learn to express his distress and to make himself understood; and for all of this he needed “consciousness” first of all, he needed to “know” himself what distressed him, he needed to “know” how he felt, he needed to “know” what he thought. For, to say it once more: Man, like every living being, thinks continually without knowing it; the thinking that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of all this—the most superficial and worst part—for only this conscious thinking takes the form of words, which is to say signs of communication, and this fact uncovers the origin of consciousness. In brief, the development of language and the development of consciousness (not of reason but merely of the way reason enters consciousness) go hand in hand. Add to this that not only language serves as a bridge between human beings but also a mien, a pressure, a gesture. The emergence of our sense impressions into our own consciousness, the ability to fix them and, as it were, exhibit them externally, increased proportionately with the need to communicate them to others by means of signs. The human being inventing signs is at the same time the human being who becomes ever more keenly conscious of himself. It was only as a social animal that man acquired self-consciousness—which he is still in the process of doing, more and more. My idea is, as you see, that consciousness does not really belong to man’s individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature; that, as follows from this, it has developed subtlety only insofar as this is required by social or herd utility. Consequently, given the best will in the world to understand ourselves as individually as possible, “to know ourselves,” each of us will always succeed in becoming conscious only of what is not individual but “average.” Our thoughts themselves are continually governed by the character of consciousness—by the “genius of the species” that commands it—and translated back into the perspective of the herd. Fundamentally, all our actions are altogether incomparably personal, unique, and infinitely individual; there is no doubt of that. But as soon as we translate them into consciousness they no longer seem to be. This is the essence of phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand them: Owing to the nature of animal consciousness, the world of which we can become conscious is only a surface-and sign-world, a world that is made common and meaner; whatever becomes conscious becomes by the same token shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, herd signal; all becoming conscious involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction to superficialities, and generalization. Ultimately, the growth of consciousness becomes a danger; and anyone who lives among the most conscious Europeans even knows that it is a disease. You will guess that it is not the opposition of subject and object that concerns me here: This distinction I leave to the epistemologists who have become entangled in the snares of grammar (the metaphysics of the people). It is even less the opposition of "thing-in-itself" and appearance; for we do not “know” nearly enough to be entitled to any such distinction. We simply lack any organ for knowledge, for “truth”: we “know” (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called “utility” is ultimately also a mere belief, something imaginary, and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish some day.

The origin of our concept of “knowledge.”— I take this explanation from the street. I heard one of the common people say, “he knew me right away.” Then I asked myself: What is it that the common people take for knowledge? What do they want when they want “knowledge”? Nothing more than this: Something strange is to be reduced to something familiar. And we philosophers—have we really meant more than this when we have spoken of knowledge? What is familiar means what we are used to so that we no longer marvel at it, our everyday, some rule in which we are stuck, anything at all in which we feel at home. Look, isn't our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover under everything strange, unusual, and questionable something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who attain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security? Here is a philosopher who fancied that the world was “known” when he had reduced it to the “idea.” Was it not because the “idea” was so familiar to him and he was so well used to it—because he hardly was afraid of the “idea” any more? How easily these men of knowledge are satisfied! Just have a look at their principles and their solutions of the world riddle with this in mind! When they find something in things—under them, or behind them—that is unfortunately quite familiar to us, such as our multiplication tables or our logic, or our willing and desiring—how happy they are right away! For “what is familiar is known”: on this they are agreed. Even the most cautious among them suppose that what is familiar is at least more easily knowable than what is strange, and that, for example, sound method demands that we start from the “inner world,” from the “facts of consciousness,” because this world is more familiar to us, Error of errors! What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to “know”—that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange, as distant, as “outside us.” The great certainty of the natural sciences in comparison with psychology and the critique of the elements of consciousness—one might almost say, with the unnatural sciences—is due precisely to the fact that they choose for an object what is not-strange.

How things will become ever more “artistic” in Europe.— Even today, in our time of transition when so many factors cease to compel men, the care to make a living still compels almost all male Europeans to adopt a particular role, their so-called occupation. A few retain the freedom, a merely apparent freedom, to choose this role for themselves; for most men it is chosen. The result is rather strange. As they attain a more advanced age, almost all Europeans confound themselves with their role; they become the victims of their own “good performance”; they themselves have forgotten how much accidents, moods, and caprice disposed of them when the question of their “vocation” was decided—and how many other roles they might perhaps have been able to play; for now it is too late. Considered more deeply, the role has actually become character; and art, nature. There have been ages when men believed with rigid confidence, even with piety, m their predestination for precisely this occupation, precisely this way of earning a living, and simply refused to acknowledge the element of accident, role, and caprice. With the help of this faith, classes, guilds, and hereditary trade privileges managed to erect those monsters of social pyramids that distinguish the Middle Ages and to whose credit one can adduce at least one thing: durability (and duration is a first-rate value on earth). But there are opposite ages, really democratic, where people give up this faith, and a certain cocky faith and opposite point of view advance more and more into the foreground—the Athenian faith that first becomes noticeable in the Periclean age, the faith of the Americans today that is more and more becoming the European faith as well: The individual becomes convinced that he can do just about everything and can manage almost any role, and everybody experiments with himself, improvises, makes new experiments, enjoys his experiments; and all nature ceases and becomes art. After accepting this role faith—an artist’s faith, if you will—the Greeks, as is well known, went step for step through a rather odd metamorphosis that does not merit imitation in all respects: They really became actors. As such they enchanted and overcame all the world and finally even “the power that had overcome the world” (for the Graeculus histrio vanquished Rome, and not, as innocents usually say, Greek culture). But what I fear, what is so palpable that today one could grasp it with one’s hands, if one felt like grasping it, is that we modem men are even now pretty far along on the same road; and whenever a human being begins to discover how he is playing a role and how he can be an actor, he becomes an actor. With this a new human flora and fauna emerge that could never have grown in more solid and limited ages; or at least they would be left there “below” under the ban and suspicion of lacking honor. It is thus that the maddest and most interesting ages of history always emerge, when the “actors,” all kinds of actors, become the real masters. As this happens, another human type is disadvantaged more and more and finally made impossible; above all, the great “architects”: The strength to build becomes paralyzed; the courage to make plans that encompass the distant future is discouraged; those with a genius for organization become scarce: who would still dare to undertake projects that would require thousands of years for their completion? For what is dying out is the fundamental faith that would enable us to calculate, to promise, to anticipate the future in plans of such scope, and to sacrifice the future to them—namely, the faith that man has value and meaning only insofar as he is a stone in a great edifice; and to that end he must be solid first of all, a “stone”— and above all not an actor! To say it briefly (for a long time people will still keep silent about it): What will not be built any more henceforth, and cannot be built any more, is—a society in the old sense of that word; to build that, everything is lacking, above all the material. All of us are no longer material for a society; this is a truth for which the time has come. It is a matter of indifference to me that at present the most myopic, perhaps most honest, but at any rate noisiest human type that we have today, our good socialists, believe, hope, dream, and above all shout and write almost the opposite. Even now one reads their slogan for the future “free society” on all tables and walls. Free society? Yes, yes! But surely you know, gentlemen, what is required for building that? Wooden iron! The well-known wooden iron. And it must not even be wooden.

without Hegel there could have been no Darwin.

the decline of the faith in the Christian god, the triumph of scientific atheism, is a generally European event in which all races had their share and for which all deserve credit and honor

Let us not forget in the end what a church is, as opposed to any “state.” A church is above all a structure for ruling that secures the highest rank for the more spiritual human beings and that believes in the power of spirituality to the extent of forbidding itself the use of all the cruder instruments of force; and on this score alone the church is under all circumstances a nobler institution than the state.

The revenge against the spirit and other ulterior motives88 of morality.— Morality—where do you suppose that it finds its most dangerous and insidious advocates? There is a human being who has turned out badly, who does not have enough spirit to be able to enjoy it but just enough education to realize this; he is bored, disgusted, and despises himself; having inherited some money, he is deprived even of the last comfort, “the blessings of work,” self-forgetfulness in “daily labor.” Such a person who is fundamentally ashamed of his existence—perhaps he also harbors a few little vices—and on the other hand cannot keep himself from becoming more and more spoiled and irritable by reading books to which he is not entitled or by associating with more spiritual company than he can digest; such a human being who has become poisoned through and through—for spirit becomes poison, education becomes poison, possessions become poison, solitude becomes poison for those who have turned out badly in this way—eventually ends up in a state of habitual revenge, will to revenge.” What do you suppose he finds necessary, absolutely necessary, to give himself in his own eyes the appearance of superiority over more spiritual people and to attain the pleasure of an accomplished revenge at least in his imagination? Always morality; you can bet on that. Always big moral words. Always the rub-a-dub of justice, wisdom, holiness, virtue. Always the Stoicism of gesture (how well Stoicism conceals what one lacks!). Always the cloak of prudent silence, of affability, of mildness, and whatever may be the names of all the other idealistic cloaks in which incurable self-despisers, as well as the incurably vain, strut about. Do not misunderstand me: Among such born enemies of the spirit there comes into being occasionally the rare piece of humanity that the common people revere, using such names as saint and sage. It is from among men of this sort that those monsters of morality come who make noise, who make history—St. Augustine is one of them. Fear of the spirit, revenge against the spirit—how often these propelling vices have become the roots of virtues! Even nothing less than virtues. And a confidential question: Even the claim that they possessed wisdom, which has been made here and there on earth by philosophers, the maddest and most immodest of all claims—has it not always been to date, in India as well as in Greece, a screen above all? At times perhaps a screen chosen with pedagogical intent, which hallows so many lies; one has a tender regard for those still in the process of becoming, of growing—for disciples, who must often be defended against themselves by means of faith in a person ( by means of an error). Much more often, however, it is a screen behind which the philosopher saves himself because he has become weary, old, cold, hard—as a premonition that the end is near, like the prudence animals have before they die: they go off by themselves, become still, choose solitude, hide in caves, and become wise. What? Wisdom as a screen behind which the philosopher hides from—spirit?—

Two kinds of causes that are often confounded.— This seems to me to be one of my most essential steps and advances: I have learned to distinguish the cause of acting from the cause of acting in a particular way, in a particular direction, with a particular goal. The first kind of cause is a quantum of dammed-up energy that is waiting to be used up somehow, for something, while the second kind is, compared to this energy, something quite insignificant, for the most part a little accident in accordance with which this quantum “discharges” itself in one particular way—a match versus a ton of powder. Among these little accidents and “matches” I include so-called “purposes” as well as the even much more so-called “vocations”: They are relatively random, arbitrary, almost indifferent in relation to the tremendous quantum of energy that presses, as I have said, to be used up somehow. The usual view is different: People are accustomed to consider the goal (purposes, vocations, etc.) as the driving force, in keeping with a very ancient error; but it is merely the directing force—one has mistaken the helmsman for the steam. And not even always the helmsman, the directing force. Is the “goal,” the “purpose” not often enough a beautifying pretext, a self-deception of vanity after the event that does not want to acknowledge that the ship is following the current into which it has entered accidentally? that it “wills” to go that way because it— must? that is has a direction to be sure, but—no helmsman at all? We still need a critique of the concept of “purpose.”

How each sex has its own prejudice about love.— Despite all the concessions that I am willing to make to the prejudice in favor of monogamy, I will never admit the claim that man and woman have equal rights in love; these do not exist. For man and woman have different conceptions of love; and it is one of the conditions of love in both sexes that neither sex presupposes the same feeling and the same concept of “love” in the other. What woman means by love is clear enough: total devotion (not mere surrender) with soul and body, without any consideration or reserve, rather with shame and horror at the thought of a devotion that might be subject to special clauses or conditions. In this absence of conditions her love is a faith; woman has no other faith. Man, when he loves a woman, wants precisely this love from her and is thus himself as far as can be from the presupposition of feminine love, Supposing, however, that there should also be men to whom the desire for total devotion is not alien; well, then they simply are—not men. A man who loves like a woman becomes a slave; while a woman who loves like a woman becomes a more perfect, woman. A woman’s passion in its unconditional renunciation of rights of her own presupposes precisely that on the other side there is no equal pathos, no equal will to renunciation; for if both partners felt impelled by love to renounce themselves, we should then get—I do not know what; perhaps an empty space? Woman wants to be taken and accepted as a possession, wants to be absorbed into the concept of possession, possessed. Consequently, she wants someone who takes, who does not give himself or give himself away; on the contrary, he is supposed to become richer in “himself”—through the accretion of strength, happiness, and faith given him by the woman who gives herself. Woman gives herself away, man acquires more—I do not see how one can get around this natural opposition by means of social contracts or with the best will in the world to be just, desirable as it may be not to remind oneself constantly how harsh, terrible, enigmatic, and immoral this antagonism is. For love, thought of in its entirety as great and full, is nature, and being nature it is in all eternity something “immoral.” Faithfulness is accordingly included in woman’s love; it follows from the definition. In man, it can easily develop in the wake of his love, perhaps as gratitude or as an idiosyncratic taste and so-called elective affinity; but it is not an essential element of his love—so definitely not that one might almost speak with some justification of a natural counterplay of love and faithfulness in man. For his love consists of wanting to have and not of renunciation and giving away; but wanting to have always comes to an end with having. It is actually man’s more refined and suspicious lust for possession that rarely admits his “having,” and then only late, and thus permits his love to persist. It is even possible for his love to increase after the surrender; he will not readily concede that a woman should have nothing more to give him.

The hermit speaks.— The art of associating with people depends essentially on an aptitude (requiring long practice) for accepting and eating a meal in whose cuisine one has no confidence. If you come to the table ravenously hungry, it is all very easy (“the worst company can be felt,” as Mephistopheles says); but one does not have this ravenous hunger when one needs it. How hard it is to digest one’s fellow men! First principle: to summon one’s courage as in misfortune, to fall to boldly, to admire oneself in the process, to grit one’s teeth on one’s repugnance, and to swallow one’s nausea. Second principle; to “improve” one’s fellow man, by praise, for example, so that he begins to sweat out his delight in himself, or to grab a corner of his good or “interesting” qualities and to pull at it until the whole virtue comes out and one can hide one’s fellow man in its folds. Third principle: autosuggestion. To fix one’s eyes upon the object of association as if it were a glass button, until one ceases to feel any pleasure or displeasure and goes to sleep unnoticed, grows rigid, and acquires poise—a home remedy amply tested in marriage and friendship and praised as indispensable, but not yet formulated scientifically. Its popular name is—patience.

Faced with a scholarly book.— We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors—walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful. Our first questions about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are: Can they walk? Even more, can they dance?” We read rarely, but not worse on that account. How quickly we guess how someone has come by his ideas; whether it was while sitting in front of his inkwell, with a pinched belly, his head bowed low over the paper—in which case we are quickly finished with his book, too! Cramped intestines betray themselves—you can bet on that—no less than closet air, closet ceilings, closet narrowness.—This was what I felt just now as I closed a very decent scholarly book—gratefully, very gratefully, but also with a sense of relief. Almost always the books of scholars are somehow oppressive, oppressed; the “specialist” emerges somewhere—his zeal, his seriousness, his fury, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunched back; every specialist has his hunched back. Every scholarly book also mirrors a soul that has become crooked; every craft makes crooked. You see the friends of your youth again after they have taken possession of their specialty—and always the opposite has happened, too! Always they themselves are now possessed by it and obsessed with it. Grown into their nook, crumpled beyond recognition, unfree, deprived of their balance, emaciated and angular all over except for one place where they are downright rotund—one feels moved and falls silent when one sees them again this way. Every craft, even if it should have a golden floor, has a leaden ceiling over it that presses and presses down upon the soul until that becomes queer and crooked. Nothing can be done about that. Let nobody suppose that one could possibly avoid such crippling by some artifice of education. On this earth one pays dearly for every kind of mastery, and perhaps one pays too dearly for everything. For having a specialty one pays by also being the victim of this specialty. But you would have it otherwise—cheaper and fairer and above all more comfortable—isn’t that right, my dear contemporaries? Well then, but in that case you also immediately get something else: instead of the craftsman and master, the “man of letters,” the dexterous, “polydexterous” man of letters who, to be sure, lacks the hunched back—not counting the posture he assumes before you, being the salesman of the spirit and the “carrier” of culture—the man of letters who really is nothing but “represents” almost everything, playing and “substituting” for the expert, and taking it upon himself in all modesty to get himself paid, honored, and celebrated in place of the expert. No, my scholarly friends, I bless you even for your hunched backs. And for despising, as I do, the “men of letters” and culture parasites. And for not knowing how to make a business of the spirit. And for having opinions that cannot be translated into financial values. And for not representing anything that you are not. And because your sole aim is to become masters of your craft, with reverence for every kind of mastery and competence, and with uncompromising opposition to everything that is semblance, half-genuine, dressed up, virtuosolike, demagogical, or histrionic in littieris et artibus—to everything that cannot prove to you its unconditional probity in discipline and prior training. (Even genius does not compensate for such a deficiency, however much it may deceive people about it. This becomes clear to anyone who has ever watched our most gifted painters and musicians from nearby. All of them, with scarcely any exception, know how to use cunning inventions of manners, of makeshift devices, and even of principles to give themselves after the event an artificial semblance of such probity, of such solidity of training and culture—without, of course, managing to deceive themselves, without silencing for good their own bad conscience. For you surely know that all great modern artists suffer from a guilty conscience.)

My melancholy wants to rest in the hiding places and abysses of perfection: that is why I need music

I once made this clear to an upright Wagnerian, not without trouble; and I had reasons for adding: “Do be a little more honest with yourself! After all, we are not in the theater. In the theater one is honest only in the mass; as an individual one lies, one lies to oneself. One leaves oneself at home when one goes to the theater, one renounces the right to one’s own tongue and choice, to one’s taste, even to one’s courage as one has it and exercises it between one’s own four walls against both God and man. No one brings along the finest senses of his art to the theater, nor does the artist who works for the theater. There one is common people, audience, herd, female, pharisee, voting cattle, democrat, neighbor, fellow man; there even the most personal conscience is vanquished by the leveling magic of the great number; there stupidity has the effect of lasciviousness and contagion; the neighbor reigns, one becomes a mere neighbor.” (I forgot to mention how my enlightened Wagnerian replied to these physiological objections: “Then you really are merely not healthy enough for our music?”)

Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an aid in the service of growing and struggling life; they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first, those who suffer from the over-fullness of life—they want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of life, a tragic insight—and then those who suffer from the impoverishment of life and seek rest, stillness, calm seas, redemption from themselves through art and knowledge, or intoxication, convulsions, anaesthesia, and madness

logic calms and gives confidence—in short, a certain warm narrowness that keeps away fear and encloses one in optimistic horizons.

The desire for destruction, change, and becoming can be an expression of an overflowing energy that is pregnant with future (my term for this is, as is known, “Dionysian”); but it can also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, disinherited, and underprivileged, who destroy, must destroy, because what exists, indeed all existence, all being, outrages and provokes them. To understand this feeling, consider our anarchists closely. The will to immortalize also requires a dual interpretation. It can be prompted, first, by gratitude and love; art with this origin will always be an art of apotheoses, perhaps dithyrambic like Rubens, or blissfully mocking like Hafiz, or bright and gracious like Goethe, spreading a Homeric light and glory over all things. But it can also be the tyrannic will of one who suffers deeply, who struggles, is tormented, and would like to turn what is most personal, singular, and narrow, the real idiosyncrasy of his suffering, into a binding law and compulsion—one who, as it were, revenges himself on all things by forcing his own image, the image of his torture, on them, branding them with it. This last version is romantic pessimism in its most expressive form, whether it be Schopenhauer’s philosophy of will or Wagner’s music—romantic pessimism, the last great event in the fate of our culture.

We are misidentified—because we ourselves keep growing, keep changing, we shed our old bark, we shed our skins every spring, we keep becoming younger, fuller of future, taller, stronger, we push our roots ever more powerfully into the depths—into evil—while at die same time we embrace the heavens ever more lovingly, more broadly, imbibing their light ever more thirstily with all our twigs and leaves. Like trees we grow—this is hard to understand, as is all of life—not in one place only but everywhere, not in one direction but equally upward and outward and inward and downward; our energy is at work simultaneously in the trunk, branches, and roots; we are no longer free to do only one particular thing, to be only one particular thing. This is our fate, as I have said; we grow in height, and even if this should be our fatality—for we dwell ever closer to the lightning—well, we do not on that account honor it less; it remains that which we do not wish to share, to make public—the fatality of the heights, our fatality.

Having “wax in one’s ears” was then almost a condition of philosophizing; a real philosopher no longer listened to life insofar as life is music; he denied the music of life—it is an ancient philosopher’s superstition that all music is sirens’ music. We today are inclined to make the opposite judgment (which actually could be equally wrong), namely that ideas are worse seductresses than out senses, for all their cold and anemic appearance, and not even In spite of this appearance: they have always lived on the “blood” of the philosopher, they always consumed his senses and even, if you will believe us, his “heart.” These old philosophers were heartless; philosophizing was always a kind of vampirism

one should not wish to divest existence of its rich ambiguity: that is a dictate of good taste, gentlemen, the taste of reverence for everything that lies beyond your horizon. That the only justifiable interpretation of the world should be one in which you are justified because one can continue to work and do research scientifically in your sense (you really mean, mechanistically?)—an interpretation that permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, and touching, and nothing more—that is a crudity and naiveté, assuming that it is not a mental illness, an idiocy.

Would it not be rather probable that, conversely, precisely the most superficial and external aspect of existence—what is most apparent, its skin and sensualization—would be grasped first—and might even be the only thing that allowed itself to be grasped? A “scientific” interpretation of the world, as you understand it, might therefore still be one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in meaning. This thought is intended for the ears and consciences of our mechanists who nowadays like to pass as philosophers and insist that mechanics is the doctrine of the first and last laws on which all existence must be based as on a ground floor. But an essentially mechanical world would be an essentially meaningless world. Assuming that one estimated the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas: how absurd would such a “scientific” estimation of music be! What would one have comprehended, understood, grasped of it? Nothing, really nothing of what is “music” in it!

who would feel inclined immediately to deify again after the old manner this monster of an unknown world? And to worship the unknown henceforth as “the Unknown One”? Alas, too many ungodly possibilities of interpretation are included in the unknown, too much devilry, stupidity, and foolishness of interpretation—even our own human, all too human folly, which we know.

Why we look like Epicureans.— We are cautious, we modern men, about ultimate convictions. Our mistrust lies in wait for the enchantments and deceptions of the conscience that are involved in every strong faith,, every unconditional Yes and No. How is this to be explained? Perhaps what is to be found here is largely the care of the “burned child,” of the disappointed idealist; but there is also another, superior component: the jubilant curiosity of one who formerly stood in his corner and was driven to despair by his corner, and now delights and luxuriates in the opposite of a corner, in the boundless, in what is “free as such.” Thus an almost Epicurean bent for knowledge develops that will not easily Jet go of the questionable character of things; also an aversion to big moral words and gestures; a taste that rejects all crude, four-square opposites and is proudly conscious of its practice in having reservations. For this constitutes our pride, this slight tightening of the reins as our urge for certainty races ahead, this self-control of the rider during his wildest rides; for we still ride mad and fiery horses, and when we hesitate it is least of all danger that makes us hesitate.

We “conserve” nothing; neither do we want to return to any past periods; we are not by any means “liberal”; we do not work for "progress"; we do not need to plug up our ears against the sirens who in the market place sing of the future: their song about “equal rights,” “a free society,” “no more masters and no servants” has no allure for us. We simply do not consider it desirable that a realm of justice and concord should be established on earth (because it would certainly be the realm of the deepest leveling and chinoiserie); we are delighted with all who love, as we do, danger, war, and adventures, who refuse to compromise, to be captured, reconciled, and castrated; we count ourselves among conquerors; we think about the necessity for new orders, also for a new slavery—for every strengthening and enhancement of the human type also involves a new kind of enslavement

We who are homeless are too manifold and mixed racially and in our descent, being “modern men,” and consequently do not feel tempted to participate in the mendacious racial self-admiration and racial indecency that parades in Germany today as a sign of a German way of thinking and that is doubly false and obscene among the people of the “historical sense.” We are, in one word—and let this be our word of honor—good Europeans, the heirs of Europe, the rich, oversupplied, but also overly obligated heirs of thousands of years of European spirit. As such, we have also outgrown Christianity and are averse to it—precisely because we have grown out of it, because our ancestors were Christians who in their Christianity were uncompromisingly upright: for their faith they willingly sacrificed possessions and position, blood and fatherland. We—do the same. For what? For our unbelief? For every kind of unbelief? No, you know better than that, friends! The hidden Yes in you is stronger than all Nos and Maybes that afflict you and your age like a disease; and when you have to embark on the sea, you emigrants, you, too, are compelled to this by - a faith!

And become bright again.”— We, openhanded and rich in spirit, standing by the road like open wells with no intention to fend off anyone who feels like drawing from us—we unfortunately do not know how to defend ourselves where we want to: we have no way of preventing people from darkening us: the time in which we live throws into us what is most time-bound; its dirty birds drop their filth into us; boys their gew-gaws; and exhausted wanderers who come to us to rest, their little and large miseries. But we shall do what we have always done: whatever one casts into us, we take down into our depth—for we are deep, we do not forget—and become bright again

The wanderer” speaks.— If one would like to see our European morality for once as it looks from a distance, and if one would like to measure it against other moralities, past and future, then one has to proceed like a wanderer who wants to know how high the towers in a town are: he leaves the town. “Thoughts about moral prejudices,” if they are not meant to be prejudices about prejudices, presuppose a position outside morality, some point beyond good and evil to which one has to rise, climb, or fly—and in the present case at least a point beyond our good and evil, a freedom from, everything “European,” by which I mean the sum of the imperious value judgments that have become part of our flesh and blood. That one wants to go precisely out there, up there, may be a minor madness, a peculiar and unreasonable “you must”—for we seekers for knowledge also have our idiosyncrasies of “unfree will”—the question is whether one really can get up there. This may depend on manifold conditions. Tn the main the question is how light or heavy we are—the problem of our “specific gravity.” One has to be very light to drive one’s will to knowledge into such a distance and, as it were, beyond one’s time, to create for oneself eyes to survey millennia and, moreover, clear skies in these eyes. One must have liberated oneself from many things that oppress, inhibit, hold down, and make heavy precisely us Europeans today. The human being of such a beyond who wants to behold the supreme measures of value of his time must first of all “overcome” this time in himself—this is the test of his strength—and consequently not only his time but also his prior aversion and contradiction against this time, his suffering from this time, his un-timeliness, his romanticism.

On the question of being understandable.— One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood. It is not by any means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone finds it impossible to understand: perhaps that was part of the author’s intention—he did not want to be understood by just “anybody.” All the nobler spirits and tastes select their audience when they wish to communicate; and choosing that, one at the same time erects barriers against “the others.” All the more subtle laws of any style have their origin at this point: they at the same time keep away, create a distance, forbid “entrance,” understanding, as said above—while they open the ears of those whose ears are related to ours. And let me say this among ourselves and about my own case: I don’t want either my ignorance or the liveliness of my temperament to keep me from being understandable for you, my friends—not the liveliness, however much it compels me to tackle a matter swiftly to tackle it at all. For I approach deep problems like cold baths: quickly into them and quickly out again. That one does not get to the depths that way, not deep enough down, is the superstition of those afraid of the water, the enemies of cold water; they speak without experience. The freezing cold makes one swift.

our task is and remains above all not to mistake ourselves for others.

Reason is businesslike—a flood That brings us too soon to our aim.

“In the South On a crooked branch I sway And rock my weariness to rest. A bird invited me to stay, And I sit in a bird-built nest. But where am I? Far, far away. The white sea stretches, fast asleep, A crimson sail, bucolic scents, A rock, fig trees, the harbor's sweep, Idyls around me, bleating sheep; Accept me, southern innocence! Step upon step—this heavy stride Is German, not life—a disease; To lift me up, I asked the breeze, And with the birds I learned to glide; Southward I flew, across the seas. Reason is businesslike—a flood That brings us too soon to our aim. In flight I rose above the mud; Now I have courage, sap, and blood For a new life, for a new game. To think in solitude is wise; Singing in solitude is silly. Hence I shall sing, dear birds, your praise, And you shall listen, willy-nilly, You wicked, dear birds, to my lays.

“So young, so false, so full of schemes, You seem to live in loving dreams, Attuned to all the games of youth. Up north—embarrassing to tell— I loved a creepy ancient belle: The name of this old hag was Truth.”

“with another sin One wipes old sins away.” Excerpt From The Gay Science Friedrich Nietzsche & Walter Kaufmann https://books.apple.com/ro/book/the-gay-science/id923207001 This material may be protected by copyright.

For a psychologist there are few questions that are as attractive as that concerning the relation of health and philosophy, and if he should himself become ill, he will bring all of his scientific curiosity into his illness. For assuming that one is a person, one necessarily also has the philosophy that belongs to that person; but there is a big difference. In some it is their deprivations that philosophize; in others, their riches and strengths. The former need their philosophy, whether it be as a prop, a sedative, medicine, redemption, elevation, or self-alienation. For the latter it is merely a beautiful luxury—in the best cases, the voluptuousness of a triumphant gratitude that eventually still has to inscribe itself in cosmic letters on the heaven of concepts. “But in the former case, which is more common, when it is distress that philosophizes, as is the case with all sick thinkers—and perhaps sick thinkers are more numerous in the history of philosophy—what will become of the thought itself when it is subjected to the pressure of sickness? This is the question that concerns the psychologist, and here an experiment is possible.

“Every philosophy that ranks peace above war, every ethic with a negative definition of happiness, every metaphysics and physics that knows some finale, some final state of some sort, every predominantly aesthetic or religious craving for some Apart, Beyond, Outside, Above, permits the question whether it was not sickness that inspired the philosopher. The unconscious disguise of physiological needs under the cloaks of the objective, ideal, purely spiritual goes to frightening lengths—and often I have asked myself whether, taking a large view, philosophy has not been merely an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body. You see that I do not want to take leave ungratefully from that time of severe sickness whose profits I have not yet exhausted even today. I am very conscious of the advantages that my fickle health gives me over all robust squares. A philosopher who has traversed many kinds of health, and keeps traversing them, has passed through an equal number of philosophies; he simply cannot keep from transposing his states every time into the most spiritual form and distance; this art of transfiguration is philosophy. We philosophers are not free to divide body from soul as the people do; we are even less free to divide soul from spirit. We are not thinking frogs, nor objectifying and registering mechanisms with their innards removed: constantly, we have to give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and, like mothers, endow them with all we have of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and catastrophe. Life—that means for us constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame—also everything that wounds us; we simply can do no other. And as for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it? Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit, being the teacher of the great suspicion that turns every U into an X, a real, genuine X, that is the letter before the penultimate one. In the end, lest what is most important remain unsaid: from such abysses, from such severe sickness, also from the sickness of severe suspicion, one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin, more ticklish and malicious, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a tenderer tongue for all good things, with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more child-like and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before. Invitation Undaunted

“Down there’s only—hell!”” “

“A. Was I ill? Have I got well?

“Do not stay in the field!

“Double pain is easier to bear

“The minds of others I know well;

“I hate to follow and I hate to lead. „You’re sad and shy when looking at the past, But trust the future when yourself you trust:

Whether I contemplate men with benevolence or with an evil eye, I always find them concerned with a single task, all of them and every one of them in particular: to do what is good for the preservation of the human race. Not from any feeling of love for the race, but merely because nothing in them is older, stronger, more inexorable and unconquerable than this instinct—because this instinct constitutes the essence of our species, our herd. It is easy enough to divide our neighbors quickly, with the usual myopia, from a mere five paces away, into useful and harmful, good and evil men; but in any large-scale accounting, when we reflect on the whole a little longer, we become suspicious of this neat division and finally abandon it. Even the most harmful man may really be the most useful when it comes to the preservation of the species; for he nurtures either in himself or in others, through his effects, instincts without which humanity would long have become feeble or rotten. Hatred, the mischievous delight in the misfortunes of others, the lust to rob and dominate, and whatever else is called evil belongs to the most amazing economy of the preservation of the species. To be sure, this economy is not afraid of high prices, of squandering, and it is on the whole extremely foolish. Still it is proven that it has preserved our race so far. I no longer know whether you, my dear fellow man and neighbor, are at all capable of living in a way that would damage the species; in other words, “unreasonably” and “badly.”

Gradually, man has become a fantastic animal that has to fulfill one more condition of existence than any other animal: man has to believe, to know, from time to time why he exists; his race cannot flourish without a periodic trust in life—without faith in reason in life.” Among some pious people I found a hatred of reason and was well disposed to them for that; for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual conscience. But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing—that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody. Some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my type of injustice.

Reflecting has lost all the dignity of its form: the ceremony and solemn gestures of reflecting have become ridiculous, and an old-style wise man would be considered intolerable. We think too fast, even while walking or on the way, or while engaged in other things, no matter how serious the subject. We require little preparation, not even much silence: it is as if we carried in our heads an unstoppable machine that keeps working even under the most unfavorable circumstances. Formerly, one could tell simply by looking at a person that he wanted to think—it was probably a rare occurrence—that he now wished to become wiser and prepared himself for a thought: he set his face as for prayer and stopped walking; yes, one even stood still for hours in the middle of the road when the thought arrived—on one leg or two legs. That seemed to be required by the dignity of the matter.” Before a function is fully developed and mature it constitutes a danger for the organism, and it is good if during the interval it is subjected to some tyranny. Thus consciousness is tyrannized—not least by our pride in it. One thinks that it constitutes the kernel of man; what is abiding, eternal, ultimate, and most original in him. One takes consciousness for a determinate magnitude. One denies its growth arid its intermittences. One takes it for the “unity of the organism. This ridiculous overestimation and misunderstanding of consciousness has the very useful consequence that it prevents an all too fast development of consciousness. Believing that they possess consciousness, men have not exerted themselves very much to acquire it; and things haven’t changed much in this respect. To this day the task of incorporating knowledge and making it instinctive is only beginning to dawn on the human eye and is not yet clearly discernible; it is a task that is seen only by those who have comprehended that so far we have incorporated only our errors and that all our consciousness relates to errors.

“What? The aim of science should be to give men as much pleasure and as little displeasure as possible? But what if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other—that whoever wanted to learn to “jubilate up to the heavens” would also have to be prepared for “depression unto death”? And that is how things may well be. At least the Stoics believed that this was how things were, and they were consistent when they also desired as little pleasure as possible, in order to get as little displeasure as possible out of life. (When they kept saying “The virtuous man is the happiest man,” this was both the school's eye-catching sign for the great mass and a casuistic subtlety for the subtle.)

Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one’s power upon others; that is all one desires in such cases. One hurts those whom one wants to feel one’s power, for pain is a much more efficient means to that end than pleasure; pain always raises the question about its origin while pleasure is inclined to stop with itself without looking back. We benefit and show benevolence to those who are already dependent on us in some way (which means that they are used to thinking of us as causes); we want to increase their power because in that way we increase ours, or we want to show them how advantageous it is to be in our power; that way they will become more satisfied with their condition and more hostile to and willing to fight against the enemies of our power. An easy prey is something contemptible for proud natures. They feel good only at the sight of unbroken men who might become their enemies and at the sight of all possessions that are hard to come by. Against one who is suffering they are often hard because he is not worthy of their aspirations and pride; but they are doubly obliging toward their peers whom it would be honorable to fight if the occasion should ever arise. Spurred by the good feeling of this perspective, the members of the knightly caste became accustomed to treating each other with exquisite courtesy. Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests; for them easy prey—and that is what all who suffer are—is enchanting. Pity is praised as the virtue of prostitutes.

A man’s virtues are called good depending on their probable consequences not for him but for us and society: the praise of virtues has always been far from “selfless,” far from “unegoistic.” Otherwise one would have had to notice that virtues (like industriousness, obedience, chastity, filial piety, and justice) are usually harmful for those who possess them, being instincts that dominate them too violently and covetously and resist the efforts of reason to keep them in balance with their other instincts. When you have a virtue, a real, whole virtue (and not merely a mini-instinct for some virtue), you are its victim. But your neighbor praises your virtue precisely on that account. One praises the industrious even though they harm their eyesight or the spontaneity and freshness of their spirit. One honors and feels sorry for the youth who has worked himself into the ground because one thinks: “For society as a whole the loss of even the best individual is merely a small sacrifice. Too bad that such sacrifices are needed! But it would be far worse if the individual would think otherwise and considered his preservation and development more important than his work in the service of society.” Thus one feels sorry for the youth not for his own sake but because a devoted instrument, ruthless against itself—a so-called “good man”—has been lost to society by his death. Perhaps one gives some thought to the question whether it would have been more useful for society if he had been less ruthless against himself and had preserved himself longer. One admits that there would have been some advantage in that, but one considers the other advantage—that a sacrifice has been made and that the attitude of the sacrificial animal has once again been confirmed for all to see—greater and of more lasting significance. To be sure, for educational purposes and to lead men to incorporate virtuous habits one emphasizes effects of virtue that make it appear as if virtue and private advantage were sisters; and some such relationship actually exists. Blindly raging industriousness, for example!—this typical virtue of an instrument—is represented as the way to wealth and honor and as the poison that best cures boredom and the passions, but one keeps silent about its dangers, its extreme dangerousness. That is how education always proceeds: one tries to condition an individual by various attractions and advantages to adopt a way of thinking and behaving that, once it has become a habit, instinct, and passion, will dominate him to his own ultimate disadvantage but “for the general good.” The praise of the selfless, the self-sacrificial, the virtuous—that is, of those who do not apply their whole strength and reason to their own preservation, development, elevation, promotion, and the expansion of their power, but rather live, in relation to themselves, modestly and thoughtlessly, perhaps even with indifference or irony—this praise certainly was not born from the spirit of selflessness. The “neighbor” praises selfless- ness because it brings him advantages. If the neighbor himself were “selfless” in his thinking, he would repudiate this diminution of strength, this mutilation for his benefit; he would work against the development of such inclinations, and above all he would manifest his selflessness by not calling it good! This indicates the fundamental contradiction in the morality that is very prestigious nowadays: the motives of this morality stand opposed to its principle. What this morality considers its proof is refuted by its criterion of what is moral. In order not to contravene its own morality, the demand “You shall renounce yourself and sacrifice yourself” could be laid down only by those who thus renounced their own advantage and perhaps brought about their own destruction through the demanded sacrifice of individuals. But as soon as the neighbor (or society) recommends altruism for the sake of its utility, it applies the contradictory principle. “You shall seek your advantage even at the expense of everything else”—and thus one preaches, in the same breath, a “Thou shalt” and “Thou shalt not.

At times, our strengths propel us so far forward that we can no longer endure our weaknesses and perish from them. We may even foresee this outcome without wishing to have it otherwise. Thus we become hard against everything in us that desires consideration, and our greatness is also our lack of compassion.

Famous men who need their fame, like all politicians, for example, never choose allies and friends without ulterior motives: from one they desire the reflected splendor of his virtue; from another the fear inspired by some of the dubious qualities that everybody associates with him; from someone else they steal the reputation of his leisure, his lying in the sun, because it serves their own purposes to appear inattentive and idle at times (this conceals the fact that they actually lie in wait); now they need a dreamer near them, now an expert, now a thinker, now a pedant, as if he were their alter ego; but soon they do not need them any more.

Every great human being exerts a retroactive force: for his sake all of history is placed in the balance again, and a thousand secrets of the past crawl out of their hiding places-into his sunshine. There is no way of telling what may yet become part of history. Perhaps the past is still essentially undiscovered! So many retroactive forces are still needed!

Thinking in a way that is not customary is much less the result of a superior intellect than it is the result of strong, evil inclinations that detach and isolate one, and that are defiant, nasty, and malicious. Heresy is the pendant of witchcraft and surely no more harmless and least of all anything essentially venerable. Heretics and witches are two species of evil human beings; what they have in common is that they also feel that they are evil but are impelled by an unconquerable lust to harm what is dominant (whether people or opinions). The Reformation, which was in a way a re-doubled intensification of the medieval spirit, at a time when that was no longer accompanied by a good conscience, produced both in the greatest abundance.

at bottom the masses are willing to submit to slavery of any kind, if only the higher-ups constantly legitimize themselves as higher, as born to command—by having noble manners. The most common man feels that nobility cannot be improvised and that one has to honor in it the fruit of long periods of time. But the lack of higher manners and the notorious vulgarity of manufacturers with their ruddy, fat hands give him the idea that it is only accident and luck that have elevated one person above another. Well, then, he reasons: let us try accident and luck! let us throw the dice! And thus socialism is born.

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions—as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. To be annoyed or feel remorse because something goes wrong—that he leaves to those who act because they have received orders and who have to reckon with a beating when his lordship is not satisfied with the result.

The reproaches of conscience are weak even in the most conscientious people compared to the feeling: “This or that is against the morals of your society.” A cold look or a sneer on the face of those among whom and for whom one has been educated is feared even by the strongest. What is it that they are really afraid of? Growing solitude! This is the argument that rebuts even the best arguments for a person or cause.—Thus the herd instinct speaks up in us.

What we know about ourselves and remember is not so decisive for the happiness of our life as people suppose. One day that which others know about us (or think they know) assaults us—and then we realize that this is more powerful. It is easier to cope with a bad conscience than to cope with a bad reputation.” Every feeling and sensation contains a piece of this old love; and some fantasy, some prejudice, some unreason, some ignorance, some fear, and ever so much else has contributed to it and worked on it. That mountain there! That cloud there! What is “real” in that? Subtract the phantasm and every human contribution from it, my sober friends! If you can! If you can forget your descent, your past, your training—all of your humanity and animality. There is no “reality” for us—not for you either, my sober friends. We are not nearly as different as you think, and perhaps our good will to transcend intoxication is as respectable as your faith that you are altogether incapable of intoxication.

This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realize that what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are. The reputation, name, and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for—originally almost always wrong and arbitrary, thrown over things like a dress and altogether foreign to their nature and even to their skin—all this grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be part of the thing and turns into its very body. What at first was appearance becomes in the end, almost invariably, the essence and is effective as such. How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts for real, so-called “reality.” We can destroy only as creators. —But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new “things.”

All great noise leads us to move happiness into some quiet distance. When a man stands in the midst of his own noise, in the midst of his own surf of plans and projects, then he is apt also to see quiet, magical beings gliding past him and to long for their happiness and seclusion: women. He almost thinks that his better self dwells there among the women, and that in these quiet regions even the loudest surf turns into deathly quiet, and life itself into a dream about life. Yet! Yet! Noble enthusiast, even on the most beautiful sailboat there is a lot of noise, and unfortunately much small and petty noise. The magic and the most powerful effect of women is, in philosophical language, action at a distance, actio in distans; but this requires first of all and above all—distance.

Love forgives the lover even his lust.

If someone cannot defend himself and therefore does not want to, we do not consider this a disgrace; but we have little respect for anyone who lacks both the capacity and the good will for revenge—regardless of whether it is a man or a woman. Would a woman be able to hold us (or, as they say, “enthral” us) if we did not consider it quite possible that under certain circumstances she could wield a dagger (any kind of dagger) against us? Or against herself—which in certain cases would be a cruder revenge (Chinese revenge).

In those ancient times in which poetry came into existence, the aim was utility, and actually a very great utility. When one lets rhythm permeate speech—the rhythmic force that reorders all the atoms of a sentence, bids one choose one's words with care, and gives one's thoughts a new color, making them darker, stranger, and more remote—the utility in question was superstitious. Rhythm was meant to impress the gods more deeply with a human petition, for it was noticed that men remember a verse much better than ordinary speech. It was also believed that a rhythmic tick-tock was audible over greater distances; a rhythmical prayer was supposed to get closer to the ears of the gods. Above all, men desired the utility of the elemental and overpowering effect that we experience in ourselves as we listen to music: rhythm is a compulsion; it engenders an unconquerable urge to yield and join in; not only our feet follow the beat but the soul does, too—probably, one surmised, the soul of the gods as well! Thus one tried to compel the gods by using rhythm and to force their hand: poetry was thrown at them like a magical snare.

Whoever finds enough tragedy and comedy in himself, probably does best when he stays away from the theater. Or if he makes an exception, the whole process, including the theater, the audience, and the poet, will strike him as the really tragic or comical spectacle, while the play that is performed will mean very little to him by comparison.

It is noteworthy that the great masters of prose have almost always been poets, too—if not publicly than at least secretly, in the “closet”.

“War is the father of all good things; war is also the father of good prose.

Men have to learn to pay homage no less than to feel contempt. Anyone who breaks new paths and who has led many others onto new paths, discovers with some amazement how clumsy and poor these people are in their capacity for expressing gratitude—and how rarely gratitude achieves expression at all. It almost seems that whenever gratitude wants to speak, she begins to gag, clears her throat, and falls silent before she has got out a word. The way in which a thinker gets some notion of the effects of his ideas and of their transforming, revolutionary power, is almost a comedy; at times it seems as if those who have felt this effect actually feel insulted and as if they could express what they consider their threatened self-reliance only by—bad manners. Whole generations are required merely to invent a polite convention for thanks; and it is only very late that we reach the moment when gratitude acquires a kind of spirit and genius. By then, there is usually also someone who becomes the recipient of great gratitude, not only for the good he himself has done but above all for the treasure of what is best and highest that has gradually been accumulated by his predecessors.

If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue, then the realization of general untruth and mendaciousness that now comes to us through science—the realization that delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation—would be utterly unbearable. Honesty would lead to nausea and suicide. But now there is a counterforce against our honesty that helps us to avoid such consequences: art as the good will to appearance. We do not always keep our eyes from rounding off something and, as it were, finishing the poem; and then it is no longer eternal imperfection that we carry across the river of becoming—then we have the sense of carrying a goddess, and feel proud and childlike as we perform this service. As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us, and art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon. At times we need a rest from ourselves by looking upon, by looking down upon, ourselves and, from an artistic distance, laughing over ourselves or weeping over ourselves. We must discover the hero no less than the fool in our passion for knowledge; we must occasionally find pleasure in our folly, or we cannot continue to find pleasure in our wisdom. Precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious human beings—really, more weights than human beings—nothing does us as much good as a fool’s cap: we need it in relation to ourselves—we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish, and blissful art lest we lose the freedom above things that our ideal demands of us. It would mean a relapse for us, with our irritable honesty, to get involved entirely in morality and, for the sake of the over-severe demands that we make on ourselves in these matters, to become virtuous monsters and scarecrows. We should be able also to stand above morality—and not only to stand with the anxious stiffness of a man who is afraid of slipping and falling any moment, but also to float above it and play. How then could we possibly dispense with art—and with the fool?— And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourselves, you do not yet belong with us.

After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. —And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.

Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being. Where should it expand? On what should it feed? How could it grow and multiply? We have some notion of the nature of the organic; and we should not reinterpret the exceedingly derivative, late, rare, accidental, that we perceive only on the crust of the earth and make of it something essential, universal, arid eternal, which is what those people do who call the universe an organism. This nauseates me. Let us even beware of believing that the universe is a machine: it is certainly not constructed for one purpose, and calling it a “machine” does it far too much honor. “Let us beware of positing generally and everywhere anything as elegant as the cyclical movements of our neighboring stars; even a glance into the Milky Way raises doubts whether there are not far coarser and more contradictory movements there, as well as stars with eternally linear paths, etc. The astral order in which we live is an exception; this order and the relative duration that depends on it have again made possible an exception of exceptions: the formation of the organic. The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms. Judged from the point of view of our reason, unsuccessful attempts are by all odds the rule, the exceptions are not the secret aim, and the whole musical box repeats eternally its tune which may never be called a melody—and ultimately even the phrase “unsuccessful attempt” is too anthropomorphic and reproachful. But how could we reproach or praise the universe? Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites; it is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things; it does not by any means strive to imitate man. None of our aesthetic and moral judgments apply to it. Nor does it have any instinct for self-preservation or any other instinct; and it does not observe any laws either. Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word “accident” has meaning. Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type. Let us beware of thinking that the world eternally creates new things. There are no eternally enduring substances; matter is as much of an error as the God of the Eleatics. But when shall we ever be done with our caution and care? When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to “naturalize” humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?

As soon as we see a new image, we immediately construct it with the aid of all our previous experiences, depending on the degree of our honesty and justice. All experiences are moral experiences, even in the realm of sense perception.

Wherever we encounter a morality, we also encounter valuations and an order of rank of human impulses and actions. These valuations and orders of rank are always expressions of the needs of a community and herd: whatever benefits it most—and second most, and third most—that is also considered the first standard for the value of all individuals. Morality trains the individual to be a function of the herd and to ascribe value to himself only as a function. The conditions for the preservation of different communities were very different; hence there were very different moralities. Considering essential changes in the forms of future herds and communities, states and societies, we can prophesy that there will yet be very divergent moralities. Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live—by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody now could endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error.

In antiquity the dignity and recognition of science were diminished by the fact that even her most zealous disciples placed the striving for virtue first, and one felt that knowledge had received the highest praise when one celebrated it as the best means to virtue. It is something new in history that knowledge wants to be more than a mere means.

In the horizon of the infinite.— We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us—indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom—and there is no longer any “land.”

“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us — for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.

“Every thoughtless person supposes that will alone is effective; that willing is something simple, a brute datum, underivable, and intelligible by itself. He is convinced that when he does something—strike something, for example—it is he that strikes, and that he did strike because he willed it. He does not see any problem here; the feeling of will seems sufficient to him not only for the assumption of cause and effect but also for the faith that he understands their relationship. He knows nothing of the mechanism of what happened and of the hundredfold fine work that needs to be done to bring about the strike, or of the incapacity of the will in itself to do even the tiniest part of this work. The will is for him a magically effective force; the faith in the will as the cause of effects is the faith in magically effective forces. Now man believed originally that wherever he saw something happen, a will had to be at work in the background as a cause, and a personal, willing being. Any notion of mechanics was far from his mind. But since man believed, for immense periods of time, only in persons (and not in substances, forces, things, and so forth), the faith in cause and effect became for him the basic faith that he applies wherever anything happens—and this is what he still does instinctively: it is an atavism of the most ancient origin. The propositions, “no effect without a cause,” “every effect in turn a cause” appear as generalizations of much more limited propositions; “no effecting without willing”; “one can have an effect only on beings that will”; “no suffering of an effect is ever pure and without consequences, but all suffering consists of an agitation of the will” (toward action, resistance, revenge, retribution). But in the pre-history of humanity both sets of propositions were identical: the formed were not generalizations of the latter, but the latter were commentaries on the former.

”God himself cannot exist without wise people,” said Luther with good reason. But “God can exist even less without unwise people”—that our good Luther did not say

The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

Buddha says: “Do not flatter your benefactor!” Repeat this saying in a Christian church; right away it clears the air of everything Christian.

Where someone rules, there are masses; and where we find masses we also find a need to be enslaved. Where men are enslaved, there are few individuals, and these are opposed by herd instincts and conscience.

Of the origin of religion.— The metaphysical need is not the origin of religions, as Schopenhauer supposed, but merely a late offshoot. Under the rule of religious ideas, one has become accustomed to the notion of “another world (behind, below, above)”—and when religious ideas are destroyed one is troubled by an uncomfortable emptiness and deprivation. From this feeling grows once again “another world,” but now merely a metaphysical one that is no longer religious. But what first led to the positing of “another world” in primeval times was not some impulse or need but an error in the interpretation of certain natural events, a failure of the intellect.

One speaks of being sick of man only when one can no longer digest him and yet has one’s stomach full of him. Misanthropy comes of an all too greedy love of man and “cannibalism”; but who asked you to swallow men like oysters, Prince Hamlet?

When the gratitude of many to one throws away all shame, we behold fame.

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.

Parliamentarianism — that is, public permission to choose between five basic political opinions—flatters and wins the favor of all those who would like to seem independent and individual, as if they fought for their opinions. Ultimately, however, it is indifferent whether the herd is commanded to have one opinion or permitted to have five. Whoever deviates from the five public opinions and stands apart will always have the whole herd against him.

Those who live alone do not speak too loud nor write too loud, for they fear the hollow echo—the critique of the nymph Echo. And all voices sound different in solitude.

He is a thinker; that means, he knows how to make things simpler than they are.

Limits of our hearing.— One hears only those questions for which one is able to find answers.

Need is considered the cause why something came to be; but in truth it is often merely an effect of what has come to be.

There is a way of asking us for our reasons that leads us not only to forget our best reasons but also to conceive a stubborn aversion to ail reasons This way of asking makes people very stupid and is a trick used by tyrannical people.

One should not try to excel one’s father’s industriousness; that makes one sick.

To be able to afford a secret enemy—that is a luxury for which the morality of even elevated spirits is usually not rich enough.

Virtue bestows happiness and a kind of bliss only on those who have not lost their faith in their virtue—not on those subtler souls whose virtue consists in a profound mistrust of themselves and of all virtue. Ultimately, then, “faith makes blessed” here, too, and not—mark it well—virtue.

Anyone with a very loud voice is almost incapable of thinking subtleties.

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does afterward

The sacrificial animal does not share the spectators’ ideas about sacrifice, but one has never let it have its say.

Fathers and sons have much more consideration for each other than mothers and daughters.

Evil has always had great effects in its favor. And nature is evil. Let us therefore be natural.” That is the secret reasoning of those who have mastered the most spectacular effects, and they have all too often been considered great human beings

He cannot control himself, and from that a poor woman infers that it will be easy to control him and casts her net for him. Soon she will be his slave.

Either we have no dreams or our dreams are interesting. We should learn to arrange our waking life the same way: nothing or interesting.

Must not anyone who wants to move the crowd be an actor who impersonates himself? Must he not first translate himself into grotesque obviousness and then present his whole person and cause in this coarsened and simplified version?

Origin of “good” and “bad.”— Improvements are invented only by those who can feel that something is not good.

Although the shrewdest judges of the witches and even the witches themselves were convinced of the guilt of witchery, this guilt nevertheless did not exist. This applies to all guilt.

One day we reach our goal, and now point with pride to the long travels we undertook to reach it. In fact, we were not even aware of traveling. But we got so far because we fancied at every point that we were at home.

If you are always profoundly occupied, you are beyond all embarrassment.

All people who have depth find happiness in being for once like flying fish, playing on the peaks of waves; what they consider best in things is that they have a surface: their skin-coveredness—sit venia verbo.

Some do not know how rich they are until they experience how rich people steal from them.

The denial of chance.— No victor believes in chance.

What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them. —Those with originality have for the most part also assigned names.

Sub specie aeterni.— A: “You are moving away faster and faster from the living; soon they will strike your name from their rolls.”— B: “That is the only way to participate in the privilege of the dead.”— A: “What privilege?”— B: “To die no more.

In what do you believe?— In this, that the weights of all things must be determined anew.

What do you consider most humane?— To spare someone shame

What is the seal of liberation?— No longer being ashamed in front of oneself

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought; hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year—what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the wholesome day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

There is a certain high point in life: once we have reached that, we are, for all our freedom, once more in the greatest danger of spiritual unfreedom, and no matter how much we have faced up to the beautiful chaos of existence and denied it all providential reason and goodness, we still have to pass our hardest test. For it is only now that the idea of a personal providence confronts us with the most penetrating force, and the best advocate, the evidence of our eyes, speaks for it—now that we can see how palpably always everything that happens to us turns out for the best. Every day and every hour, life seems to have no other wish than to prove this proposition again and again. Whatever it is, bad weather or good, the loss of a friend, sickness, slander, the failure of some letter to arrive, the spraining of an ankle, a glance into a shop, a counter-argument, the opening of a book, a dream, a fraud—either immediately or very soon after it proves to be something that “must not be missing”; it has a profound significance and use precisely for us. Is there any more dangerous seduction that might tempt one to renounce one’s faith in the gods of Epicurus who have no care and are unknown, and to believe instead in some petty deity who is full of care and personally knows every little hair on our head and finds nothing nauseous in the most miserable small service? Well, I think that in spite of all this we should leave the gods in peace as well as the genii who are ready to serve us, and rest content with the supposition that our own practical and theoretical skill in interpreting and arranging events has now reached its high point. Nor should we conceive too high an opinion of this dexterity of our wisdom when at times we are excessively surprised by the wonderful harmony created by the playing of our instrument—a harmony that sounds too good for us to dare to give the credit to ourselves. Indeed, now and then someone plays with us—good old chance; now and then chance guides our hand, and the wisest providence could not think up a more beautiful music than that which our foolish hand produces then.

Living in the midst of this jumble of little lanes, needs, and voices gives me a melancholy happiness: how much enjoyment, impatience, and desire, how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life comes to light every moment! And yet silence will soon descend on all these noisy, living, life-thirsty people. How his shadow stands even now behind everyone, as his dark fellow traveler! It is always like the last moment before the departure of an emigrants’ ship: people have more to say to each other than ever, the hour is late, and the ocean and its desolate silence are waiting impatiently behind all of this noise—so covetous and certain of their prey. And all and everyone of them suppose that the heretofore was little or nothing while the near future is everything; and that is the reason for all of this haste, this clamor, this outshouting and overreaching each other. Everyone wants to be the first in this future—and yet death and deathly silence alone are certain and common to all in this future. How strange it is that this sole certainty and common element makes almost no impression on people, and that nothing is further from their minds than the feeling that they form a brotherhood of death. It makes me happy that men do not want at all to think the thought of death! I should like very much to do something that would make the thought of life even a hundred times more appealing to them.

We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did—and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see each other again; perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us. That we have to become estranged is the law above us; by the same token we should also become more venerable for each other—and the memory of our former friendship more sacred. There is probably a tremendous but invisible stellar orbit in which our very different ways and goals may be included as small parts of this path; let us rise up to this thought. But our life is too short and our power of vision too small for us to be more than friends in the sense of this sublime possibility. —Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies.

Architecture for the search for knowledge.— One day, and probably soon, we need some recognition of what above all is lacking in our big cities: quiet and wide, expansive places for reflection. Places with long, high-ceilinged cloisters for bad or all too sunny weather where no shouting or noise of carriages can reach and where good manners would prohibit even priests from praying aloud—buildings and sites that would altogether give expression to the sublimity of thoughtfulness and of stepping aside. The time is past when the church possessed a monopoly on reflection, when the vita contemplativa always had to be first of all a vita religiosa; and everything built by the church gives expression to that idea. I do not see how we could remain content with such buildings even if they were stripped of their churchly purposes. The language spoken by these buildings is far too rhetorical and unfree, reminding us that they are houses of God and ostentatious monuments of some supramundane intercourse; we who are godless could not think our thoughts in such surroundings. We wish to see ourselves translated into stone and plants, we want to take walks in ourselves when we stroll around these buildings and gardens.

the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is—to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer. At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due; it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!” There is a lake that one day ceased to permit itself to flow off; it formed a dam where it had hitherto flown off; and ever since this lake is rising higher and higher. Perhaps this very renunciation will also lend us the strength needed to bear this renunciation; perhaps man will rise ever higher as soon as he ceases to flow out into a god.

Delight in blindness.— “My thoughts,” said the wanderer to his shadow, “should show me where I stand; but they should not betray to me where I am going. I love my ignorance of the future and do not wish to perish of impatience and of tasting promised things ahead of time.”

one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry and art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight. For the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy.

“Brief habits.— I love brief habits and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things and states, down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitternesses. My nature is designed entirely for brief habits, even in the needs of my physical health and altogether as far as I can see at all—from the lowest to the highest. I always believe that here is something that will give me lasting satisfaction—brief habits, too, have this faith of passion, this faith in eternity—and that I am to be envied for having found and recognized it; and now it nourishes me at noon and in the evening and spreads a deep contentment all around itself and deep into me so that I desire nothing else, without having any need for comparisons, contempt, or hatred. But one day its time is up; the good thing parts from me, not as something that has come to nauseate me but peacefully and sated with me as I am with it—as if we had reason to be grateful to each other as we shook hands to say farewell. Even then something new is waiting at the door, along with my faith—this indestructible fool and sage!—that this new discovery will be just right, and that this will be the last time. That is what happens to me with dishes, ideas, human beings, cities, poems, music, doctrines, ways of arranging the day, and life styles. “Enduring habits I hate. I feel as if a tyrant had come near me and as if the air I breathe had thickened when events take such a turn that it appears that they will inevitably give rise to enduring habits; for example, owing to an official position, constant association with the same people a permanent domicile, or unique good health. Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits.

What one should learn from artists.— How can we make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not? And I rather think that in themselves they never are. Here we could learn something from physicians, when for example they dilute what is bitter or add wine and sugar to a mixture—but even more from artists who are really continually trying to bring off such inventions and feats. Moving away from things until there is a good deal that one no longer sees and there is much that our eye has to add if we are still to see them at all; or seeing things around a corner and as cut out and framed; or to place them so that they partially conceal each other and grant us only glimpses of architectural perspectives; or looking at them through tinted glass or in the light of the sunset; or giving them a surface and skin that is not fully transparent—all this we should learn from artists while being wiser than they are in other matters. For with them this subtle power usually comes to an end where art ends and life begins; but we want to be the poets of our life—first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters.

The fancy of the contemplatives.— What distinguishes the higher human beings from the lower is that the former see and hear immeasurably more, and see and hear thoughtfully—and precisely this distinguishes human beings from animals, and the higher animals from the lower. For anyone who grows up into the heights of humanity the world becomes ever fuller; ever more fishhooks are cast in his direction to capture his interest; the number of things that stimulate him grows constantly, as does the number of different kinds of pleasure and displeasure: The higher human being always becomes at the same time happier and unhappier. But he can never shake off a delusion: He fancies that he is a spectator and listener who has been placed before the great visual and acoustic spectacle that is life; he calls his own nature contemplative and overlooks that he himself is really the poet who keeps creating this life. Of course, he is different from the actor of this drama, the so-called active type; but he is even less like a mere spectator and festive guest in front of the stage. As a poet, he certainly has vis contemplativa and the ability to look back upon his work, but at the same time also and above all vis creativa, which the active human being lacks, whatever visual appearances and the faith of all the world may say. We who think and feel at the same time are those who really continually fashion something that had not been there before: the whole eternally growing world of valuations, colors, accents, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations. This poem that we have invented is continually studied by the so-called practical human beings (our actors) who learn their roles and translate everything into flesh and actuality, into the everyday. Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature—nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present—and it was we who gave and bestowed it. Only we have created the world that concerns man!— But precisely this knowledge we lack, and when we occasionally catch it for a fleeting moment we always forget it again immediately; we fail to recognize our best power and underestimate ourselves, the contemplatives, just a little. We are neither as proud nor as happy as we might be.

Two who are happy.— Truly, in spite of his youth, this is a great improviser of life who amazes even the subtlest observer; for he never seems to make a mistake although he continually takes the greatest risk. One is reminded of those masters of musical improvisation whose hands the listener would also like to credit with divine infallibility although here and there they make a mistake as every mortal does. But they are practiced and inventive and ready at any moment to incorporate into their thematic order the most accidental tone to which the flick of a finger or a mood has driven them, breathing a beautiful meaning and a soul into an accident. Here is an altogether different person: at bottom, everything he desires and plans goes wrong. What he has occasionally set his heart upon has brought him several times to the edge of the abyss and within a hair of destruction; and if he escaped that, it was certainly not merely “with a black eye.” Do you suppose that he feels unhappy about that? He made up his mind long ago not to take his own desires and plans too seriously, “If I do not succeed at this,” he says to himself, “I may perhaps succeed at that; and on the whole I do not know whether I do not have more reason to be grateful to my failures than to any success. Was I made to be stubborn and to have horns like a bull? What constitutes the value and result of life for me lies elsewhere; my pride as well as my misery lie elsewhere. I know more about life because I have so often been on the verge of losing it; and precisely for that reason I get more out of life than any of you”.

By doing we forego.— At bottom I abhor all those moralities which say: “Do not do this! Renounce! Overcome yourself!” But I am well disposed toward those moralities which goad me to do something and do it again, from morning till evening, and then to dream of it at night, and to think of nothing except doing this well, as well as I alone can do it. When one lives like that, one thing after another that simply does not belong to such a life drops off. Without hatred or aversion one sees this take its leave today and that tomorrow, like yellow leaves that any slight stirring of the air takes off a tree. He may not even notice that it takes its leave; for his eye is riveted to his goal—forward, not sideward, backward, downward. What we do should determine what we forego; by doing we forego—that is how I like it, that is my placitum. But I do not wish to strive with open eyes for my own impoverishment; I do not like negative virtues—virtues whose very essence it is to negate and deny oneself something.

Stoics and Epicureans.— The Epicurean selects the situation, the persons, and even the events that suit his extremely irritable, intellectual constitution; he gives up all others, which means almost everything, because they would be too strong and heavy for him to digest. The Stoic, on the other hand, trains himself to swallow stones and worms, slivers of glass and scorpions without nausea; he wants his stomach to become ultimately indifferent to whatever the accidents of existence might pour into it: he reminds one of that Arabian sect of the Assaua whom one encounters in Algiers: like these insensitive people, he, too, enjoys having an audience when he shows off his insensitivity, while the Epicurean would rather dispense with that, having his “garden”! For those with whom fate attempts improvisations—those who live in violent ages and depend on sudden and mercurial people—Stoicism may indeed be advisable. But anyone who foresees more or less that fate permits him to spin a long thread does well to make Epicurean arrangements. That is what all those have always done whose work is of the spirit. For this type it would be the loss of losses to be deprived of their subtle irritability and be awarded in its place a hard Stoic hedgehog skin.

In favor of criticism.— Now something that you formerly loved as a truth or probability strikes you as an error; you shed it and fancy that this represents a victory for your reason. But perhaps this error was as necessary for you then, when you were still a different person—you are always a different person—as are all your present “truths,” being a skin, as it were, that concealed and covered a great deal that you were not yet permitted to see. What killed that opinion for you was your new life and not your reason: you no longer need it, and now it collapses and unreason crawls out of it into the light like a worm. When we criticize something, this is no arbitrary and impersonal event; it is, at least very often, evidence of vital energies in us that are growing and shedding a skin. We negate and must negate because something in us wants to live and affirm—something that we perhaps do not know or see as yet. —This is said in favor of criticism.

”To be sure, times used to be more ‘beautiful’ when anyone with a halfway new idea could still feel so indispensable that he would go out into the street and shout at everyone: ‘Behold, the kingdom of heaven is at hand!’—I should not miss myself if I were not there. All of us are dispensable.

I have given a name to my pain and call it “dog.” It is just as faithful, just as obtrusive and shameless, just as entertaining, just as clever as any other dog—and I can scold it and vent my bad mood on it, as others do with their dogs, servants, and wives.

Looking back.— The true pathos of every period of our life rarely becomes clear to us as long as we live in this period; then we always assume that it is the only state that is possible and reasonable for us and—to speak with the Greeks and adopt their distinction—an ethos and not a pathos. A few musical chords reminded me today of a winter and a house and an extremely solitary life, as well as the feeling in which I lived at that time: I thought that I might go on living that way forever. But now I comprehend that it was wholly pathos and passion and thus comparable to this painful and bold music that was so certain that there was some comfort. That sort of thing one must not have for years or for eternities; otherwise one would become too “supra-terrestrial” for this planet.

“Wisdom in pain.— There is as much wisdom in pain as there is in pleasure: both belong among the factors that contribute the most to the preservation of the species. If pain did not, it would have perished long ago; that it hurts is no argument against it but its essence. In pain I hear the captain’s command; “Take in the sails!” The bold seafarer “man” must have mastered the art of doing a thousand things with his sails; otherwise he would be done for in no time, and the ocean would swallow him. We must learn to live with diminished energies, too: As soon as pain gives its safety signal the time has come to diminish them; some great danger or other, a storm is approaching, and we are well advised to “inflate” ourselves as little as possible.

In media vita.— No, life has not disappointed me, On the contrary, I find it truer, so more desirable and mysterious every year—ever since the day when the great liberator came to me; the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge—and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery. —And knowledge itself: let it be something else for others; for example, a bed to rest on, or the way to such a bed, or a diversion, or a form of leisure—for me it is a world of dangers and victories in which heroic feelings, too, find places to dance and play. “Life as a means to knowledge”—with this principle in one's heart one can live not only boldly but even gaily, and laugh gaily, too. And who knows how to laugh anyway and live well if he does not first know a good deal about war and victory?

Who will attain anything great if he does not find in himself the strength and the will to inflict great suffering? Being able to suffer is the least thing; weak women and even slaves often achieve virtuosity in that. But not to perish of internal distress and uncertainty when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of this suffering-that is great, that belongs to greatness.” It seems to me that people always exaggerate when they speak of pain and misfortune, as if it were a requirement of good manners to exaggerate here, while one keeps studiously quiet about the fact that there are innumerable palliatives against pain, such as anaesthesia or the feverish haste of thoughts, or a quiet posture, or good or bad memories, purposes, hopes, and many kinds of pride and sympathy that almost have the same effect as anaesthetics—and at the highest degrees of pain one automatically loses consciousness. We know quite well how to drip sweetnesses upon our bitternesses, especially the bitternesses of the soul; we find remedies in our courage and sublimity as well as the nobler deliria of submission and resignation. A loss is a loss for barely one hour; somehow it also brings us some gift from heaven—new strength, for example, or at least a new opportunity for strength. Is our life really painful and burdensome enough to make it advantageous to exchange it for a Stoic way of life and petrification? We are not so badly off that we have to be as badly off as Stoics.

Leisure and idleness.— There is something of the American Indians, something of the ferocity peculiar to the Indian blood, in the American lust for gold; and the breathless haste with which they work—the distinctive vice of the new world—is already beginning to infect old Europe with its ferocity and is spreading a lack of spirituality like a blanket. Even now one is ashamed of resting, and prolonged reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in one’s hand, even as one eats one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always “might miss out on something.” “Rather do anything than nothing”: this principle, too, is merely a string to throttle all culture and good taste. Just as all forms are visibly perishing by the haste of the workers, the feeling for form itself, the ear and eye for the melody of movements are also perishing. The proof of this may be found in the universal demand for gross obviousness in all those situations in which human beings wish to be honest with one another for once—in their associations with friends, women, relatives, children, teachers, pupils, leaders, and princes: One no longer has time or energy for ceremonies, for being obliging in an indirect way, for esprit in conversation, and for any otium at all. Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating others. Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time than someone else. Hours in which honesty is permitted have become rare, and when they arrive one is tired and does not only want to “let oneself go” but actually wishes to stretch out as long and wide and ungainly as one happens to be. This is how people now write letters, and the style and spirit of letters will always be the true “sign of the times. If sociability and the arts still offer any delight, it is the kind of delight that slaves, weary of their work, devise for themselves. How frugal our educated—and uneducated—people have become regarding “joy”! How they are becoming increasingly suspicious of all joy! More and more, work enlists all good conscience on its side; the desire for joy already calls itself a “need to recuperate” and is beginning to be ashamed of itself. “One owes it to one's health”—that is what people say when they are caught on an excursion into the country. Soon we may well reach the point where people can no longer give in to the desire for a vita contemplativa (that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience. Well, formerly it was the other way around; it was work that was afflicted with the bad conscience. A person of good family used to conceal the fact that he was working if need compelled him to work. Slaves used to work, oppressed by the feeling that they were doing something contemptible: “doing” itself was contemptible. “Nobility and honor are attached solely to otium and bellum,” that was the ancient prejudice.

For the longest time, conscious thought was considered thought itself. Only now does the truth dawn on us that by far the greatest part of our spirit's activity remains unconscious and unfelt. But I suppose that these instincts which are here contending against one another understand very well how to make themselves felt by, and how to hurt, one another. This may well be the source of that sudden and violent exhaustion that afflicts all thinkers (it is the exhaustion on a battlefield). Indeed, there may be occasions of concealed heroism in our warring depths, but certainly nothing divine that eternally rests in itself, as Spinoza supposed. Conscious thinking, especially that of the philosopher, is the least vigorous and therefore also the relatively mildest and calmest form of thinking; and thus precisely philosophers are most apt to be led astray about the nature of knowledge.” But that is what happens to us not only in music. That is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fair-mindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way; for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned.” Let us therefore limit ourselves to the purification of our opinions and valuations and to the creation of our own new tables of what is good, and let us stop brooding about the “moral value of our actions”! Yes, my friends, regarding all the moral chatter of some about others it is time to feel nauseous. Sitting in moral judgment should offend our taste. Let us leave such chatter and such bad taste to those who have nothing else to do but drag the past a few steps further through time and who never live in the present—which is to say the many, the great majority. We, however, want to become those we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves. To that end we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order to be able to be creators in this sense—while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been based on ignorance of physics or were constructed so as to contradict it. Therefore: long live physics! And even more so that which compels us to turn to physics—our honesty!” If you, who adhere to this religion, have the same attitude toward yourselves that you have toward your fellow men; if you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you even for an hour and if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible distress way ahead of time; if you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that besides your religion of pity you also harbor another religion in your heart that is perhaps the mother of the religion of pity: the religion of comfortableness. How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable and benevolent people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together. But now back to the first question! How is it at all possible to keep to one’s own way? Constantly, some clamor or other calls us aside; rarely does our eye behold anything that does not require us to drop our own preoccupation instantly to help. I know, there are a hundred decent and praiseworthy ways of losing my own way, and they are truly highly “moral”! Indeed, those who now preach the morality of pity even take the view that precisely this and only this is moral—to lose one’s own way in order to come to the assistance of a neighbor. I know just as certainly that I only need to expose myself to the sight of some genuine distress and I am lost. And if a suffering friend said to me, “Look, I am about to die; please promise me to die with me,” I should promise it; and the sight of a small mountain tribe fighting for its liberty would persuade me to offer it my hand and my life—if for good reasons I may choose for once two bad examples. All such arousing of pity and calling for help is secretly seductive, for our “own way” is too hard and demanding and too remote from the love and gratitude of others, and we do not really mind escaping from it—and from our very own conscience—to flee into the conscience of the others and into the lovely temple of the “religion of pity.” As soon as any war breaks out anywhere, there also breaks out precisely among the noblest people a pleasure that, to be sure, is kept secret: Rapturously, they throw themselves into the new danger of death because the sacrifice for the fatherland seems to them to offer the long desired permission—to dodge their goal; war offers them a detour to suicide, but a detour with a good conscience. And while I shall keep silent about some points, I do not want to remain silent about my morality which says to me: Live in seclusion so that you can live for yourself. Live in ignorance about what seems most important to your age. Between yourself and today lay the skin of at least three centuries. And the clamor of today, the noise of wars and revolutions should be a mere murmur for you. You will also wish to help—but only those whose distress you understand entirely because they share with you one suffering and one hope—your friends—and only in the manner in which you help yourself. I want to make them bolder, more persevering, simpler, gayer. I want to teach them what is understood by so few today, least of all by these preachers of pity: to share not suffering but joy.” The Greeks, to be sure, prayed: “Everything beautiful twice and even three times!” They implored the gods with good reason, for ungodly reality gives us the beautiful either not at all or once only. I mean to say that the world is overfull of beautiful things but nevertheless poor, very poor when it comes to beautiful moments and unveilings of these things. But perhaps this is the most powerful magic of life: it is covered by a veil interwoven with gold, a veil of beautiful possibilities, sparkling with promise, resistance, bashfulness, mockery, pity, and seduction. Yes, life is a woman

we must overcome even the Greeks!

The greatest weight.— What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!

Incipit tragoedia.— When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and Lake Urmi and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not tire of that. But at last his heart changed—and one rooming he rose with the dawn, stepped before the sun, and spoke to it thus:​“You great star, what would your happiness be if you did not have those for whom you shine? For ten years you have climbed up to my cave; You would have become weary of your light and of the journey had it not been for me and my eagle and my serpent; but we waited for you every morning, took your overflow from you, and blessed you for it. Behold, I am sick of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to receive it; I want to give away and distribute until the wise among men enjoy their folly once again and the poor their riches. For that I must descend to the depths, as you do in the evening when you go behind the sea and still bring light to the underworld, you over-rich star. Like you I must go under,73 as men put it to whom I wish to descend. Bless me then, you calm eye that can look without envy even upon an all too great happiness. Bless the cup that wants to overflow in order that the water may flow from it golden and carry the reflection of your rapture everywhere. Behold, this cup wants to become empty again, and Zarathustra wants to become man again,”—Thus Zarathustra began to go under.” Indeed, we philosophers and “free spirits” feel, when we hear the news that “the old god is dead,” as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an “open sea.”

“In science convictions have no rights of citizenship, as one says with good reason. Only when they decide to descend to the modesty of hypotheses, of a provisional experimental point of view, of a regulative fiction, they may be granted admission and even a certain value in the realm of knowledge—though always with the restriction that they remain under police supervision, under the police of mistrust. —But does this not mean, if you consider it more precisely, that a conviction may obtain admission to science only when it ceases to be a conviction? Would it not be the first step in the discipline of the scientific spirit that one would not permit oneself any more convictions? But if both should be required, much trust as well as much mistrust, from where would science then be permitted to take its unconditional faith or conviction on which it rests, that truth is more important than any other thing, including every other conviction? Precisely this conviction could never have come into being if both truth and untruth constantly proved to be useful, which is the case. Thus—the faith in science, which after all exists undeniably, cannot owe its origin to such a calculus of utility; it must have originated in spite of the fact that the disutility and dangerousness of “the will to truth,” of “truth at any price” is proved to it constantly. “At any price”: how well we understand these words once we have offered and slaughtered one faith after another on this altar!

Morality as a problem.— The lack of personality always takes its revenge: A weakened, thin, extinguished personality that denies itself is no longer fit for anything good—least of all for philosophy. “Selflessness” has no value either in heaven or on earth. All great problems demand great love, and of that only strong, round, secure spirits who have a firm grip on themselves are capable. It makes the most telling difference whether a thinker has a personal relationship to his problems and finds in them his destiny, his distress, and his greatest happiness, or an “impersonal” one, meaning that he can do no better than to touch them and grasp them with the antennae of cold, curious thought. In the latter case nothing will come of it; that much one can promise in advance, for even if great problems should allow themselves to be grasped by them they would not permit frogs and weaklings to hold on to them; such has been their taste from time immemorial—a taste, incidentally, that they share with all redoubtable females.” The whole pose of “man against the world,” of man as a “world-negating” principle, of man as the measure of the value of things, as judge of the world who in the end places existence itself upon his scales and finds it wanting—the monstrous insipidity of this pose has finally come home to us and we are sick of it. We laugh as soon as we encounter the juxtaposition of “man and world,” separated by the sublime presumption of the little word “and.” But look, when we laugh like that, have we not simply carried the contempt for man one step further? And thus also pessimism, the contempt for that existence which is knowable by us? Have we not exposed ourselves to the suspicion of an opposition—an opposition between the world in which we were at home up to now with our reverences that perhaps made it possible for us to endure life, and another world that consists of us—an inexorable, fundamental, and deepest suspicion about ourselves that is more and more gaining worse and worse control of us Europeans and that could easily confront coming generations with the terrifying Either/Or: “Either abolish your reverences or—yourselves!” The latter would be nihilism; but would not the former also be—nihilism?—This is our question mark.

Faith is always coveted most and needed most urgently where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive sign of sovereignty and strength. In other words, the less one knows bow to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely—a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. From this one might perhaps gather that the two world religions, Buddhism and Christianity, may have owed their origin and above all their sudden spread to a tremendous collapse and disease of the will. And that is what actually happened: both religions encountered a situation in which the will had become diseased, giving rise to a demand that had become utterly desperate for some “thou shall” Both religions taught fanaticism in ages in which the will had become exhausted, and thus they offered innumerable people some support, a new possibility of willing, some delight in willing. For fanaticism is the only “strength of the will” that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain, being a sort of hypnotism of the whole system of the senses and the intellect for the benefit of an excessive nourishment (hypertrophy) of a single point of view and feeling that henceforth becomes dominant—which the Christian calls his faith. Once a human being reaches the fundamental conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes “a believer.” Conversely, one could conceive of such a pleasure and power of self-determination, such a freedom of the will that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence.

nothing is more democratic than logic; it is no respecter of persons and makes no distinction between crooked and straight noses. (Incidentally, Europe owes the Jews no small thanks for making people think more logically and for establishing cleanlier intellectual habits— nobody more so than the Germans who are a lamentably déraisonnable race who to this day are still in need of having their “heads washed” first. Wherever Jews have won influence they have taught men to make finer distinctions, more rigorous inferences, and to write in a more luminous and cleanly fashion; their task was ever to bring a people “to listen to raison.”)” The common people attribute wisdom to such serious men of “faith” who have become quiet, meaning that they have acquired knowledge and are “certain” compared to one’s own uncertainty

How morality is scarcely dispensable.— A naked human being is generally a shameful sight. I am speaking of us Europeans (and not even of female Europeans!). Suppose that, owing to some magician’s malice, the most cheerful company at table suddenly saw itself disrobed and undressed; I believe that not only their cheerfulness would vanish and that the strongest appetite would be discouraged—it seems that we Europeans simply cannot dispense with that masquerade which one calls clothes. Now consider the way “moral man” is dressed up, how he is veiled behind moral formulas and concepts of decency—the way our actions are benevolently concealed by the concepts of duty, virtue, sense of community, honorableness, self-denial—should the reasons for all this not be equally good? I am not suggesting that all this is meant to mask human malice and villainy—the wild animal in us; my idea is, on the contrary, that it is precisely as tame animals that we are a shameful sight and in need of the moral disguise, that the “inner man” in Europe is not by a long shot bad enough to show himself without shame (or to be beautiful). The European disguises himself with morality because he has become a sick, sickly, crippled animal that has good reasons for being “tame”; for he is almost an abortion, scarce half made up, weak, awkward. It is not the ferocity of the beast of prey that requires a moral disguise but the herd animal with its profound mediocrity, timidity, and boredom with itself. With morality the European dresses up—let us confess it!—to look nobler, more important, more respectable, “divine”—” Jesus (or Paul), for example, found how small people lived in the Roman province—a modest, virtuous, pinched life. He offered an exegesis, he read the highest meaning and value into it—and with this also the courage to despise every other way of life, the quiet Herrnhut fanaticism, the secret, subterranean self-confidence that grows and grows and finally is ready “to overcome the world” (that is, Rome and the upper classes throughout the Empire). Buddha likewise found a human type, in his case scattered through all classes and social strata of his people, that was good and good-natured from inertia (and above all inoffensive); also from inertia, this type lived abstinently, almost without needs. He understood how such a human type must inevitably roll, with its whole vis inertiae, into a faith that promises to prevent the recurrence of terrestrial troubles (meaning work and action in general). To understand that was his genius. To become the founder of a religion one must be psychologically infallible in one’s knowledge of a certain average type of souls who have not yet recognized that they belong together. It is he that brings them together. The founding of a religion therefore always becomes a long festival of recognition.—

“The problem of consciousness (more precisely, of becoming conscious of something) confronts us only when we begin to comprehend how we could dispense with it; and now physiology and the history of animals place us at the beginning of such comprehension (it took them two centuries to catch up with Leibniz’s suspicion which soared ahead). For we could think, feel, will, and remember, and we could also “act” in every sense of that word, and yet none of all this would have to “enter our consciousness” (as one says metaphorically). The whole of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in a mirror. Even now, for that matter, by far the greatest portion of our life actually takes place without this mirror effect; and this is true even of our thinking, feeling, and willing life, however offensive this may sound to older philosophers. For what purpose, then, any consciousness at all when it is in the main superfluous? Now, if you are willing to listen to my answer and the perhaps extravagant surmise that it involves, it seems to me as if the subtlety and strength of consciousness always were proportionate to a man’s (or animal’s) capacity for communication, and as if this capacity in turn were proportionate to the need for communication. But this last point is not to be understood as if the individual human being who happens to be a master in communicating and making understandable his needs must also be most dependent on others in his needs. But it does seem to me as if it were that way when we consider whole races and chains of generations; Where need and distress have forced men for a long time to communicate and to understand each other quickly and subtly, the ultimate result is an excess of this strength and art of communication-as it were, a capacity that has gradually been accumulated and now waits for an heir who might squander it. (Those who are called artists are these heirs; so are orators, preachers, writers—all of them people who always come at the end of a long chain, “late born” every one of them in the best sense of that word and, as I have said, by their nature squanderers.) In brief, the development of language and the development of consciousness (not of reason but merely of the way reason enters consciousness) go hand in hand. Add to this that not only language serves as a bridge between human beings but also a mien, a pressure, a gesture. The emergence of our sense impressions into our own consciousness, the ability to fix them and, as it were, exhibit them externally, increased proportionately with the need to communicate them to others by means of signs. The human being inventing signs is at the same time the human being who becomes ever more keenly conscious of himself. It was only as a social animal that man acquired self-consciousness—which he is still in the process of doing, more and more. My idea is, as you see, that consciousness does not really belong to man’s individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature; that, as follows from this, it has developed subtlety only insofar as this is required by social or herd utility. Consequently, given the best will in the world to understand ourselves as individually as possible, “to know ourselves,” each of us will always succeed in becoming conscious only of what is not individual but “average.” Our thoughts themselves are continually governed by the character of consciousness—by the “genius of the species” that commands it—and translated back into the perspective of the herd. Fundamentally, all our actions are altogether incomparably personal, unique, and infinitely individual; there is no doubt of that. But as soon as we translate them into consciousness they no longer seem to be. This is the essence of phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand them: Owing to the nature of animal consciousness, the world of which we can become conscious is only a surface-and sign-world, a world that is made common and meaner; whatever becomes conscious becomes by the same token shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, herd signal; all becoming conscious involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction to superficialities, and generalization. Ultimately, the growth of consciousness becomes a danger; and anyone who lives among the most conscious Europeans even knows that it is a disease. You will guess that it is not the opposition of subject and object that concerns me here: This distinction I leave to the epistemologists who have become entangled in the snares of grammar (the metaphysics of the people). It is even less the opposition of "thing-in-itself" and appearance; for we do not “know” nearly enough to be entitled to any such distinction. We simply lack any organ for knowledge, for “truth”: we “know” (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called “utility” is ultimately also a mere belief, something imaginary, and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish some day.” The great certainty of the natural sciences in comparison with psychology and the critique of the elements of consciousness—one might almost say, with the unnatural sciences—is due precisely to the fact that they choose for an object what is not-strange.” After accepting this role faith—an artist’s faith, if you will—the Greeks, as is well known, went step for step through a rather odd metamorphosis that does not merit imitation in all respects: They really became actors. As such they enchanted and overcame all the world and finally even “the power that had overcome the world” (for the Graeculus histrio vanquished Rome, and not, as innocents usually say, Greek culture). But what I fear, what is so palpable that today one could grasp it with one’s hands, if one felt like grasping it, is that we modem men are even now pretty far along on the same road; and whenever a human being begins to discover how he is playing a role and how he can be an actor, he becomes an actor. With this a new human flora and fauna emerge that could never have grown in more solid and limited ages; or at least they would be left there “below” under the ban and suspicion of lacking honor. It is thus that the maddest and most interesting ages of history always emerge, when the “actors,” all kinds of actors, become the real masters. As this happens, another human type is disadvantaged more and more and finally made impossible; above all, the great “architects”: The strength to build becomes paralyzed; the courage to make plans that encompass the distant future is discouraged; those with a genius for organization become scarce: who would still dare to undertake projects that would require thousands of years for their completion? For what is dying out is the fundamental faith that would enable us to calculate, to promise, to anticipate the future in plans of such scope, and to sacrifice the future to them—namely, the faith that man has value and meaning only insofar as he is a stone in a great edifice; and to that end he must be solid first of all, a “stone”— and above all not an actor!

without Hegel there could have been no Darwin.” What do you suppose he finds necessary, absolutely necessary, to give himself in his own eyes the appearance of superiority over more spiritual people and to attain the pleasure of an accomplished revenge at least in his imagination? Always morality; you can bet on that. Always big moral words. Always the rub-a-dub of justice, wisdom, holiness, virtue. Always the Stoicism of gesture (how well Stoicism conceals what one lacks!). Always the cloak of prudent silence, of affability, of mildness, and whatever may be the names of all the other idealistic cloaks in which incurable self-despisers, as well as the incurably vain, strut about. Do not misunderstand me: Among such born enemies of the spirit there comes into being occasionally the rare piece of humanity that the common people revere, using such names as saint and sage. It is from among men of this sort that those monsters of morality come who make noise, who make history—St. Augustine is one of them. Fear of the spirit, revenge against the spirit—how often these propelling vices have become the roots of virtues! Even nothing less than virtues. What? Wisdom as a screen behind which the philosopher hides from—spirit?—

Two kinds of causes that are often confounded.— This seems to me to be one of my most essential steps and advances: I have learned to distinguish the cause of acting from the cause of acting in a particular way, in a particular direction, with a particular goal. The first kind of cause is a quantum of dammed-up energy that is waiting to be used up somehow, for something, while the second kind is, compared to this energy, something quite insignificant, for the most part a little accident in accordance with which this quantum “discharges” itself in one particular way—a match versus a ton of powder. Among these little accidents and “matches” I include so-called “purposes” as well as the even much more so-called “vocations”: They are relatively random, arbitrary, almost indifferent in relation to the tremendous quantum of energy that presses, as I have said, to be used up somehow. The usual view is different: People are accustomed to consider the goal (purposes, vocations, etc.) as the driving force, in keeping with a very ancient error; but it is merely the directing force—one has mistaken the helmsman for the steam. And not even always the helmsman, the directing force. Man, when he loves a woman, wants precisely this love from her and is thus himself as far as can be from the presupposition of feminine love, Supposing, however, that there should also be men to whom the desire for total devotion is not alien; well, then they simply are—not men. A man who loves like a woman becomes a slave; while a woman who loves like a woman becomes a more perfect, woman. Faithfulness is accordingly included in woman’s love; it follows from the definition. In man, it can easily develop in the wake of his love, perhaps as gratitude or as an idiosyncratic taste and so-called elective affinity; but it is not an essential element of his love—so definitely not that one might almost speak with some justification of a natural counterplay of love and faithfulness in man. For his love consists of wanting to have and not of renunciation and giving away; but wanting to have always comes to an end with having. Third principle: autosuggestion. To fix one’s eyes upon the object of association as if it were a glass button, until one ceases to feel any pleasure or displeasure and goes to sleep unnoticed, grows rigid, and acquires poise—a home remedy amply tested in marriage and friendship and praised as indispensable, but not yet formulated scientifically. Its popular name is—patience.” Almost always the books of scholars are somehow oppressive, oppressed; the “specialist” emerges somewhere—his zeal, his seriousness, his fury, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunched back; every specialist has his hunched back. Every scholarly book also mirrors a soul that has become crooked; every craft makes crooked. You see the friends of your youth again after they have taken possession of their specialty—and always the opposite has happened, too! Always they themselves are now possessed by it and obsessed with it. Grown into their nook, crumpled beyond recognition, unfree, deprived of their balance, emaciated and angular all over except for one place where they are downright rotund—one feels moved and falls silent when one sees them again this way. Every craft, even if it should have a golden floor, has a leaden ceiling over it that presses and presses down upon the soul until that becomes queer and crooked. Nothing can be done about that. Let nobody suppose that one could possibly avoid such crippling by some artifice of education. On this earth one pays dearly for every kind of mastery, and perhaps one pays too dearly for everything. For having a specialty one pays by also being the victim of this specialty. But you would have it otherwise—cheaper and fairer and above all more comfortable—isn’t that right, my dear contemporaries? Well then, but in that case you also immediately get something else: instead of the craftsman and master, the “man of letters,” the dexterous, “polydexterous” man of letters who, to be sure, lacks the hunched back—not counting the posture he assumes before you, being the salesman of the spirit and the “carrier” of culture—the man of letters who really is nothing but “represents” almost everything, playing and “substituting” for the expert, and taking it upon himself in all modesty to get himself paid, honored, and celebrated in place of the expert. (Even genius does not compensate for such a deficiency, however much it may deceive people about it. This becomes clear to anyone who has ever watched our most gifted painters and musicians from nearby. All of them, with scarcely any exception, know how to use cunning inventions of manners, of makeshift devices, and even of principles to give themselves after the event an artificial semblance of such probity, of such solidity of training and culture—without, of course, managing to deceive themselves, without silencing for good their own bad conscience. For you surely know that all great modern artists suffer from a guilty conscience.)

My melancholy wants to rest in the hiding places and abysses of perfection: that is why I need music

I once made this clear to an upright Wagnerian, not without trouble; and I had reasons for adding: “Do be a little more honest with yourself! After all, we are not in the theater. In the theater one is honest only in the mass; as an individual one lies, one lies to oneself. One leaves oneself at home when one goes to the theater, one renounces the right to one’s own tongue and choice, to one’s taste, even to one’s courage as one has it and exercises it between one’s own four walls against both God and man. No one brings along the finest senses of his art to the theater, nor does the artist who works for the theater. There one is common people, audience, herd, female, pharisee, voting cattle, democrat, neighbor, fellow man; there even the most personal conscience is vanquished by the leveling magic of the great number; there stupidity has the effect of lasciviousness and contagion; the neighbor reigns, one becomes a mere neighbor.

logic calms and gives confidence—in short, a certain warm narrowness that keeps away fear and encloses one in optimistic horizons.

one should not wish to divest existence of its rich ambiguity: that is a dictate of good taste, gentlemen, the taste of reverence for everything that lies beyond your horizon. That the only justifiable interpretation of the world should be one in which you are justified because one can continue to work and do research scientifically in your sense (you really mean, mechanistically?)—an interpretation that permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, and touching, and nothing more—that is a crudity and naiveté, assuming that it is not a mental illness, an idiocy.

Why we look like Epicureans.— We are cautious, we modern men, about ultimate convictions. Our mistrust lies in wait for the enchantments and deceptions of the conscience that are involved in every strong faith,, every unconditional Yes and No. How is this to be explained? Perhaps what is to be found here is largely the care of the “burned child,” of the disappointed idealist; but there is also another, superior component: the jubilant curiosity of one who formerly stood in his corner and was driven to despair by his corner, and now delights and luxuriates in the opposite of a corner, in the boundless, in what is “free as such.” Thus an almost Epicurean bent for knowledge develops that will not easily Jet go of the questionable character of things; also an aversion to big moral words and gestures; a taste that rejects all crude, four-square opposites and is proudly conscious of its practice in having reservations. For this constitutes our pride, this slight tightening of the reins as our urge for certainty races ahead, this self-control of the rider during his wildest rides; for we still ride mad and fiery horses, and when we hesitate it is least of all danger that makes us hesitate.

“On the question of being understandable.— One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood. It is not by any means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone finds it impossible to understand: perhaps that was part of the author’s intention—he did not want to be understood by just “anybody.” All the nobler spirits and tastes select their audience when they wish to communicate; and choosing that, one at the same time erects barriers against “the others.” All the more subtle laws of any style have their origin at this point: they at the same time keep away, create a distance, forbid “entrance,” understanding, as said above—while they open the ears of those whose ears are related to ours.

our task is and remains above all not to mistake ourselves for others.” The name of this old hag was Truth.