Beyond Good and Evil

by Friedrich Nietzsche

converting every ‘Thus it happened’ into ‘Thus I willed it’.

He knew, for instance, that if he didn't practise hyperbole his voice would be unlikely to be heard at all, and that if he did he would be likely to be shrugged off as a mere ranter.

The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in antithetical values.

the act of being born plays no part in the procedure and progress of heredity, so ‘being conscious’ is in no decisive sense the opposite of the instinctive – most of a philosopher's conscious thinking is secretly directed and compelled into definite channels by his instincts. Behind all logic too and its apparent autonomy there stand evaluations, in plainer terms physiological demands for the preservation of a certain species of life.

To recognize untruth as a condition of life: that, to be sure, means to resist customary value-sentiments in a dangerous fashion; and a philosophy which ventures to do so places itself, by that act alone, beyond good and evil.

we really ought to get free from the seduction of words!

On the other hand: if your ship has been driven into these seas, very well! Now clench your teeth! Keep your eyes open! Keep a firm hand on the helm! – We sail straight over morality and past it, we flatten, we crush perhaps what is left of our own morality by venturing to voyage thither

choose the good solitude, the free, wanton, easy solitude which gives you too a right to remain in some sense good!

How poisonous, how cunning, how bad every protracted war makes one when it cannot be waged with open force!

all company is bad company except the company of one's equals

Few are made for independence - it is a privilege of the strong. And he who attempts it, having the completest right to it but without being compelled to, thereby proves that he is probably not only strong but also daring to the point of recklessness.

There are heights of the soul seen from which even tragedy ceases to be tragic;

What serves the higher type of man as food or refreshment must to a very different and inferior type be almost poison.

Books for everybody are always malodorous books: the smell of petty people clings to them. Where the people eats and drinks, even where it worships, there is usually a stink. One should not go into churches if one wants to breathe pure air. –

Later, when the youthful soul, tormented by disappointments, finally turns suspiciously on itself, still hot and savage even in its suspicion and pangs of conscience: how angry it is with itself now, how it impatiently rends itself, how it takes revenge for its long self-delusion, as if it had blinded itself deliberately! During this transition one punishes oneself by distrusting one's feelings; one tortures one's enthusiasm with doubts, indeed one feels that even a good conscience is a danger, as though a good conscience were a screening of oneself and a sign that one's subtler honesty had grown weary; and above all one takes sides, takes sides on principle, against ‘youth’. – A decade later: and one grasps that all this too – was still youth!

One must know how to conserve oneself: the sternest test of independence.

And how could there exist a ‘common good’! The expression is a self-contradiction: what can be common has ever but little value.

It is dreadful to die of thirst in the sea. Do you have to salt your truth so much that it can no longer even – quench thirst?

Terrible experiences make one wonder whether he who experiences them is not something terrible.

To be ashamed of one's immorality: that is a step on the ladder at the end of which one is also ashamed of one's morality.

One ought to depart from life as Odysseus departed from Nausicaa – blessing rather than in love with it.

To close your ears to even the best counter-argument once the decision has been taken: sign of a strong character. Thus an occasional will to stupidity.

There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena…

The will to overcome an emotion is ultimately only the will of another emotion or of several others.

The more abstract the truth you want to teach the more you must seduce the senses to it.

What we do in dreams we also do when we are awake: we invent and fabricate the person with whom we associate – and immediately forget we have done so.

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.

The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night.

In a lively conversation I often see before me the face of the person with whom I am speaking so clearly and subtly determined by the thought he is expressing or which I believe has been called up in him that this degree of clarity far surpasses the power of my eyesight – so that the play of the muscles and the expression of the eyes must have been invented by me. Probably the person was making a quite different face or none whatever.

It is as if, in his rejection of scepticism, they seemed to hear some evil, menacing sound from afar, as if some new explosive were being tested somewhere, a dynamite of the spirit, perhaps a newly discovered Russian nihiline, a pessimism bonae voluntatis which does not merely say No, will No, but – dreadful thought! does No.

there is today confessedly no better sedative and soporific than scepticism, the gentle, gracious, lulling poppy scepticism;

perhaps by saying after Montaigne ‘What do I know?’ Or after Socrates: ‘I know that I know nothing.’ Or: ‘Here I do not trust myself, here no door stands open to me.’ Or: ‘If it did stand open, why go straight in?’ Or: ‘What is the point of hasty hypotheses? To make no hypothesis at all could well be a part of good taste. Do you absolutely have to go straightening out what is crooked? Absolutely have to stop up every hole with oakum?

Is there not plenty of time? Does time not have time? Oh you rogues, are you unable to wait?

But that which becomes most profoundly sick and degenerates in such hybrids is the will:

they no longer have any conception of independence of decision, of the valiant feeling of pleasure in willing – even in their dreams they doubt the ‘freedom of the will’.

when ‘equality of rights’ could all too easily change into equality in wrongdoing: I mean into a general war on everything rare, strange, privileged, the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, creative fullness of power and mastery –

today, being noble, wanting to be by oneself, the ability to be different, independence and the need for self-responsibility pertains to the concept ‘greatness’; and the philosopher will betray something of his ideal when he asserts: ‘He shall be the greatest who can be the most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent, the man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, the superabundant of will; this shall be called greatness: the ability to be as manifold as whole, as vast as full.’ And, to ask it again: is greatness – possible today?

What a philosopher is, is hard to learn, because it cannot be taught: one has to ‘know’ it from experience – or one ought to be sufficiently proud not to know it.

perhaps, even if nothing else of today has a future, precisely our laughter may still have a future!

we modern men, like semi-barbarians – and attain our state of bliss only when we are most – in danger.

a thinker cannot relearn but only learn fully

The vain man takes pleasure in every good opinion he hears about himself (quite apart from any point of view of utility and likewise regardless of truth or falsehood), just as he suffers from every bad opinion: for he submits to both,

The mediocre alone have the prospect of continuing on and propagating themselves – they are the men of the future, the sole survivors; ‘be like them! become mediocre!’ is henceforth the only morality that has any meaning left, that still finds ears to hear it. – But it is difficult to preach, this morality of mediocrity! – for it can never admit what it is and what it wants! it has to speak of moderation and dignity and duty and love of one's neighbour – it will scarcely be able to conceal its irony! –

That which divides two people most profoundly is a differing sense and degree of cleanliness.

A human being who strives for something great regards everybody he meets on his way either as a means or as a delay and hindrance – or as a temporary resting-place.

In every kind of injury and loss the lower and coarser soul is better off than the nobler: the dangers facing the latter are bound to be greater, the probability that it will come to grief and perish is, considering the multiplicity of the conditions of its life, enormous. – When a lizard loses a finger that finger grows again: not so in the case of man. –

Men of profound sorrow give themselves away when they are happy: they have a way of grasping happiness as if they wanted to crush and smother it, from jealousy – alas, they know too well that it will flee away.

‘Bad! Bad! What? Is he not going – backwards?’ – Yes! But you ill understand him if you complain about it. He goes backwards as everyone goes backwards who wants to take a big jump. –

The noble soul has reverence for itself. –