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The things he chiefly argued for were anti-Christian things—the abandonment of the purely moral view of life, the rehabilitation of instinct, the dethronement of weakness and timidity as ideals, the renunciation of the whole hocus-pocus of dogmatic religion, the extermination of false aristocracies (of the priest, of the politician, of the plutocrat), the revival of the healthy, lordly “innocence” that was Greek. If he was anything in a word, Nietzsche was a Greek born two thousand years too late.
Christian ethics were quite as dubious, at bot tom, as Christian theology—that they were founded, just as surely as such childish fables as the story of Jonah and the whale, upon the peculiar prejudices and credulities, the special desires and appetites, of inferior men—that they warred upon the best interests of men of a better sort quite as unmistakably as the most extravagant of objective superstitions.
Democracy and free speech are not facets of one gem; democracy and free speech are eternal enemies.
What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity....
The most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by Christianity!—
Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for
power: whenever the will to power fails there is disaster.
My contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will—that the values of décadence, of nihilism,...
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Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect.
Nothing is more unhealthy, amid all our unhealthy modernism, than Christian pity.
Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth.
The “pure spirit” is a piece of pure stupidity: take away the nervous system and the senses, the so-called “mortal shell,” and the rest is miscalculation—that is all!...
Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of contact with actuality.
The truth is that there is no other alternative for gods: either they are the will to power—in which case they are national gods—or incapacity for power—in which case they have to be good....
In him war is declared on life, on nature, on the will to live! God becomes the formula for every slander upon the “here and now,” and for every lie about the “beyond”! In him nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is made holy!...
Buddhism is the only genuinely positive religion to be encountered in history,
He understands good, the state of goodness, as something which promotes health.
In Buddha’s teaching egoism is a duty. The “one thing needful,” the question “how can you be delivered from suffering,” regulates and determines the whole spiritual diet.
Christianity aims at mastering beasts of prey; its modus operandi is to make them ill—to make feeble is the Christian recipe for taming, for “civilizing.”
Truth and faith: here we have two wholly distinct worlds of ideas, almost two diametrically opposite worlds—the road to the one and the road to the other lie miles apart.
When a man is in love he endures more than at any
other time; he submits to anything.
This is what brought him to the cross: the proof thereof is to be found in the inscription that was put upon the cross. He died for his own sins—there is not the slightest ground for believing, no matter how often it is asserted, that he died for the sins of others. —
“Sin,” which means anything that puts a distance between God and man, is abolished—this is precisely the “glad tidings.” Eternal bliss is not merely promised, nor is it bound up with conditions: it is conceived as the only reality—what remains consists merely of signs useful in speaking of it.
Even a man who makes the most modest pretensions to integrity must know that a theologian, a priest, a pope of today not only errs when he speaks, but actually lies—and
and that he no longer escapes blame for his lie through “innocence” or “ignorance.” The priest knows, as every one knows, that there is no longer any “God,” or any “sinner,” or any “Saviour”—that “free will” and the “moral order of the world” are lies—: serious reflection, the profound self-conquest of the spirit, allow no man to pretend that he does not
know ...
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All the ideas of the church are now recognized for what they are—as the worst counterfeits in existence, invented to debase nature and all natural values; the priest himself is seen as he actually is—as the most dangero...
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Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfils; Christianity promises everything, but fulfils nothing.—Hard
What he himself didn’t believe was swallowed readily enough by the idiots among whom he spread his teaching.—What
What he wanted was power; in Paul the priest once more reached out for power—he had use only for such concepts, teachings and symbols as served the purpose of tyrannizing over the masses and organizing mobs.
Christianity is a revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground against everything that is lofty: the gospel of the “lowly” lowers....
The Christian, that ultima ratio of lying, is the Jew all over again—he is threefold the Jew....
Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose!—The
The Christian is simply a Jew of the “reformed” confession.—
Christian morality is refuted by its fors: its reasons are against it,—this makes it Christian.)
every word that comes from the lips of an “early Christian” is a lie, and his every act is instinctively dishonest—all his values, all his aims are noxious, but whoever he hates, whatever he hates, has real value....
One Jew more or less—what did it matter?...
If any one were to show us this Christian God, we’d be still less inclined to believe in him.—In
As a matter of fact no man can be a philologian or a physician without being also Antichrist.
he is bored and trying to kill time. Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.
What does he do? He creates man—man is entertaining....
But then he notices that man is also bored. God’s pity for the only form of distress that invades all paradises knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals.
Moral: science is the forbidden per se; it alone is forbidden.
This is all there is of morality.—“Thou shall not know”:—the
Man must not think.—And
the priest rules through the invention of sin.—
the service of truth is the hardest of all services.—What,
It means that a man must be severe with his own heart, that he must scorn “beautiful feelings,” and that he makes every Yea and Nay a matter of conscience!—Faith makes blessed: therefore, it lies....
the actual ulterior purpose of the whole system of salvation of the church is to make people
