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in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross.
Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful nor noble, and has no desire to become any of these; it is by no means striving to imitate mankind! It is quite impervious to all our aesthetic and moral judgements!
The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.
‘Where has God gone?’ he cried. ‘I shall tell you. We have killed him – you and I. We are all his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is more
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After Buddha was dead, his shadow was for centuries still pointed out in a cave – an immense, frightful shadow. God is dead: but, men being what they are, perhaps there will for millennia still be caves in which his shadow is pointed out. – And we – we still have to conquer his shadow too!
For believe me! – the secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously!
What alone can our teaching be? – That no one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, not he himself
For certain men feel so great a need to exercise their strength and lust for power that, in default of other objects or because their efforts in other directions have always miscarried, they at last hit upon the idea of tyrannizing over certain parts of their own nature, over, as it were, segments or stages of themselves.
In every ascetic morality man worships a part of himself as God and for that he needs to diabolize the other part.
Plato was the incarnate desire to become the supreme philosophical lawgiver and founder of states; he appears to have suffered terribly from the non-fulfilment of his nature, and towards the end of his life his soul became full of the blackest gall.[…]
When man possesses the feeling of power he feels and calls himself good: and it is precisely then that the others upon whom he has to discharge his power feel and call him evil!
what one formerly did ‘for the sake of God’ one now does for the sake of money, that is to say, for the sake of that which now gives the highest feeling of power and good conscience.
he who cannot obey himself will be commanded.
The will of the weaker persuades it to serve the stronger; its will wants to be master over those weaker still: this delight alone it is unwilling to forgo.
‘The living creature values many things higher than life itself: yet out of this evaluation itself speaks – the will to power!’
What is good? – All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad? – All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? – The feeling that power increases – that a resistance is overcome.
What is the ape to men? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And just so shall man be to the superman: a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment.
Man is a rope, fastened between animal and superman – a rope over an abyss.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-across and a down-going.
Amor fati: may that be my love from now on! I want to wage no war against the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. May looking away be my only form of negation! And, all in all: I want to be at all times hereafter only an affirmer!
What if a demon crept after you one day or night in your loneliest solitude and said to you: ‘This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence – and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and in the same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hour-glass of existence will be turned again and again
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all things recur eternally and we ourselves with them, and that we have already existed an infinite number of times before and all things with us.
You higher men, learn this, learn that joy wants eternity, joy wants the eternity of all things, wants deep, deep, deep eternity!
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity. Not merely to endure that which happens of necessity, still less to dissemble it – all idealism is untruthfulness in the face of necessity – but to love it …
I fear that the animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason – as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal.
The perfect clarity of all dream images, whose presupposition is an unconditional belief in their reality, recalls to us states of earlier mankind, in which hallucination was extraordinarily common and sometimes seized entire communities, entire peoples simultaneously. Thus: in sleep and dreams we once again go through the curriculum of earlier humanity.
How can anyone become a thinker if he does not spend at least a third of the day without passions, people and books?
What does not kill me makes me stronger.
