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I am by nature even the opposite of the type of person who has been admired as virtuous till now. Between ourselves, it seems to me that that is precisely something I can be proud of. I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus;* I would prefer to be a satyr rather than a saint.
Reality has been robbed of its value, its sense, its truthfulness insofar as an ideal world was faked up... The ‘real world’ and the ‘apparent world’ — in plain words: the fake world and reality*... The lie of the ideal has till now been the curse on reality; on its account humanity itself has become fake and false right down to its deepest instincts—to the point of worshipping values opposite to the only ones which would guarantee it a flourishing, a future, the exalted right to a future.
Anyone who knows how to breathe the air of my writings knows that it is an air of the heights, a bracing air. You must be made for it, or else you are in no little danger of catching cold in it. The ice is near, the solitude is immense—but how peacefully everything lies in the light! how freely you breathe! how much you feel to be beneath you!—Philosophy, as I have understood and lived it so far, is choosing to live in ice and high mountains—seeking out everything alien and questionable in existence, everything that has hitherto been excluded by morality.
Error (belief in the ideal) is not blindness, error is cowardice...
You revere me: but what if your reverence should some day collapse? Be careful lest a statue fall and kill you!
You had not yet sought yourselves: then you found me. Thus do all believers; that is why all belief is worth so little. Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me* will I return to you..
He guesses correctly what will heal harm, he exploits strokes of bad luck to his advantage; what does not kill him makes him stronger.* Instinctively he gathers together from everything he sees, hears, experiences, his aggregate: he is a selective principle, he lets a great deal go. He is always in his kind of company, whether he is dealing with books, people, or landscapes: he honours by choosing, by granting admission, by trusting. He reacts to every kind of stimulus slowly, with the slowness which years of caution and a willed pride have cultivated in him—he examines the stimulus as it
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I am always a match for a chance occurrence; I need to be unprepared to be master of myself.
It seems to me, furthermore, that even the rudest word, the rudest letter is more good-natured, more honourable than silence. Those who keep quiet almost always lack refinement and heartfelt courtesy; silence is an objection, swallowing things necessarily makes for a bad character—it even ruins the stomach.
Resentment, born of weakness, harms no one more than the weak person himself
Treating oneself as a fate, not wanting oneself to be ‘otherwise’—in such circumstances this is great good sense itself.
My practice of war can be summed up in four propositions. First: I attack only causes that are victorious—on occasion, I wait till they are victorious. Second: I attack causes only when there are no allies to be found, when I am standing alone—when I am compromising myself alone... I have never made a move in public that was not compromising: this is my criterion for right action. Third: I never attack people—I make use of a person only as a kind of strong magnifying glass with which one can make visible some general but insidious and quite intangible exigency. This is how I attacked David
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As has always been my custom—extreme honesty with myself is the prerequisite of my existence;
for everything momentous in it was always propelled in my direction by chance, never by a recommendation
Perhaps I am even a little envious of Stendhal? He robbed me of the best atheist joke, which was just made for me to tell: ‘God’s only excuse is that he doesn’t exist’... I myself said somewhere:* what has been the greatest objection to existence so far? God...
Another ruse and self-defence consists in reacting as rarely as possible and withdrawing from situations and conditions in which one would be condemned to hang one’s ‘freedom’, one’s initiative out to dry, so to speak, and become a mere reagent.
In the early morning at break of day, when you are at your freshest, at the dawning of your strength, to read a book— that is what I call depraved!
Suffering from solitude is an objection, too—I have only ever suffered from ‘multitude’...
My formula for human greatness is amor fati:* not wanting anything to be different, not forwards, not backwards, not for all eternity. Not just enduring what is necessary, still less concealing it—all idealism is hypocrisy in the face of what is necessary—but loving it...
some are born posthumously.
Ultimately no one can hear in things—books included—more than he already knows. If you have no access to something from experience, you will have no ear for it.
If I conjure up the image of a perfect reader, it always turns into a monster of courage and curiosity, and what’s more something supple, cunning, cautious, a born adventurer and discoverer.
And so as to leave no doubts about my views, which in this respect are as honourable as they are strict, I want to share one more principle from my moral code against vice: with the word ‘vice’ I am combating every kind of anti-nature* or, if you like pretty words, idealism. The principle runs thus: ‘preaching chastity is a public incitement to perversity. All despising of the sexual life, all besmirching of it by calling it “;impure” is the crime of crimes against life—it is the true sin against the holy spirit of life.’
‘Rationality’ against instinct. ‘Rationality’ at any price as a dangerous, life-undermining power!
Anyone who not only understands the word ‘Dionysian’ but understands himself in the word ‘Dionysian’ has no need for a refutation of Plato or Christianity or Schopenhauer—he can smell the decay...
Basically I had put into practice one of Stendhal’s maxims:* his advice is to make one’s entry into society with a duel.
the ideal is not refuted—it dies of exposure...
With a look of pity I saw how utterly emaciated I was, how I had wasted away: realities were entirely lacking within my knowledge, and the ‘idealities’ were worth damn all!—I was gripped by a really burning thirst: from then on, indeed, I pursued nothing but physiology, medicine, and natural science—I returned even to truly historical studies only when my task compelled me imperiously to do so. That was also when I first guessed the connection between an activity chosen contrary to one’s instinct, a so-called ‘profession’, to which one is called last of all ,* and that need to have one’s
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At that stage my instinct decided implacably against yet more giving way, going along with things, mistaking myself. Any kind of life, the most unfavourable conditions, illness, poverty—anything seemed to me preferable to that unworthy ‘selflessness’ which I had entered into at first from ignorance, from youth, and in which I later got bogged down from inertia, so-called ‘feelings of obligation’.
The moral individual is no closer to the intelligible world than to the physical one—for there is no intelligible world...”
My task, that of preparing the way for a moment of highest self-contemplation on humanity’s part, a great noon-day when it will look back and look ahead, when it will step out from under the dominance of chance and the priests and for the first time ask the question ‘why?’ ‘what for?’ as a whole —this task follows necessarily from the insight that humanity has not found the right way by itself, that it is definitely not divinely ruled but that precisely among its holiest conceptions of value the instinct of negation, of corruption, the décadence instinct has seductively held sway.
Willing-no-more and valuing-no-more and creating-no-more: oh, that such great weariness might remain ever far from me!
I will emphasize one final point, prompted by the highlighted verse. For a Dionysian task the hardness of the hammer, the pleasure even in destroying are crucial preconditions. The imperative ‘Become hard!,,* the deepest conviction that all creators are hard, is the true badge of a Dionysian nature.
‘For man will rather will nothingness than not will’
Some day my name will be linked to the memory of something monstrous, of a crisis as yet unprecedented on earth, the most profound collision of consciences, a decision conjured up against everything hitherto believed, demanded, hallowed. I am not a man, I am dynamite.
But my truth is terrifying, for lies were called truth so far.—Revaluation of all values: that is my formula for the highest act of self-reflection on the part of humanity, which has become flesh* and genius in me.
Zarathustra leaves no room for doubt here: he says that it was precisely knowing the good people, the ‘best’ people, that made him shudder before humanity as a whole; it was this revulsion that gave him the wings ‘on which to soar into distant futures’*—he makes no secret of the fact that his type of man, a relatively superhuman type, is superhuman precisely in relation to the good, that the good and the just would call his overman a devil...
There just was no psychology before me.—Being the first here can be a curse, at any rate it is a destiny: for you are also the first to despise... Disgust at man is my danger*
The concept ‘hereafter’, ‘true world’ invented in order to devalue the only world there is—so as to leave no goal, no reason, no task for our earthly reality!
