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Every select man strives instinctively for a citadel and a privacy, where he is FREE from the crowd, the many, the majority—where
(all intercourse is bad intercourse except with one's equals):—that
so-called cynics, those who simply recognize the animal, the commonplace and "the rule" in themselves, and at the same time have so much spirituality and ticklishness as to make them talk of themselves
And no one is such a LIAR as the indignant man.
And with regard to Aristophanes—that transfiguring, complementary genius, for whose sake one PARDONS all Hellenism for having existed,
Our deepest insights must—and should—appear as follies, and under certain circumstances as crimes, when they come unauthorizedly to the ears of those who are not disposed and predestined for them.
One should not go into churches if one wishes to breathe PURE air.
Elitism
Throughout the longest period of human history—one calls it the prehistoric period—the value or non-value of an action was inferred from its CONSEQUENCES; the action in itself was not taken into consideration, any more than its origin; but pretty much as in China at present, where the distinction or disgrace of a child redounds to its parents, the retro-operating power of success or failure was what induced men to think well or ill of an action. Let us call this period the PRE-MORAL period of mankind; the imperative, "Know thyself!" was then still unknown.—In
the origin of an action was interpreted in the most definite sense possible, as origin out of an INTENTION;
Is it not possible, however, that the necessity may now have arisen of again making up our minds with regard to the reversing and fundamental shifting of values, owing to a new self-consciousness and acuteness in man—is
It cannot be helped: the sentiment of surrender, of sacrifice for one's neighbour, and all self-renunciation-morality, must be mercilessly called to account, and brought to judgment;
"Are they not perhaps—DECEPTIONS?"—That they PLEASE—him who has them, and him who enjoys their fruit, and also the mere spectator—that is still no argument in their FAVOUR, but just calls for caution. Let us therefore be cautious!
But the truth should be pleasing
the ERRONEOUSNESS of the world in which we think we live is the surest and most certain thing our eyes can light upon:
we have now to cease being "MERELY moral" men!
It is nothing more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than semblance;
Indeed, what is it that forces us in general to the supposition that there is an essential opposition of "true" and "false"?
And to any one who suggested: "But to a fiction belongs an originator?"—might it not be bluntly replied: WHY? May not this "belong" also belong to the fiction?
we cannot sink or rise to any other "reality" but just that of our impulses—for
The question is ultimately whether we really recognize the will as OPERATING, whether we believe in the causality of the will; if we do so—and fundamentally our belief IN THIS is just our belief in causality itself—we MUST make the attempt to posit hypothetically the causality of the will as the only causality.
one would thus have acquired the right to define ALL active force unequivocally as WILL TO POWER.
A thing could be TRUE, although it were in the highest degree injurious and dangerous;
Everything that is profound loves the mask: the profoundest things have a hatred even of figure and likeness.
Should not the CONTRARY only be the right disguise for the shame of a God to go about in?
Poppycock--like "'I didn't do it' is what the guilty would say". And what about Christ's being a paradox, or the Father's being unseen?
A man who has depths in his shame meets his destiny and his delicate decisions upon paths which few ever reach,
One must not avoid one's tests, although they constitute perhaps the most dangerous game one can play, and are in the end tests made only before ourselves and before no other judge.
Not to cleave to any person, be it even the dearest—every person is a prison and also a recess.
One must know how TO CONSERVE ONESELF—the best test of independence.
philosophers of the future might rightly, perhaps also wrongly, claim to be designated as "tempters."
One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people.
Need I say expressly after all this that they will be free, VERY free spirits, these philosophers of the future—as
these wrongly named "free spirits"—as glib-tongued and scribe-fingered slaves of the democratic taste and its "modern ideas"
What they would fain attain with all their strength, is the universal, green-meadow happiness of the herd,
—and suffering itself is looked upon by them as something which must be DONE AWAY WITH.
Not Christians
everything wicked, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and serpentine in man, serves as well for the elevation of the human species as its opposite—we
that wide-spread heaven of clear, wicked spirituality, which, from above, would be able to oversee, arrange, and effectively formulize this mass of dangerous and painful experiences.—But
Faith, such as early Christianity desired, and not infrequently achieved in the midst of a skeptical and southernly free-spirited world, which had centuries of struggle between philosophical schools behind it and in it, counting besides the education in tolerance which the Imperium Romanum gave—this faith is NOT that sincere, austere slave-faith by which perhaps a Luther or a Cromwell, or some other northern barbarian of the spirit remained attached to his God and Christianity, it is much rather the faith of Pascal, which resembles in a terrible manner a continuous suicide of reason—a tough,
...more
Modern men, with their obtuseness as regards all Christian nomenclature, have no longer the sense for the terribly superlative conception which was implied to an antique taste by the paradox of the formula, "God on the Cross".
was the Orient, the PROFOUND Orient, it was the Oriental slave who thus took revenge on Rome and its noble, light-minded toleration, on the Roman "Catholicism" of non-faith, and it was always not the faith, but the freedom from the faith, the half-stoical and smiling indifference to the seriousness of the faith, which made the slaves indignant at their masters and revolt against them.
Wherever the religious neurosis has appeared on the earth so far, we find it connected with three dangerous prescriptions as to regimen: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence—but
It seems that the Latin races are far more deeply attached to their Catholicism than we Northerners are to Christianity generally, and that consequently unbelief in Catholic countries means something quite different from what it does among Protestants—namely, a sort of revolt against the spirit of the race, while with us it is rather a return to the spirit (or non-spirit) of the race.
—"DISONS DONC HARDIMENT QUE LA RELIGION EST UN PRODUIT DE L'HOMME NORMAL, QUE L'HOMME EST LE PLUS DANS LE VRAI QUANT IL EST LE PLUS RELIGIEUX ET LE PLUS ASSURE D'UNE DESTINEE INFINIE.... C'EST QUAND IL EST BON QU'IL VEUT QUE LA VIRTU CORRESPONDE A UN ORDER ETERNAL, C'EST QUAND IL CONTEMPLE LES CHOSES D'UNE MANIERE DESINTERESSEE QU'IL TROUVE LA MORT REVOLTANTE ET ABSURDE. COMMENT NE PAS SUPPOSER QUE C'EST DANS CES MOMENTS-LA, QUE L'HOMME VOIT LE MIEUX?"...
The passion for God: there are churlish, honest-hearted, and importunate kinds of it, like that of Luther—the whole of Protestantism lacks the southern DELICATEZZA.
I'm proud that he attacks Lutheranism more than RCC
they honoured something in themselves when they honoured the saint.
—it was the "Will to Power" which obliged them to halt before the saint.
perhaps he will find that the New Testament, the book of grace, still appeals more to his heart (there is much of the odour of the genuine, tender, stupid beadsman and petty soul in it). To have bound up this New Testament (a kind of ROCOCO of taste in every respect) along with the Old Testament into one book, as the "Bible," as "The Book in Itself," is perhaps the greatest audacity and "sin against the Spirit" which literary Europe has upon its conscience.
Why Atheism nowadays? "The father" in God is thoroughly refuted; equally so "the judge," "the rewarder." Also his "free will": he does not hear—and even if he did, he would not know how to help. The worst is that he seems incapable of communicating himself clearly; is he uncertain?—This is what I have made out (by questioning and listening at a variety of conversations) to be the cause of the decline of European theism; it appears to me that though the religious instinct is in vigorous growth,—it rejects the theistic satisfaction with profound distrust.
Modern philosophy, as epistemological skepticism, is secretly or openly ANTI-CHRISTIAN,
"think" the condition, and "I" the conditioned; "I," therefore, only a synthesis which has been MADE by thinking itself.
Then, during the moral epoch of mankind, they sacrificed to their God the strongest instincts they possessed, their "nature"; THIS festal joy shines in the cruel glances of ascetics and "anti-natural" fanatics.
To sacrifice God for nothingness—this paradoxical mystery of the ultimate cruelty has been reserved for the rising generation; we all know something thereof already.
