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O Voltaire! O humanity! O idiocy! There is something ticklish in “the truth,” and in the search for the truth; and if man goes about it too humanely—“il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien”—I wager he finds nothing!
One must subject oneself to one’s own tests that one is destined for independence and command, and do so at the right time. 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.
One must know how to conserve oneself—the best test of independence.
I should say that Christianity has hitherto been the most portentous of presumptions.
such men, with their “equality before God,” have hitherto swayed the destiny of Europe; until at last a dwarfed, almost ludicrous species has been produced, a gregarious animal, something obliging, sickly, mediocre, the European of the present day.
It is not the strength, but the duration of great sentiments that makes great men.
We all feign to ourselves that we are simpler than we are, we thus relax ourselves away from our fellows.
One is punished best for one’s virtues.
He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.
There is a haughtiness of kindness which has the appearance of wickedness. 185. “I dislike him.”—Why?—“I am not a match for him.”—Did any one ever answer so?
It is always more obvious to me that the philosopher, as a man indispensable for the morrow and the day after the morrow, has ever found himself, and has been obliged to find himself, in contradiction to the day in which he lives; his enemy has always been the ideal of his day.
the philosopher will betray something of his own 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, and of super-abundance of will; precisely this shall be called greatness: as diversified as can be entire, as ample as can be full.” And to ask once more the question: Is greatness possible—nowadays?
Almost everything that we call “higher culture” is based upon the spiritualizing and intensifying of cruelty—this is my thesis; the “wild beast” has not been slain at all, it lives, it flourishes, it has only been—transfigured.
“He who has not a hard heart when young, will never have one.”
Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousy—ah, they know only too well that it will flee from them!
