The Portable Nietzsche

by Friedrich Nietzsche

As interpreters of our experiences. A kind of honesty has been alien to all founders of religions and others like them: they have never made their experiences a matter of conscience for knowledge. “What did I really experience? What happened in me then, and around me? Was my reason bright enough? Was my will turned against all deceptions of the senses and was it courageous in its resistance to the fantastic?”—none of them has raised such questions; all the dear religious people still do not raise such questions even now: rather, they have a thirst for things that are against reason, and they do not want to make it too hard for themselves to satisfy it. And so they experience “miracles” and “rebirths” and hear the voices of the little angels! We, however, we others, who thirst for reason, want to look our experiences as straight in the eye as if they represented a scientific experiment, hour after hour, day after day. We ourselves want to be our experiments and guinea pigs.