The Complete Works of Nietzsche: including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Human All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy, and many more

by Friedrich Nietzsche

One virtue is more virtue than two,

I

love him who castigates his God because he loves Him: for by the wrath of his God he must perish.

Do you forget all those other things which would in their turn have to support you for all eternity, just as they have borne with you up to the present

Other men are formed of such peculiar material—it need not be a particularly noble one, but simply rarer—that they are sure to fare ill except in one single instance: when they can live according to their own designs,—in all other cases the injury has to be borne by society.

I wish that everybody may be possessed of as much artistic capacity as will enable him to set off his virtues by means of his weaknesses, and to make us, through his weaknesses, desirous

of acquiring his virtues:

Dignity and Timidity.—Ceremonies, official robes and court dresses, grave countenances, solemn aspects, the slow pace, involved speech—everything, in short, known as dignity—are all pretences adopted by those who are timid at heart: they wish to make themselves feared (themselves or the things they represent). The fearless (i.e. originally those who naturally inspire others with awe) have no need of dignity and ceremonies: they bring into repute—or, still more, into ill-repute—honesty and straightforward words and bearing, [pg 231] as characteristics of their self-confident awefulness.

On German Virtue.—How

For our musicians have not the slightest suspicion that it is their own history, the history of the disfigurement of the soul, which they are transposing into music.

while in other and more intelligent races

Independence (which in its weakest form is called “freedom of thought”) is the type of resignation which the tyrannical

man ends by accepting—he who for a long time had [pg 240] been looking for something to govern, but without finding anything except himself.