Ecce Homo

by Friedrich Nietzsche

Another ideal runs ahead of us, a strange, seductive, dangerous ideal to which we do not want to convert anyone because we do not easily admit that anyone has a right to it: the ideal of a spirit who naively, that is to say impulsively and from overflowing plenitude and power, plays with everything hitherto called holy, good, untouchable, divine; for whom the highest things by which the people reasonably enough take their standards would signify something like a danger, a corruption, a degradation, or at least a recreation, a blindness, a temporary self-forgetfulness; the ideal of a human-super-human well-being and well-wishing which will often enough seem inhuman, for example when it is set beside the whole of earthly seriousness hitherto, beside every kind of solemnity in gesture, word, tone, glance, morality and task as their most corporal involuntary parody – and with which, in spite of all that, perhaps the great seriousness first arises, the real question-mark is first set up, the destiny of the soul veers round, the clock-hand moves on, the tragedy begins …’