Beyond Good and Evil

by Friedrich Nietzsche

laughing is a bad infirmity of human nature, which every thinking mind will strive to overcome” (Hobbes)

supposing that gods, too, philosophize, which has been suggested to me by many an inference—I should not doubt that they also know how to laugh the while in a superhuman and new way—and at the expense of all serious things. Gods enjoy mockery: it seems they cannot suppress laughter even during holy rites.

what is to those who follow him one more constraint to press ever closer to him in order to follow him ever more inwardly and thoroughly—the

richer In himself, newer to himself than before, broken open, blown at and sounded out by a thawing wind, perhaps more unsure, tenderer, more fragile, more broken, but full of hopes that as yet have no name, full of new will and currents, full of new dissatisfaction and undertows—but

many strange and not undangerous spirits have crossed my path, too, but above all he of whom I was speaking just now, and he again and again—namely, no less a one than the god Dionysus, that great ambiguous one and tempter god to whom I once offered, as you know, in all secrecy and reverence, my first-born

We humans are—more humane.