_To recognise untruth as a condition of life:_ that is certainly to
impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a
philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself
beyond good and evil. 9
Psychologists should bethink themselves before putting down the
instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic
being. A living thing seeks above all to _discharge its strength_--life
itself is _Will to Power;_ self-preservation is only one of the
indirect and most frequent _results_ thereof. 20
It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is the
privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best
right, but without being _obliged_ to do so, proves that he is probably
not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. 43
The virtues of the common man would perhaps mean vice and weakness in a
philosopher; it might be possible for a highly developed man, supposing
him to degenerate and go to ruin, to acquire qualities thereby alone,
for the sake of which he would have to be honoured as a saint in the
lower world into which he had sunk. 44
Books for the general reader are always ill-smelling books, the odour
of paltry people clings to them. Where the populace eat and drink, and
even where they reverence, it is accustomed to stink. One should not go
into churches if one wishes to breathe pure air. 44
"Will" can naturally only operate on "will"--and not on "matter"
(not on "nerves," for instance): in short, the hypothesis must be
hazarded, whether will does not operate on will wherever "effects" are
recognised--and whether all mechanical action, inasmuch as a power
operates therein, is not just the power of will, the effect of will.
Granted, finally, that we succeed in explaining our entire instinctive
life as the development and ramification of one fundamental form of
will--namely, the Will to Power, as _my_ thesis puts it; granted that
all organic functions could be traced back to this Will to Power, and
that the solution of the problem of generation and nutrition--it is one
problem--could also be found therein: one would thus have acquired the
right to define _all_ active force unequivocally as _Will to Power._
The world seen from within, the world defined and designated according
to its "intelligible character"--it would simply be "Will to Power,"
and nothing else. 52
Happiness and virtue are no arguments. It is willingly forgotten,
however, even on the part of thoughtful minds, that to make unhappy
and to make bad are just as little counter-arguments. A thing could be
_true,_ although it were in the highest degree injurious and dangerous;
indeed, the fundamental constitution of existence might be such that
one succumbed by a full knowledge of it--so that the strength of a mind
might be measured by the amount of "truth" it could endure--or to speak
more plainly, by the extent to which it _required_ truth attenuated,
veiled, sweetened, damped, and falsified. 53-54
Everything that is profound loves the mask; the profoundest things have
a hatred even of figure and likeness. Should not the _contrary_ only be
the right disguise for the shame of a God to go about in? 54-55
One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people.
"Good" is no longer good when one's neighbour takes it into his mouth.
And how could there be a "common good." The expression contradicts
itself; that which can be common is always of small value. In the end
things must be as they are and have always been--the great things
remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and
thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for
the rare. 57-58
In every country of Europe, and the same in America, there is at
present ... a very narrow, prepossessed, enchained class of spirits....
Briefly and regrettably, they belong to the _levellers,_ these wrongly
named "free spirits"--as glib-tongued and scribe-fingered slaves of
the democratic taste and its "modern ideas"; all of them men without
solitude, without personal solitude, blunt honest fellows to whom
neither courage nor honourable conduct ought to be denied; only, they
are not free, and are ludicrously superficial, especially in their
innate partiality for seeing the cause of almost _all_ human misery
and failure in the old forms in which society has hitherto existed--a
notion which happily inverts the truth entirely. 53-59
We believe that severity, violence, slavery, danger in the street and
in the heart, secrecy, stoicism, tempter's art and revelry of every
kind,--that everything wicked, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and
serpentine in man, serves as well for the elevation of the human
species as its opposite.... 59
The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice: the sacrifice of
all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit; it is at the
same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation. 65
The mightiest men have hitherto always bowed reverently before
the saint, as the enigma of self-subjugation and utter voluntary
privation.--Why did they thus bow? They divined in him--and as it were
behind the questionableness of his frail and wretched appearance--the
superior force which wished to test itself by such a subjugation; the
strength and love of power, and knew how to honour it: they honoured
something in themselves when they honoured the saint.... The mighty
ones of the world learned to have a new fear before him, they divined
a new power, a strange, still unconquered enemy:--it was the "Will to
Power" which obliged them to halt before the saint. 70-71
Perhaps the most solemn conceptions that have caused the most fighting
and suffering, the conceptions "God" and "sin," will one day seem to us
of no more importance than a child's plaything or a child's pain seems
to an old man.... 75
To love mankind _for God's sake_--this has so far been the noblest and
remotest sentiment to which mankind has attained. 79
For those who are strong and independent, destined and trained
to command, in whom the judgment and skill of a ruling race is
incorporated, religion is an additional means for overcoming, betraying
and surrendering to the former the conscience of the latter, their
inmost heart, which would fain escape obedience. 80
Asceticism and Puritanism are almost indispensable means of educating
and ennobling a race which seeks to rise above its hereditary baseness
and work itself upward to future supremacy. And finally, to ordinary
men, to the majority of the people, who exist for service and general
utility, and are only so far entitled to exist, religion gives
invaluable contentedness with their lot and condition, peace of heart,
ennoblement of obedience, additional social happiness and sympathy,
with something of transfiguration and embellishment, something of
justification of all the commonplaceness, all the meanness, all the
semi-animal poverty of their souls. 81
"Knowledge for its own sake"--that is the last snare laid by morality:
we are thereby completely entangled in morals once more. 85