Beyond Good and Evil
On the Prejudices of Philosophers:
- "The falseness of a judgement is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgement; in this respect our new language may sound strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating."
The Free Spirit:
- "Need I still say expressly after all this that they, too, will be free, very free spirits, these philosophers of the future -- though just as certainly they will not be merely free spirits but something more, higher, greater, and thoroughly different that does not want to be misunderstood and mistaken for something else."
- "Curious to a vice, investigators to the point of cruelty, with uninhibited fingers for the unfathomable, with teeth and stomachs for the most indigestible, ready for every feat that requires a sense of acuteness and acute senses, ready for every venture, thanks to an excess of 'free will,' with fore- and back-souls into whose ultimate intentions nobody can look so easily, with fore- and backgrounds which no foot is likely to explore to the end; concealed under cloaks of light, conquerors even if we look like heirs and prodigals, arrangers and collectors from morning till late, misers of our riches and our crammed drawers, economical in learning and forgetting, inventive in schemas, occasionally proud of tables of categories, occasionally pedants, occasionally night owls of work even in broad daylight"
What is Religious:
- "The love of truth has its reward in heaven and on earth."
Our Virtues:
- "Measure is alien to us; let us own it; our thrill is the thrill of the infinite, the unmeasured. Like a rider on a steed that flies forward, we drop the reins before the infinite, we modern men, like semi-barbarians -- and reach our bliss only where we are most -- in danger."
- " Honesty, supposing that this is our virtue from which we cannot get away, we free spirits -- well, let us work on it with all our malice and love and not weary of 'perfecting' ourselves in our virtue, the only one left us. May its splendor remain spread out one day like a gilded blue mocking evening light over this aging culture and its musty and gloomy seriousness! And if our honesty should nevertheless grow weary one day and sigh and stretch its limbs and find us too hard, and would like to have things better, easier, tenderer, like an agreeable vice -- let us remain hard, we last Stoics! And let us dispatch to her assistance whatever we have in us of devilry: our disgust with what is clumsy and approximate, our 'nitimur in vetitum,' our adventurous courage, our seasoned and choosy curiosity, our subtlest, most disguised, most spiritual will to power and overcoming of the world that flies and flutters covetously around all the realms of the future -- let us come to the assistance of our 'god' with all our 'devils' ! "
- "That commanding something which the people call 'the spirit' wants to be master in and around its own house and wants to feel that it is master; it has the will from multiplicity to simplicity, a will that ties up, tames, and is domineering and truly masterful. Its needs and capacities are so far the same as those which physiologists posit for everything that lives, grows, and multiplies. The spirit's power to appropriate the foreign stands revealed in its inclination to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, and to overlook or repulse whatever is totally contradictory -- just as it involuntarily emphasizes certain features and lines in what is foreign, in every piece of the 'external world,' retouching and falsifying the whole to suit itself. Its intent in all this is to incorporate new 'experiences,' to file new things in old files -- growth, in a word -- or, more precisely, the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power."
"Nur wer sich wandelt, bleibt mit mir verwandt." - Only those who change remain akin to me.
