Beyond Good and Evil, passage 899

Perhaps the paradox of his situation becomes so dreadful that, precisely where he has learnt GREAT SYMPATHY, together with great CONTEMPT, the multitude, the educated, and the visionaries, have on their part learnt great reverence--reverence for "great men" and marvelous animals, for the sake of whom one blesses and honours the fatherland, the earth, the dignity of mankind, and one's own self, to whom one points the young, and in view of whom one educates them.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 314

69. One has regarded life carelessly, if one has failed to see the hand that--kills with leniency.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 959

One here sees at once that it is not only shame that this divinity lacks;--and in general there are good grounds for supposing that in some things the Gods could all of them come to us men for instruction. We men are--more human.--

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 492

His fundamental desire is that the war which is IN HIM should come to an end; happiness appears to him in the character of a soothing medicine and mode of thought (for instance, Epicurean or Christian); it is above all things the happiness of repose, of undisturbedness, of repletion, of final unity--it is the "Sabbath of Sabbaths," to use the expression of the holy rhetorician, St.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 68

12. As regards materialistic atomism, it is one of the best-refuted theories that have been advanced, and in Europe there is now perhaps no one in the learned world so unscholarly as to attach serious signification to it, except for convenient everyday use (as an abbreviation of the means of expression)--thanks chiefly to the Pole Boscovich: he and the Pole Copernicus have hitherto been the greatest and most successful opponents of ocular evidence.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 612

In short, you psychologists, study the philosophy of the "rule" in its struggle with the "exception": there you have a spectacle fit for Gods and godlike malignity! Or, in plainer words, practise vivisection on "good people," on the "homo bonae voluntatis," ON YOURSELVES!

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 347

101. A discerning one might easily regard himself at present as the animalization of God.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 16

WHO is it really that puts questions to us here? WHAT really is this "Will to Truth" in us? In fact we made a long halt at the question as to the origin of this Will--until at last we came to an absolute standstill before a yet more fundamental question. We inquired about the VALUE of this Will. Granted that we want the truth: WHY NOT RATHER untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance?

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 253

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 of will, in which they recognized their own strength and love of power, and knew how to honour it: they honoured something in themselves when they honoured the saint.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 853

It may be looked upon as the result of an extraordinary atavism, that the ordinary man, even at present, is still always WAITING for an opinion about himself, and then instinctively submitting himself to it; yet by no means only to a "good" opinion, but also to a bad and unjust one (think, for instance, of the greater part of the self-appreciations and self-depreciations which believing women learn from their confessors, and which in general the believing Christian learns from his Church).

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 788

That, however, which offends even in the humanest Englishman is his lack of music, to speak figuratively (and also literally): he has neither rhythm nor dance in the movements of his soul and body; indeed, not even the desire for rhythm and dance, for "music." Listen to him speaking; look at the most beautiful Englishwoman WALKING--in no country on earth are there more beautiful doves and swans; finally, listen to them singing! But I ask too much...

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 723

"HE has as much, and knows as much, philosophy as a peasant or a corps-student," said the one--"he is still innocent. But what does that matter nowadays! It is the age of the masses: they lie on their belly before everything that is massive. And so also in politicis.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 421

179. The consequences of our actions seize us by the forelock, very indifferent to the fact that we have meanwhile "reformed."

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 635

The very decided Yea and Nay of their palate, their promptly ready disgust, their hesitating reluctance with regard to everything strange, their horror of the bad taste even of lively curiosity, and in general the averseness of every distinguished and self-sufficing culture to avow a new desire, a dissatisfaction with its own condition, or an admiration of what is strange: all this determines and disposes them unfavourably even towards the best things of the world which are not their property or could not become their prey--and no faculty is more unintelligible to such men than just this historical sense, with its truckling, plebeian curiosity.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 90

More rigorous minds, however, learnt at last to get along without this "earth-residuum," and perhaps some day we shall accustom ourselves, even from the logician's point of view, to get along without the little "one" (to which the worthy old "ego" has refined itself).

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 976

This song is done,--the sweet sad cry of rue Sang out its end; A wizard wrought it, he the timely friend, The midday-friend,--no, do not ask me who; At midday 'twas, when one became as two.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 214

"My opinion is MY opinion: another person has not easily a right to it"--such a philosopher of the future will say, perhaps. 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.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 442

How much trouble have the poets and orators of every nation given themselves!--not excepting some of the prose writers of today, in whose ear dwells an inexorable conscientiousness--"for the sake of a folly," as utilitarian bunglers say, and thereby deem themselves wise--"from submission to arbitrary laws," as the anarchists say, and thereby fancy themselves "free," even free-spirited.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 394

151. It is not enough to possess a talent: one must also have your permission to possess it;--eh, my friends?

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 375

131. The sexes deceive themselves about each other: the reason is that in reality they honour and love only themselves (or their own ideal, to express it more agreeably). Thus man wishes woman to be peaceable: but in fact woman is ESSENTIALLY unpeaceable, like the cat, however well she may have assumed the peaceable demeanour.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 637

That as men of the "historical sense" we have our virtues, is not to be disputed:--we are unpretentious, unselfish, modest, brave, habituated to self-control and self-renunciation, very grateful, very patient, very complaisant--but with all this we are perhaps not very "tasteful." Let us finally confess it, that what is most difficult for us men of the "historical sense" to grasp, feel, taste, and love, what finds us fundamentally prejudiced and almost hostile, is precisely the perfection and ultimate maturity in every culture and art, the essentially noble in works and men, their moment of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, the goldenness and coldness which all things show that have perfected themselves.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 378

135. Pharisaism is not a deterioration of the good man; a considerable part of it is rather an essential condition of being good.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 727

NOT great!"--The old men had obviously become heated as they thus shouted their "truths" in each other's faces, but I, in my happiness and apartness, considered how soon a stronger one may become master of the strong, and also that there is a compensation for the intellectual superficialising of a nation--namely, in the deepening of another.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 431

It was precisely owing to moral philosophers' knowing the moral facts imperfectly, in an arbitrary epitome, or an accidental abridgement--perhaps as the morality of their environment, their position, their church, their Zeitgeist, their climate and zone--it was precisely because they were badly instructed with regard to nations, eras, and past ages, and were by no means eager to know about these matters, that they did not even come in sight of the real problems of morals--problems which only disclose themselves by a comparison of MANY kinds of morality.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 210

Not to cleave to one's own liberation, to the voluptuous distance and remoteness of the bird, which always flies further aloft in order always to see more under it--the danger of the flier.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 598

There is, in fine, a gradation of rank in psychical states, to which the gradation of rank in the problems corresponds; and the highest problems repel ruthlessly every one who ventures too near them, without being predestined for their solution by the loftiness and power of his spirituality.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 539

This is in the last instance a question of taste, if it has not really been a question of conscience.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 150

For the indignant man, and he who perpetually tears and lacerates himself with his own teeth (or, in place of himself, the world, God, or society), may indeed, morally speaking, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense he is the more ordinary, more indifferent, and less instructive case. And no one is such a LIAR as the indignant man.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 329

83. INSTINCT--When the house is on fire one forgets even the dinner--Yes, but one recovers it from among the ashes.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 497

After the fabric of society seems on the whole established and secured against external dangers, it is this fear of our neighbour which again creates new perspectives of moral valuation.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 610

218. The psychologists of France--and where else are there still psychologists nowadays?--have never yet exhausted their bitter and manifold enjoyment of the betise bourgeoise, just as though... in short, they betray something thereby. Flaubert, for instance, the honest citizen of Rouen, neither saw, heard, nor tasted anything else in the end; it was his mode of self-torment and refined cruelty.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 437

daily after dinner: one may read about the matter in his biography. A question by the way: a pessimist, a repudiator of God and of the world, who MAKES A HALT at morality--who assents to morality, and plays the flute to laede-neminem morals, what? Is that really--a pessimist?

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 172

Instead of the consequences, the origin--what an inversion of perspective! And assuredly an inversion effected only after long struggle and wavering! To be sure, an ominous new superstition, a peculiar narrowness of interpretation, attained supremacy precisely thereby: the origin of an action was interpreted in the most definite sense possible, as origin out of an INTENTION; people were agreed in the belief that the value of an action lay in the value of its intention.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 661

They are an unassuming and fundamentally mediocre species of men, these utilitarian Englishmen, and, as already remarked, in so far as they are tedious, one cannot think highly enough of their utility. One ought even to ENCOURAGE them, as has been partially attempted in the following rhymes:--

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 46

Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means actually the same as "living according to life"--how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be?

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 241

And thus it was a genuine Schopenhauerian consequence, that his most convinced adherent (perhaps also his last, as far as Germany is concerned), namely, Richard Wagner, should bring his own life-work to an end just here, and should finally put that terrible and eternal type upon the stage as Kundry, type vecu, and as it loved and lived, at the very time that the mad-doctors in almost all European countries had an opportunity to study the type close at hand, wherever the religious neurosis--or as I call it, "the religious mood"--made its latest epidemical outbreak and display as the "Salvation Army"--If it be a question, however, as to what has been so extremely interesting to men of all sorts in all ages, and even to philosophers, in the whole phenomenon of the saint, it is undoubtedly the appearance of the miraculous therein--namely, the immediate SUCCESSION OF OPPOSITES, of states of the soul regarded as morally antithetical: it was believed here to be self-evident that a "bad man" was all at once turned into a "saint," a good man.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 705

This is what is happening nowadays: let us not deceive ourselves about it! Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit, woman strives for the economic and legal independence of a clerk: "woman as clerkess" is inscribed on the portal of the modern society which is in course of formation.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 100

"Freedom of Will"--that is the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the order--who, as such, enjoys also the triumph over obstacles, but thinks within himself that it was really his own will that overcame them.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 589

212. It is always more obvious to me that the philosopher, as a man INDISPENSABLE for the morrow and the day after the morrow, has ever found himself, and HAS BEEN OBLIGED to find himself, in contradiction to the day in which he lives; his enemy has always been the ideal of his day.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 138

These pariahs of society, these long-pursued, badly-persecuted ones--also the compulsory recluses, the Spinozas or Giordano Brunos--always become in the end, even under the most intellectual masquerade, and perhaps without being themselves aware of it, refined vengeance-seekers and poison-Brewers (just lay bare the foundation of Spinoza's ethics and theology!), not to speak of the stupidity of moral indignation, which is the unfailing sign in a philosopher that the sense of philosophical humour has left him.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 279

Perhaps there is even an order of rank with respect to those burnt children, the born artists who find the enjoyment of life only in trying to FALSIFY its image (as if taking wearisome revenge on it), one might guess to what degree life has disgusted them, by the extent to which they wish to see its image falsified, attenuated, ultrified, and deified,--one might reckon the homines religiosi among the artists, as their HIGHEST rank.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 390

147. From old Florentine novels--moreover, from life: Buona femmina e mala femmina vuol bastone.--Sacchetti, Nov. 86.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 235

"Enlightenment" causes revolt, for the slave desires the unconditioned, he understands nothing but the tyrannous, even in morals, he loves as he hates, without NUANCE, to the very depths, to the point of pain, to the point of sickness--his many HIDDEN sufferings make him revolt against the noble taste which seems to DENY suffering.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 271

Among these, for instance, who are at present living apart from religion in Germany, I find "free-thinkers" of diversified species and origin, but above all a majority of those in whom laboriousness from generation to generation has dissolved the religious instincts; so that they no longer know what purpose religions serve, and only note their existence in the world with a kind of dull astonishment.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 344

98. When one trains one's conscience, it kisses one while it bites.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 557

"Are not our ears already full of bad sounds?" say the skeptics, as lovers of repose, and almost as a kind of safety police; "this subterranean Nay is terrible! Be still, ye pessimistic moles!" The skeptic, in effect, that delicate creature, is far too easily frightened; his conscience is schooled so as to start at every Nay, and even at that sharp, decided Yea, and feels something like a bite thereby. Yea!

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 965

My table was spread out for you on high-- Who dwelleth so Star-near, so near the grisly pit below?-- My realm--what realm hath wider boundary? My honey--who hath sipped its fragrancy?

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 393

150. Around the hero everything becomes a tragedy; around the demigod everything becomes a satyr-play; and around God everything becomes--what? perhaps a "world"?

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 433

That which philosophers called "giving a basis to morality," and endeavoured to realize, has, when seen in a right light, proved merely a learned form of good FAITH in prevailing morality, a new means of its EXPRESSION, consequently just a matter-of-fact within the sphere of a definite morality, yea, in its ultimate motive, a sort of denial that it is LAWFUL for this morality to be called in question--and in any case the reverse of the testing, analyzing, doubting, and vivisecting of this very faith.

Beyond Good and Evil, passage 651

It is probable that people will misunderstand and mistake us on that account: what does it matter! They will say: "Their 'honesty'--that is their devilry, and nothing else!" What does it matter! And even if they were right--have not all Gods hitherto been such sanctified, re-baptized devils? And after all, what do we know of ourselves? And what the spirit that leads us wants TO BE CALLED? (It is a question of names.) And how many spirits we harbour?