Works By Friedrich Nietzsche

"Wherever a man’s feelings are exalted, that imaginary world is involved in some way. It is a sad fact, but for the moment the man of science has to be suspicious of all higher feelings, so greatly are they nourished by delusion and nonsense. It is not that they are thus in themselves, or must always remain thus, but of all the gradual purifications awaiting mankind, the purification of the higher feelings will certainly be one of the most gradual."

"Men who enjoy moments of exaltation and ecstasy who, on account of the contrast other states present and because of the way they have squandered their nervous energy, are ordinarily in a wretched and miserable condition, regard these moments as their real ‘self’ and their wretchedness and misery as the effect of what is ‘outside the self’; and thus they harbor feelings of revengefulness towards their environment, their age, their entire world."

"Christianity has succeeded in transforming Eros and Aphrodite—great powers capable of idealisation—into diabolical kobolds and phantoms."

"Here is a morality which rests entirely on the drive to distinction—do not think too highly of it! For what kind of a drive is it, and what thought lies behind it? We want to make the sight of us painful to another and to awaken in him the feeling of envy and of his own impotence and degradation... This person has become humble and is now perfect in his humility—seek for those whom he has for long wished to torture with it! You will find them soon enough! ... The chastity of the nun: with what punitive eyes it looks into the faces of women who live otherwise! How much joy in revenge there is in those eyes! ...the morality of distinction is, in its ultimate foundation, pleasure in refined cruelty."

"Freedoers are at a disadvantage compared to freethinkers because people suffer more obviously from the consequences of deeds than from those of thoughts. If one considers, however, that both one and the other are in search of gratification, and that the in case of the freethinker the mere thinking thorough and enunciation of forbidden things provides this gratification, both are on an equal footing with regard to motive"

"During the prehistoric age of mankind, spirit was presumed to exist everywhere and was not held in honor as a privilege of man. Because, on the contrary, ... one saw in the spirit that which unites us with nature, not that which sunders us from it."

"Men of application and goodwill, assist in this one work: to take the concept of punishment which has overrun the whole world and root it out! There exists no more noxious weed!"

"Wer ist der Sittlichste? Einmal Der, welcher das Gesetz am häufigsten erfüllt: also, gleich dem Brahmanen, das Bewusstsein desselben überallhin und in jeden kleinen Zeitteil trägt, sodass er fortwährend erfinderisch ist in Gelegenheiten, das Gesetz zu erfüllen. Sodann Der, der es auch in den schwersten Fällen erfüllt. Der Sittlichste ist Der, welcher am meisten der Sitte opfert: welches aber sind die größten Opfer? Nach der Beantwortung dieser Frage entfalten sich mehrere unterschiedliche Moralen; aber der wichtigste Unterschied bleibt doch jener, welcher die Moralität der häufigsten Erfüllung von der der schwersten Erfüllung trennt. Man täusche sich über das Motiv jener Moral nicht, welche die schwerste Erfüllung der Sitte als Zeichen der Sittlichkeit fordert! Die Selbstüberwindung wird nicht ihrer nützlichen Folgen halber, die sie für das Individuum hat, gefordert, sondern damit die Sitte, das Herkommen herrschend erscheine, trotz allem individuellen Gegengelüst und Vorteil: der Einzelne soll sich opfern,—so heischt es die Sittlichkeit der Sitte."

"In allen ursprünglichen Zuständen der Menschheit bedeutet „böse” so viel wie „individuell”, „frei”, „willkürlich”, „ungewohnt”, „unvorhergesehen”, „unberechenbar”."

"The moralists who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, offer the individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his own advantage, as his personal way to happiness, are the exceptions. ... They take a new path under the highest disapprobation of all advocates of morality of custom—they cut themselves off from the community, as immoral men, and are in the profoundest sense evil."

"However advanced Europe might be in other respects, in religious matters it has not yet reached the freethinking naïveté of the ancient Brahmans."

"God created all things except for sin alone: is it any wonder if he is ill-disposed towards it? But man created sin—and is he to cast out this only child of his merely because it displeases God, the grandfather of sin! Is that humane? ... Heart and duty ought to speak firstly for the child and only secondarily for the honor of the grandfather!"

"Among barbarous peoples there exists a species of customs whose purpose appears to be [to support the idea of] custom in general: minute and fundamentally superfluous stipulations ... which, however keep continually in the consciousness the constant proximity of custom, the perpetual compulsion to practice customs: so as the strengthen the mighty proposition with which civilization begins: any custom is better than no custom."

"To suffer for the sake of morality and then be told that this kind of suffering is founded on an error: this arouses indignation. For there is a unique consolation in affirming through one’s suffering a ‘profounder world of truth’ ... and one would much rather suffer and thereby feel oneself exalted above reality (through consciousness of having thus approached this ‘profounder world of truth’) than be without suffering but also without this feeling that one is exalted. It is thus pride, and the customary manner in which pride is gratified, which stands in the way of a new understanding of morality."

"Every individual action, every individual mode of thought arouses dread; it is impossible to compute what precisely the rarer, choicer, more original spirits in the whole course of history have had to suffer through being felt as evil and dangerous, indeed through feeling themselves to be so. Under the dominion of the morality of custom, originality of every kind has acquired a bad conscience."

"Popular morality and popular medicine. The morality which prevails in a community is constantly being worked at by everybody: most people produce example after example of the alleged relationship between cause and effect between guilt and punishment, confirm it as well founded and strengthen their faith ... All, however, are at one in the wholly crude, unscientific character of their activity ... both material and form are worthless, as are the material and form of all popular medicine. Popular medicine and popular morality belong together and ought not to be evaluated differently as they still are: both are the most dangerous pseudosciences."

"Nothing has been purchased more dearly than that little bit of human reason and feeling of freedom that now constitutes our pride. It is this pride, however, which now makes it almost impossible for us to empathize with those tremendous eras of ‘morality of custom’ which precede ‘world history’ as the actual and decisive eras of history which determined the character of mankind: the eras in which suffering counted as virtue, cruelty counted as virtue, dissembling counted as virtue, revenge counted as virtue ... Do you think all this has altered and that mankind must therefore have changed its character?"

"Custom represents the experiences of men in earlier times, as to what they supposed to be useful and harmful—but the sense for custom (morality) applies, not to these experiences as such, but to the age, sanctity and indiscussability of the custom. And so this sense is a hindrance to the acquisition of new experiences and the correction of customs; that is to say, morality is a hindrance to the creation of new and better customs"

"Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has hitherto always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstantiated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed—history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!"

"All institutions which accord to a passion belief in its endurance and responsibility for its endurance, contrary to the nature of passion, have raised it to a new rank, and thereafter he who is assailed by such a passion no longer believes himself debased or endangered by it, as he formerly did, but enhanced in his own eyes and those of his peers. Think of institutions and customs which have created out of the fiery abandonment of the moment perpetual fidelity, out of the enjoyment of anger perpetual vengeance, ... out of a single and unpremeditated word perpetual obligation. This transformation has each time introduced a very great deal of hypocrisy and lying into the world, but each time too, and at this cost, it has introduced a new suprahuman concept which elevates mankind."

"Der freie Mensch ist unsittlich, weil er in Allem von sich und nicht von einem Herkommen abhängen will."

"Under the pressure of superstitious fear, ... one spoils one’s sense of reality and one’s pleasure in it, and in the end accords reality a value only insofar as it is capable of being a symbol."

"It is clear that moral feelings are transmitted in this way: children observe in adults inclinations for and aversions to certain actions and, as born apes, imitate these inclinations and aversions; in later life they find themselves full of these acquired and well-exercised affects and consider it only decent to try to account for and justify them. This ‘accounting,’ however, has nothing to do with either the origin or the degree of intensity of the feeling: all one is doing is complying with the rule that, as a rational being, one has to have reasons for one’s For and Against, and that they have to adducible and acceptable reasons."

"‘Trust your feelings!’—But feelings are nothing final or original; behind the feelings there stand judgments and evaluations. ... The inspiration born of feeling is the grandchild of a judgment—and often a false judgment! And in any event not a child of your own! To trust one’s feelings means to give more obedience to one’s grandfather and grandmother and their grandparents than to the gods which are in us: our reason and our experience."

"Sittlichkeit ist nichts Anderes (also namentlich nicht mehr!), als Gehorsam gegen Sitten."

"The free spirit … counts the theory of the innocence of all opinions as being as well founded as the theory of the innocence of all actions"

"I descended into the lowest depths, I searched to the bottom, I examined and pried into an old faith on which, for thousands of years, philosophers had built as upon a secure foundation. The old structures came tumbling down about me."

"The [Christian] addition of Hell ... the novel teaching of eternal damnation ... was mightier than the idea of definitive death, which thereafter faded away. It was only science which reconquered (?) it, as it had to do when it at the same time rejected any other idea of death and of any life beyond it."

"Is it not dreadful to make necessary and regularly recurring sensations into a source of inner misery, and in this way to want to make inner misery a necessary and regularly recurring phenomenon."

"Strict perseverance in significant and exquisite gestures together with the obligation to live only with people who do not “let themselves go”—that is quite enough for one to become significant and exquisite…"

"In Athens, in the time of Cicero (who expresses his surprise about this), the men and youths were far superior in beauty to the women. But what work and exertion in the service of beauty had the male sex there imposed on itself for centuries!— For one should make no mistake about the method in this case: a breeding of feelings and thoughts alone is almost nothing (—this is the great misunderstanding underlying German education, which is wholly illusory): one must first persuade the body."

"Supreme rule of conduct: before oneself too, one must not “let oneself go.”"

"It is society, our tame, mediocre, emasculated society, in which a natural human being … necessarily degenerates into a criminal."

"Whoever must do secretly, with long suspense, caution, and cunning, what he can do best and would like most to do, becomes anemic; and because he always harvests only danger, persecution, and calamity from his instincts, his attitude to these instincts is reversed too"

"Let us generalize the case of the criminal: let us think of men so constituted that for one reason or another, they lack public approval and know that they are not felt to be beneficent or useful—that chandala feeling that one is not considered equal, but an outcast, unworthy, contaminating. All men so constituted have a subterranean hue to their thoughts and actions; everything about them becomes paler than in those whose existence is touched by daylight. Yet almost all forms of existence which we consider distinguished today once lived in this half tomblike atmosphere: the scientific character, the artist, the genius, the free spirit, the actor, the merchant, the great discoverer. … All innovators of the spirit must for a time bear the pallid and fatal mark of the chandala on their foreheads—not because they are considered that way by others, but because they themselves feel the terrible chasm which separates them from everything that is customary or reputable. Almost every genius knows, as one stage of his development, the “Catilinarian existence”—a feeling of hatred, revenge, and rebellion against everything which already is, which no longer becomes ... Catiline—the form of pre-existence of every Caesar.—"

"It is decisive for the lot of a people and of humanity that culture should begin in the right place—not in the “soul” (as was the fateful superstition of the priests and half-priests): the right place is the body, the gesture, the diet, physiology; the rest follows from that ... Therefore the Greeks remain the first cultural event in history—they knew, they did, what was needed; and Christianity, which despised the body, has been the greatest misfortune of humanity so far."

"If one wants an end, one must also want the means: if one wants slaves, then one is a fool if one educates them to be masters."

"Finally, some advice for our dear pessimists and other decadents. It is not in our hands to prevent our birth; but we can correct this mistake …one must advance a step further in its logic and not only negate life with “will and representation,” as Schopenhauer did—one must first of all negate Schopenhauer."

"Philosophers are merely another kind of saint, and their whole craft is such that they admit only certain truths—namely, those for the sake of which their craft is accorded public sanction."

"Instinctively to choose what is harmful for oneself, to feel attracted by “disinterested” motives, that is virtually the formula of decadence. “Not to seek one’s own advantage”—that is merely the moral fig leaf for quite a different, namely, a physiological, state of affairs: “I no longer know how to find my own advantage.” Disintegration of the instincts!"

"To bewail one’s lot is always despicable: it is always the outcome of weakness. Whether one ascribes one’s afflictions to others or to one’s self, it is all the same. The socialist does the former, the Christian, for instance, does the latter. That which is common to both attitudes, or rather that which is equally ignoble in them both, is the fact that somebody must be to blame if one suffers—in short, that the sufferer drugs himself with the honey of revenge to allay his anguish."

"Instead of saying naively, “I am no longer worth anything,” the moral lie in the mouth of the decadent says, “Nothing is worth anything, life is not worth anything.”"

"The criminal type is the type of the strong human being under unfavorable circumstances: a strong human being made sick."

"The beauty of a race or family, their grace and graciousness in all gestures, is won by work: like genius, it is the end result of the accumulated work of generations. One must have made great sacrifices to good taste… one must have preferred beauty to advantage, habit, opinion and inertia."

"The way that the “single one” or the “individual,” has been hitherto understood, by the people and the philosophers alike, is an error. He is not a thing by himself, not an atom, not a “link in the chain,” not a thing merely inherited from former times. He represents the whole single line of humanity up to himself."

"The single one, the “individual,” as hitherto understood by the people and the philosophers alike, is an error after all: he is nothing by himself, no atom, no “link in the chain,” nothing merely inherited from former times; he is the whole single line of humanity up to himself."

"The anarchist, as the mouthpiece of the declining strata of society, demands with a fine indignation what is “right,” “justice,” and “equal rights,” … the “fine indignation” itself soothes him; it is a pleasure for all wretched devils to scold: it gives a slight but intoxicating sense of power. Even plaintiveness and complaining can give life a charm."

"Nothing is more distasteful to true philosophers than man when he beings to wish. If they see man only at his deeds, if they see this bravest, craftiest, and most enduring of animals, even inextricably entangled in disaster, how admirable he then appears to them. They even encourage him. But true philosophers despise the man who wishes, as also the desirable man, and all the desiderata and ideals of man in general … he finds only nonentity behind human ideals, or, not even nonentity but vileness, absurdity, sickness, cowardice, fatigue, … How is it that man, who as a reality is so estimable, ceases from deserving respect the moment he begins to desire. Must he pay for being so perfect as a reality? Must he make up for his deeds, for the tension of spirit and will which underlies all his deeds, by an eclipse of his power in matters of the imagination, and in absurdity. … That which justifies man is his reality. It will justify him to all eternity. How much more valuable is a real man than any other man who is merely the phantom desires, of dreams …than any kind of ideal man."

"“What is the task of all higher education?” To turn men into machines. “What are the means?” Man must learn to be bored. “How is that accomplished?” “By means of the concept of duty.”"

"Self-interest is worth as much as the person who has it."