Twilight of the Idols

"... imprisoned among all sorts of terrible concepts"

"‘You run ahead? Are you doing it as a shepherd? Or as an exception? A third case would be the fugitive. First question of conscience.’"

"Auch der Muthigste von uns hat nur selten den Muth zu dem, was er eigentlich weiss."

"Die Weisheit zieht auch der Erkenntniss Grenzen."

"I want, once and for all, not to know many things. Wisdom requires moderation in knowledge as in other things."

"Daß man gegen seine Handlungen keine Feigheit begeht! daß man sie nicht hinterdrein im Stiche läßt!—Der Gewissensbiß ist unanständig."

"Hat man sein warum? des Lebens, so verträgt man sich fast mit jedem wie?"

"Ich mißtraue allen Systematikern und gehe ihnen aus dem Weg. Der Wille zum System ist ein Mangel an Rechtschaffenheit."

"Man begeht selten eine Übereilung allein. In der ersten Übereilung thut man immer zu viel. Eben darum begeht man gewöhnlich noch eine zweite—und nunmehr thut man zu wenig."

"Es giebt einen Hass auf Lüge und Verstellung aus einem reizbaren Ehrbegriff; es giebt einen ebensolchen Hass aus Feigheit, insofern die Lüge, durch ein göttliches Gebot, verboten ist. Zu feige, um zu lügen."

"Ohne Musik wäre das Leben ein Irrthum."

"Nur die ergangenen Gedanken haben Werth."

"Das waren Stufen für mich, ich bin über sie hinaufgestiegen,—dazu mußte ich über sie hinweg. Aber sie meinten, ich wollte mich auf ihnen zur Ruhe setzen."

"Der Fanatismus, mit dem sich das ganze griechische Nachdenken auf die Vernünftigkeit wirft, verräth eine Nothlage: man war in Gefahr, man hatte nur Eine Wahl: entweder zu Grunde zu gehn oder—absurd-vernünftig zu sein."

"All passions have a phase when they are merely disastrous, when they drag down their victim with the weight of stupidity—and a later, very much later phase when they wed the spirit, when they “spiritualize” themselves. Formerly, in view of the element of stupidity in passion, war was declared on passion itself, its destruction was plotted… The most famous formula for this is to be found in the New Testament.... There it is said, for example, with particular reference to sexuality: “If thy eye offend thee, pluck it out.” Fortunately, no Christian acts in accordance with this precept. Destroying the passions and cravings, merely as a preventive measure against their stupidity and the unpleasant consequences of this stupidity—today this itself strikes us as merely another acute form of stupidity. We no longer admire dentists who “pluck out” teeth so that they will not hurt any more."

"The early church, as everyone knows, certainly did wage war against the intelligent."

"The church combats passion by means of excision of all kinds. Its practice, its remedy is castration. It never inquires, “How can a desire be spiritualized, beautified, deified.” In all ages it has laid the weight of discipline in the process of extirpation. The extirpation of sensuality, pride, lust of dominion, lust of property, and revenge. But to attack the passions at the roots means attacking life itself at its source. The method of the church is hostile to life."

"Castration and extirpation are instinctively chosen for waging war against a passion by those who are too weak of will, too degenerate, to impose some sort of moderation upon it."

"Radical and moral hostility to sensuality remains a suspicious symptom."

"The most poisonous diatribes against the senses have not been said by the impotent, nor by the ascetics, but by those impossible ascetics, by those who found it necessary to be ascetics."

"The spiritualization of sensuality is called love."

"…the value of having enemies …"

"A man is productive only insofar as he is rich in contrasted instincts. He can remain young only on condition that his soul does not begin to take things easy and to yearn for peace."

"Nothing has grown more alien to us than that old desire, the peace of the soul, which is the aim of Christianity."

"… the well-being of unaccustomed satiety …"

"… laziness, coaxed by vanity into togging itself out in a moral garb …"

"The price of fruitfulness is to be rich in internal opposition …"

"Any one of the laws of life is fulfilled by the definite cannon “thou shalt.” “Thou shalt not,” and any sort of obstacle or hostile element in the road of life, is thus cleared away."

"The morality which is antagonistic to nature, that is to say, almost every morality that has been taught, honored and preached hitherto, is directed precisely against the life instincts. It is a condemnation, now secret, now blatant and impudent, of these very instincts."

"The saint in whom God is well pleased is the ideal Eunuch."

"Admitting that you have understood the villainy of such a mutiny against life as that which has become almost sacrosanct in Christian morality, you have fortunately understood something besides, and that is the futility, the fictitiousness, the absurdity and the falseness of such a mutiny. For the condemnation of life by a living creature is after all but the symptom of a definite kind of life."

"In order even to approach the problem of the value of life, a man would need to be placed outside life, and moreover know it as well as one, as many, as all in fact, who have lived it. These are reasons enough to prove to us that this problem is an inaccessible one to us."

"When we speak of values, we speak under the inspiration, and through the optics, of life. Life itself urges us to determine values. Life itself values through us when we determine values."

"Eine Verurteilung des Lebens von seiten des Lebenden bleibt zuletzt doch nur das Symptom einer bestimmten Art von Leben: die Frage, ob mit Recht, ob mit Unrecht, ist gar nicht damit aufgeworfen. Man müßte eine Stellung außerhalb des Lebens haben, und andrerseits es so gut kennen, wie einer, wie viele, wie alle, die es gelebt haben, um das Problem vom Wert des Lebens überhaupt anrühren zu dürfen: Gründe genug, um zu begreifen, daß dies Problem ein für uns unzugängliches Problem ist. Wenn wir von Werten reden, reden wir unter der Inspiration,"

"Morality as it has been understood hitherto … is the instinct of degeneration itself, which converts itself into an imperative. It says “perish.” It is the death sentence of men …"

"Every healthy morality is dominated by an instinct of life… Anti-natural morality—that is, almost every morality which has so far been taught, revered and preached—turns, conversely, against the instincts of life: it is a condemnation of these instincts…"

"Morality, insofar as it condemns for its own sake, and not out of regard for the concerns, considerations, and contrivances of life, is a specific error for which one ought to have no pity…"

"Let us at last consider how exceedingly simple it is on our part to say: “Man should be thus and thus!” Reality shows us a marvelous wealth of types, and a luxuriant variety of forms and changes—and yet the first wretch of a moral loafer that comes along cries: “No! Man should be different.” He even knows what man should be like, this sanctimonious prig: he draws his own face on the wall and declares, “Ecce homo!”"

"The individual in his past and future is a piece of fate. One law the more, one necessity the more for all that is to come and is to be. To say to him, “change thyself” is tantamount to saying that everything should change, even backwards as well."

"Morality, insofar as it condemns per se, and not out of any aim, consideration or motive of life, is a specific error for which no one should feel any mercy—a degenerate idiosyncrasy that has done an unalterable amount of harm."

"We others, we immoralists, on the contrary, have opened our hearts wide to all kinds of comprehension, understanding, and approbation. We do not deny readily; we glory in saying “Yea” to things. Our eyes have opened ever wider and wider to that economy which still employs, and knows how to use to its own advantage, all that which the sacred craziness of priests and the morbid reason in priests rejects."

"… the repulsive race of bigots, the priests and the virtuous …"

"Alles Gute ist Instinkt—und, folglich, leicht, nothwendig, frei. Die Mühsal ist ein Einwand."

"Die leichten Füsse das erste Attribut der Göttlichkeit."

"The so-called motive: another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, something alongside the deed that is more likely to cover up the antecedents of the deeds than to represent them."

"And what a fine abuse we had perpetrated with this “empirical evidence”; we created the world on this basis as a world of causes, a world of will, a world of spirits. The most ancient and enduring psychology was at work here and did not do anything else: all that happened was considered a doing, all doing the effect of a will; the world became to it a multiplicity of doers; a doer (a “subject”) was slipped under all that happened. It was out of himself that man projected his three “inner facts”—that in which he believed most firmly: the will, the spirit, the ego. He even took the concept of being from the concept of the ego; he posited “things” as being, in his image, in accordance with his concept of the ego as a cause. Is it any wonder that later he always found in things only that which he had put into them?"

"With the unknown, one is confronted with danger, discomfort, and care,—the first instinct is to abolish [wegzuschaffen] these painful states. First principle: any explanation is better than none. Since at bottom it is merely a matter of wishing to be rid of oppressive representations, one is not too particular about the means of getting rid of them: the first representation that explains the unknown as familiar feels so good that one “considers it true.” The proof of pleasure (“of strength”) as a criterion of truth. .— The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The “why?” shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a kind of cause—a cause that is comforting, liberating, and relieving. That it is something already familiar, experienced, and inscribed in the memory, which is posited as a cause, that is the first consequence of this need. That which is new and strange and has not been experienced before, is excluded as a cause.— Thus one searches not only for some kind of explanation to serve as a cause, but for a selected and preferred kind of explanation—that which has most quickly and most frequently abolished the feeling of the strange, new, and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual explanations.— Consequence: one kind of positing of causes predominates more and more, is concentrated into a system and finally emerges as dominant, that is, as simply precluding other causes and explanations.— The banker immediately thinks of “business,” the Christian of “sin,” and the girl of her love."

"The “explanation” of agreeable general feelings. They are produced by trust in God. They are produced by the consciousness of good deeds .. They are produced by faith, charity, and hope—the Christian virtues.— In truth, all these supposed explanations are resultant states and, as it were, translations of pleasurable or unpleasurable feelings into a false dialect: one is in a state of hope because the basic physiological feeling is once again strong and rich; one trusts in God because the feeling of fullness and strength gives a sense of rest.— Morality and religion belong altogether to the psychology of error: in every single case, cause and effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing something to be true; or a state of consciousness is confused with its causes."

"The error of free will.— Today we no longer have any pity for the concept of “free will”: we know only too well what it is—the foulest of all theologians’ artifices aimed at making mankind “responsible” in their sense, that is, dependent upon them ... Here I simply supply the psychology of all making-responsible.— Wherever responsibilities are sought, it is usually the instinct of wanting to judge and punish which is at work. Becoming has been deprived of its innocence when any being-such-and-such is traced back to will, to purposes, to acts of responsibility: the doctrine of the will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is, because one wanted to impute guilt. The entire old psychology, the psychology of will, was conditioned by the fact that its originators, the priests at the head of ancient communities, wanted to create for themselves the right to punish—or wanted to create this right for God ... Men were considered “free” so that they might be judged and punished—so that they might become guilty: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within the consciousness (—and thus the most fundamental counterfeit in psychologicis was made the principle of psychology itself ...). Today, as we have entered into the reverse movement and we immoralists are trying with all our strength to take the concept of guilt and the concept of punishment out of the world again, and to cleanse psychology, history, nature, and social institutions and sanctions of them, there is in our eyes no more radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue with the concept of a “moral world-order” to infect the innocence of becoming by means of “punishment” and “guilt.” Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman ..."

"Moral judgment has this in common with the religious one: that it believes in realities which are not real."