Works By Friedrich Nietzsche

"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…"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"For the Greeks the sexual symbol was therefore the venerable symbol par excellence, the real profundity in the whole of ancient piety. Every single element in the act of procreation, of pregnancy, and of birth aroused the highest and most solemn feelings."

"All becoming and growing—all that guarantees a future—involves pain."

"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."

"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."

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

"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.”"

"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!"

"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."

"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"

"Complaining is never any good: it stems from weakness. Whether one charges one’s misfortune to others or to oneself—the socialist does the former; the Christian, for example, the latter—really makes no difference. The common and, let us add, the unworthy thing is that it is supposed to be somebody’s fault that one is suffering; in short, that the sufferer prescribes the honey of revenge for himself against his suffering. The objects of this need for revenge, as a need for pleasure, are mere occasions: everywhere the sufferer finds occasions for satisfying his little revenge."

"... 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.’"

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"When the anarchist, as the mouthpiece of the decaying strata of society, raises his voice in splendid indignation for “right,” “justice,” “equal rights,” he is only groaning under the burden of his ignorance, which cannot understand why he actually suffers, what his poverty consists of: the poverty of life. An instinct of causality is active in him. Someone must be responsible for him being so ill at ease. His splendid indignation alone relieves him somewhat. It is a pleasure for all poor devils to grumble. It gives them a little intoxicating sensation of power. The very act of complaining, the mere fact that one bewails one’s lot, may lend such a charm to life that on that account alone one is ready to endure it. There is a small dose of revenge in every lamentation. One casts one’s affections, and, under certain circumstances, even one’s baseness, in the teeth of those who are different, as if their condition were an injustice and iniquitous privilege."

"“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.”"

"The other thing I do not like to hear is the notorious “and” …"

"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."

"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."

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

"Weder Manu, noch Plato, noch Confucius, noch die jüdischen und christlichen Lehrer haben je an ihrem Recht zur Lüge gezweifelt."

"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."

"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 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 ..."

"Alle Mittel, wodurch bisher die Menschheit moralisch gemacht werden sollte, waren von Grund aus unmoralisch."

"Die leichten Füsse das erste Attribut der Göttlichkeit."

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

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

"Moral judgments, like religious ones, belong to a stage of ignorance at which the very concept of the real, and the distinction between what is real and imaginary, are still lacking."

"Wenn thatsächlich die Engländer glauben, sie wüßten von sich aus, „intuitiv”, was gut und böse ist, wenn sie folglich vermeinen, das Christenthum als Garantie der Moral nicht mehr nöthig zu haben, so ist dies selbst bloß die Folge der Herrschaft des christlichen Werthurtheils und ein Ausdruck von der Stärke und Tiefe diesen Herrschaft: sodaß der Ursprung der englischen Moral vergessen worden ist, sodaß das Sehr-Bedingte ihres Rechts auf Dasein nicht mehr empfunden wird."

"In art, man enjoys himself as perfection."

"How does one compromise oneself today? If one is consistent. If one proceeds in a straight line. If one is not ambiguous enough to permit five conflicting interpretations. If one is genuine."

"Plato goes further. He says with an innocence possible only for a Greek, not a “Christian,” that there would be no Platonic philosophy at all if there were not such beautiful youths in Athens: it is only their sight that transposes the philosopher’s soul into an erotic trance, leaving it no peace until it lowers the seed of all exalted things into such beautiful soil."

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

"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."

"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."