The Genealogy of Morals

Where our treasure is there will our heart be also. Our treasure is there were stand the hives of our knowledge. We care really only for one thing – to bring something home to the hive.

Morality, a scrupulosity, I should have been almost entitled to term it my a priori.

The judgment good did not originate among those to whom goodness was shown. Much rather has it been the good themselves, that is, the aristocratic, the powerful, the high-stationed, the high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good. It was out of the pathos of distance in contradistinction to all the low, the vulgar, the plebeian that the aristocratic first arrogated the right to create values for their own profit.

The jews, in opposition to the aristocratic equation (good = aristocratic = beautiful = happy = loved by the gods) dared to suggest the contrary equation, namely the poor alone are the good, the sick are the only ones who are blessed.

The aristocrat’s system of values acts and grows spontaneously, it merely seeks its antithesis in order to pronounce a more grateful and exultant yes to its own self.

The well born simply felt themselves the happy they did not have to manufacture their happiness artificially through looking at their enemies or to talk and lie themselves into happiness, complete men that they were, exuberant with strength, and consequently necessarily energetic, they were too wise to dissociate happiness from action – activity becomes in their minds necessarily counted as happiness.

It is not surprising that the lambs should bear a grudge against the great birds of prey, but that is no reason for blaming the great birds of prey for taking the little lambs.

As the people separate the lightning from its flash, so does the popular morality separate strength from the expression of strength

 But there is no being behind doing, working, becoming; the doer is a mere appendage to the action.

The oppressed, downtrodden, overpowered say to themselves with the vindictive guile weakness: Let us be otherwise than the evil, namely good! and good is everyone who does not oppress, who hurts no one, who does not attack, who does not pay back, who hands over revenge to God, who holds himself, as we do, in hiding; who goes out of the way of evil, and demands in short, little from life; like ourselves the patient, the meek, the just. Yet all this means nothing more than once for all, the weak are the weak, it is good to do nothing for which we are not strong enough.

Man eventually kept in his memory five or six "I will nots" with regard to which he had already given his promise, so as to enjoy the advantages of society and verily with the help of this kind of memory man eventually attained reason.

A world thought out on completely deterministic lines would easily be guessed by the gods, and would soon bore them.

Life is essentially something which functions by injuring, oppressing, exploiting, and annihilating, and is absolutely inconceivable without such character.

Everything, anything, which exists and which prevails anywhere, will always be put to new purposes by a force superior to itself, all happening in the organic world consists of overpowering and domination is a new interpretation and adjustment, which must necessarily obscure or absolutely extinguish the subsisting meaning and end.

All ends and all utilities are only signs that a Will to Power has mastered a less powerful force.

I regard the bad conscience as the serious illness which man was bound to contract under the stress of the most radical change which he has ever experienced – that change, when he found himself finally imprisoned within the pale of society and of peace.

All good things were once bad things: Marriage, for example, or submission to law.

There is only a seeing from a perspective, only a knowing from a perspective.

It is not from the strongest that harm comes to the strong but from the weakest.

Look into the background of every family, everywhere the fight of the sick against the healthy.

The healthy should remain separated from the sick, the higher must not degrade itself to be the tool of the lower.

The ascetic priest must be accepted by us as the predestined saviour, herdsman, and champion of the sick herd. He will in certain cases find it necessary to conjure up out of himself a new type of beast of prey – a new animal monstrosity in which the polar bear, the crouching panther, and the fox are joined together in a trinity as fascinating as it is fearsome.

Every sufferer searches instinctively for a cause of his suffering, something living, on which, he can on any pretext vent his emotions. For the venting of emotions is the sufferer’s greatest attempt at alleviation.

All sufferers have an awful resourcefulness and ingenuity in finding excuse for painful emotions, they even enjoy their jealousy, their broodings over base actions and apparent injuries, they burrow through the intestines of their past and present in their search for obscure mysteries, wherein they will be at liberty to wallow in a torturing suspicion and get drunk on the venom of their own malice – they tear open the oldest wounds, they make themselves bleed from the scars which have long been healed, they make evil doers out of friends, wife, child, and everything which is nearest to them.

I am proceeding from an hypothesis which does not require to be proved, the hypothesis that sinfulness in man is not an actual fact, but rather merely the interpretation of a fact, a discomfort seen through a moral religious perspective which is no longer binding upon us.

A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats.

All great things go to ruin by reason of themselves, by reason of an act of self dissolution.

Man will wish Nothingness rather than not wish at all.

Public opinion always worships the herd instinct.