Beyond Good and Evil

Christianity is Platonism for the people.

The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is the belief in antitheses of values.

A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength.

Immediate Certainty, absolute knowledge, the thing in itself all involve a contradiction in adjecto.

The will is the emotion of the command.

Freedom of the will is supremacy in respect to him who must obey.

The desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society there from, involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui, and to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the slough of nothingness.

It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, reciprocity, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose.

In real life it is only a question of strong and weak wills.

One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people.

That which can be common is always of small value, the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and everything rare for the rare.

The maturity of man – that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play.

We do the same when awake as when dreaming: we only invent and imagine him with whom we have intercourse – and forget it immediately.

What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.

One may indeed lie with the mouth; but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.

One loves ultimately one’s desires, not the thing desired.

There is an innocence in lying which is a sign of good faith in a cause.

That which philosophers called giving a basis to morality proved merely a learned form of good faith in prevailing morality.

Systems of morals are only a sign language of the emotions.

Like the father, so also do the teacher, the class, the priest, and the prince still see in every new individual an unobjectionable opportunity for a new possession.

The jewish prophets fused into one the expressions rich, godless, wicked, violent, sensual as opposed to poor, saint, friend.

In all ages there have always been human herds (family alliances, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches) and always a great number who obey in proportion to the small number who command (parents, teachers, laws, class prejudices, public opinion).

Everything that elevates the individual above the herd, and is a source of fear to the neighbor, is henceforth called evil.

The objective man is in truth a mirror, so much has he come to regard himself as the passage and reflection of outside forms and events.

Many generations must have prepared the way for the coming of the philosopher; each of his virtues must have been separately acquired, nurtured, transmitted, and embodied; not only the bold, easy, delicate course and current of his thoughts, but above all the readiness for great responsibilities, the majesty of ruling glance and contemning look, the feeling of separation from the multitude with their duties and virtues.

The practice of judging morally, is the favorite revenge of the intellectually shallow on those who are less so.

Whoever has really offered sacrifice knows that he wanted and obtained something for it.

Truth is a woman, one must not use force with her.

There are higher problems than the problems of pleasure and pain and sympathy, and all systems of philosophy which deal only with these are naivetes.

Almost everything that we call higher culture is based upon the spiritualizing and intensifying of cruelty.

Nothing is more foreign, more repugnant, or more hostile to woman than truth – her great art is falsehood, her chief concern is appearance and beauty.

If woman had been a thinking creature, she should certainly, as cook for thousands of years, have discovered the most important physiological facts, and should likewise have got possession of the healing art.

Women have hitherto been treated by men like birds: as something delicate, fragile, wild, strange, sweet and animating – but also as something that needs to be cooped up to prevent it flying away.

The noble type of man is a creator of values. He honors whatever he recognizes in himself: such morality is self gratification.

Slave morality is essentially the morality of utility.