Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The socialist rabble, the chandala apostles, who undermine the instinct, the pleasure, the worker's sense of satisfaction with his small existence-who make him envious, who teach him revenge. The source of wrong is never unequal rights but the claim of "equal" rights.
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.
There is perhaps nothing so admirable in Christianity and Buddhism as their art of teaching even the lowest to elevate themselves by piety to a seemingly higher order of things, and thereby to retain their satisfaction with the actual world in which they find it difficult enough to live - this very difficulty being necessary.
Unresolved dissonances between the characters and dispositions of the parents continue to reverberate in the nature of the child and make up the history of its inner sufferings.
Lust and self-mutilation are closely related impulses. There are also self-mutilators among knowers: they do not want to be creators under any circumstances.
Such men alone are my readers, my proper readers, my preordained readers. Of what account are the rest? The rest are simply... humanity. One must be superior to humanity in power, in loftiness of soul- in contempt.
One who is publicly honest about himself ends up by priding himself somewhat on this honesty: for he knows only too well why he is honest-for the same reasons another person prefers illusion and dissimulation.
One cannot read the New Testament without acquired admiration for whatever it abuses not to speak of the "wisdom of this world," which an impudent wind bag tries to dispose of "by the foolishness of preaching."