We deceive ourselves when giving respect to the person for whom we have surrendered ourselves, when we respectively expect them to be as we would wish them to be.
People who wish to numb our caution in dealing with them by means of flattery are employing a dangerous expedient, like a sleeping draught, which, if it does not put us to sleep, keeps us all the more awake.
Another Christian concept, no less crazy, has passed even more deeply into the tissue of modernity: the concept of the 'equality of souls before God.' This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights.
I conjure you, my brethren, to remain faithful to earth, and do not believe those who speak unto you of super terrestrial hopes! Poisoners they are, whether they know it or not.
Creating-that is the great salvation from suffering, and life's alleviation. But for the creator to appear, suffering itself is needed, and much transformation.
All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.
We have no organ at all for knowledge, for truth: we know (or believe or imagine) precisely as much as may be useful in the interest of the human herd, the species: and even what is here called usefulness is in the end only a belief, something imagined and perhaps precisely that most fatal piece of stupidity by which we shall one day perish.
Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches and in punishment there is so much that is festive!
Now we will no longer concede so easily that anyone has the truth; the rigorous methods of inquiry have spread sufficient distrust and caution, so that we experience every man who represents opinions violently in word and deed as any enemy of our present culture, or at least as a backward person. And in fact, the fervor about having the truth counts very little today in relation to that other fervor, more gentle and silent, to be sure, for seeking the truth, a search that does not tire of learning afresh and testing anew.
Has there ever been anything filthier on earth than the saints in the wilderness? Around them was not only the devil loose around them- but also the swine.