You say 'I' and you are proud of this word. But greater than this- although you will not believe in it - is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say 'I' but performs 'I'.
That little hypocrites and half-crazed people dare to imagine that on their account the laws of nature are constantly broken; such an enhancement of every kind of selfishness to infinity, to impudence, cannot be branded with sufficient contempt. And yet Christianity owes its triumph to this pitiable flattery of personal vanity.
Intoxicating joy is it for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and forget himself. Intoxicating joy and self-forgetting, did the world once seem to me.
When a scholar of the old culture vows no longer to have anything to do with men who believe in progress, he is right. For the old culture has its greatness and goodness behind it, and an historical education forces one to admit that it can never again be fresh.
Many other such substitutes for war will be discovered, but perhaps precisely thereby it will become more and more obvious that such a highly cultivated and therefore necessarily enfeebled humanity as that of modern Europe not only needs wars, but the greatest and most terrible wars, consequently occasional relapses into barbarism, lest, by the means of culture, it should lose its culture and its very existence.
The strength required for the vision of the most powerful reality is not only compatible with the most powerful strength for action, for monstrous action, for crime - it even presupposes it.
In what does the objective measure of value lie? In the quantum of enhanced and organized power alone, in accordance with what occurs in all occurrence, a will to increase.
To recognize untruth as a condition of life--that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.