Book I

1 Teachers of the Purpose of Existence. — Whether I look on men with a good or a bad eye, I always find them busy with one task, all of them and each one in particular: doing what serves the preservation of the human species. And truly not out of a feeling of love for this species, but simply because nothing in them is older, stronger, more inexorable, more invincible than that instinct — because this instinct is precisely the essence of our kind and herd. Though one may be quick enough, with the usual short-sightedness, to sort one's neighbors neatly at five paces into useful and harmful, good and evil people, on a large reckoning, on longer reflection about the whole, one grows mistrustful of this sorting and separating and finally lets it be. Even the most harmful man is perhaps still the most useful of all with regard to the preservation of the species; for he keeps alive in himself, or through his effect in others, drives without which humanity would long since have grown slack or rotten. Hatred, malice, the lust for plunder and for rule, and whatever else is called evil: all this belongs to the astonishing economy of the preservation of the species, though to a costly, extravagant and on the whole supremely foolish economy — which has nevertheless, by proven measure, preserved our kind until now.

I no longer know whether you, my dear fellow man and neighbor, can at all live to the disadvantage of the species, that is “unreasonably” and “badly”; what could have harmed the species has perhaps died out many thousands of years ago and now belongs to the things that are no longer possible even for God. Follow your best or your worst desires and, above all, go to ruin! — in both you are probably still in some way the furtherer and benefactor of humanity, and may on that account keep your panegyrists — and likewise your mockers! But you will never find the one who would understand how to mock you, the individual, wholly even in your best part, who could bring home to you your boundless fly-and-frog wretchedness as thoroughly as would be compatible with the truth! To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh out of the whole truth — for that the best have so far lacked enough sense of truth and the most gifted far too little genius! There is perhaps a future for laughter too! Then, when the proposition “the species is everything, one is always none” has been incorporated into humanity and the access to this last liberation and irresponsibility stands open to everyone at any time. Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom, perhaps there will then be only “gay science.” For the present it is still quite otherwise, for the present the comedy of existence has not yet “become conscious” of itself, for the present it is still the time of tragedy, the time of moralities and religions. What does the ever-new appearance of those founders of moralities and religions mean, those authors of the struggle over moral valuations, those teachers of bad conscience and of wars of religion? What do these heroes mean on this stage? For they have so far been its heroes, and everything else, for a time alone visible and all too near, has always served only to prepare for these heroes, whether as machinery and backdrop or in the role of confidants and valets. (The poets, for example, were always the valets of some morality.) — It goes without saying that these tragedians too work in the interest of the species, even if they may believe they are working in the interest of God and as God's emissaries. They too further the life of the species by furthering faith in life. “It is worth living — so each of them cries — there is something in this life, life has something behind it, beneath it, take care!” That drive which rules equally in the highest and in the commonest men, the drive of the preservation of the species, breaks out from time to time as reason and passion of the spirit; it then has a brilliant retinue of reasons about it and wants with all violence to make us forget that it is at bottom drive, instinct, folly, groundlessness. Life shall be loved, because! Man shall further himself and his neighbor, because! And however all these shalls and becauses are called and may yet be called in future! So that what happens necessarily and always, of itself and without any purpose, may from now on appear done toward a purpose and may become evident to man as reason and last commandment — to this end the ethical teacher appears, as the teacher of the purpose of existence; to this end he invents a second and different existence and lifts, by means of his new mechanics, this old common existence out of its old common hinges. Yes! he absolutely does not want us to laugh about existence, nor about ourselves, — nor about him either; for him one is always one, something first and last and monstrous, for him there is no species, no sums, no zeros. However foolish and enthusiastic his inventions and valuations may be, however much he misjudges the course of nature and denies its conditions: — and all ethics have so far been foolish and contrary to nature to such a degree that humanity would have perished of each one of them, had it taken possession of humanity — nevertheless! each time “the hero” stepped onto the stage, something new was attained, the dreadful counterpart of laughter, that deep shudder of many individuals at the thought: “yes, it is worth living! yes, I am worth living!” — life and I and you and all of us became interesting to one another once again for a while. — It cannot be denied that in the long run laughter and reason and nature have so far become master over each of these great teachers of purpose: the short tragedy always passed over in the end into the eternal comedy of existence and back again, and the “waves of innumerable laughter” — to speak with Aeschylus — must in the end sweep over even the greatest of these tragedians. But with all this correcting laughter, on the whole the ever-new appearance of those teachers of the purpose of existence has nevertheless changed human nature, — it now has one need more, precisely the need for the ever-new appearance of such teachers and doctrines of “purpose.” Man has gradually become a fantastic animal that has one more condition of existence to fulfill than any other animal: man must from time to time believe that he knows why he exists, his species cannot thrive without a periodic trust in life! Without faith in the reason in life! And again and again from time to time the human species will decree: “there is something about which absolutely no laughing is any longer permitted!” And the most cautious friend of man will add: “not only laughter and gay wisdom, but also the tragic with all its sublime unreason belongs among the means and necessities of the preservation of the species!” — And consequently! Consequently! Consequently! Oh do you understand me, my brothers? Do you understand this new law of ebb and flood? We too have our time!

2 The Intellectual Conscience. — I keep making the same experience and keep resisting it anew, I will not believe it even though I grasp it with my hands: the great majority lack the intellectual conscience; indeed it has often seemed to me that with the demand for such a conscience one is as lonely as in the desert in the most populous cities. Everyone looks at you with foreign eyes and goes on handling his scales, calling this good, that evil; no one blushes when you let it be noticed that these weights are not of full weight, — no one is indignant with you either: perhaps they laugh at your doubt. I mean to say: the great majority do not find it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly without having first become conscious of the last and surest grounds for and against, and without even taking the trouble for such grounds afterward, — the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this “great majority.” But what are good-heartedness, delicacy and genius to me if the man of these virtues tolerates slack feelings in believing and judging, if the demand for certainty does not count with him as the innermost desire and deepest need, — as that which separates the higher men from the lower! I found in certain pious people a hatred of reason and was fond of them for it: so at least the bad intellectual conscience still betrayed itself! But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors and the whole wonderful uncertainty and ambiguity of existence and not to ask, not to tremble with desire and delight in questioning, not even to hate the questioner, perhaps even to be wearily amused by him — that is what I feel as contemptible, and this feeling is what I look for first in everyone: — some folly or other always persuades me anew that every human being has this feeling, as a human being. It is my kind of injustice.

3 Noble and Common. — To common natures all noble, magnanimous feelings appear unpurposive and therefore first of all implausible: they wink their eyes when they hear of such things, and seem to want to say “there will probably be some good advantage in it, one cannot see through all walls”: — they are mistrustful of the noble man, as though he were seeking advantage by stealthy paths. When they are all too plainly convinced of the absence of selfish intentions and gains, the noble man counts with them as a kind of fool: they despise him in his joy and laugh at the brightness of his eyes. “How can one rejoice at being at a disadvantage, how can one want to come to a disadvantage with open eyes! There must be a sickness of reason bound up with the noble affection” — so they think, and look down as they do so: as they look down on the joy that the madman has from his fixed idea. The common nature is distinguished by this, that it keeps its advantage fixed in its eye and that this thinking of purpose and advantage is itself stronger in it than the strongest drives: not to let itself be seduced by those drives into unpurposive actions — that is its wisdom and its self-feeling. Compared with it the higher nature is the more unreasonable: — for the noble, magnanimous, self-sacrificing man really succumbs to his drives, and in his best moments his reason pauses. An animal that protects its young at the risk of its life, or in the rutting season follows the female even into death, thinks neither of danger nor of death, its reason likewise pauses, because the pleasure in its brood or in the female, and the fear of being deprived of this pleasure, rule it wholly; it becomes stupider than it otherwise is, like the noble and magnanimous man. This one possesses certain feelings of pleasure and displeasure in such strength that the intellect must fall silent before them or give itself over to their service: then the heart enters the head with such people and one now speaks of “passion.” (Here and there the opposite of this also occurs, and as it were the “inversion of passion,” for instance in Fontenelle, on whose heart someone once laid a hand with the words: “What you have there, my dearest, is brain too.”) It is the unreason, or the cross-grained reason, of passion that the common man despises in the noble man, especially when this passion directs itself to objects whose value seems to him wholly fantastic and arbitrary. He is annoyed at the man who succumbs to the passion of the belly, but he does grasp the charm that here plays the tyrant; what he does not grasp is how one could, for example, for the love of a passion for knowledge, put one's health and honor at stake. The taste of the higher nature directs itself to exceptions, to things that usually leave one cold and seem to have no sweetness in them; the higher nature has a singular measure of value. Besides this, it mostly believes that it does not have a singular measure of value in its idiosyncrasy of taste; rather it posits its values and disvalues as the values and disvalues valid altogether, and thereby falls into the unintelligible and the impractical. It is very rare that a higher nature keeps enough reason in reserve to understand and treat everyday people as such: most of all it believes in its passion as in the secretly kept passion of everyone, and is full of ardor and eloquence precisely in this belief. Now if such exceptional people do not feel themselves as exceptions, how should they ever understand common natures and fairly estimate the rule! — and so they too speak of the folly, the unpurposiveness and the fantasy of humanity, full of astonishment at how madly the world runs and why it will not confess to what “it stands in need of.” — This is the eternal injustice of the noble.

4 What Preserves the Species. — The strongest and most evil spirits have so far advanced humanity the most: they kept kindling the passions that were falling asleep — all ordered society puts the passions to sleep —, they kept waking the sense for comparison, for contradiction, for delight in the new, the venturesome, the untried; they forced men to set opinions against opinions, model images against model images. With weapons, with the overturning of boundary stones, by violation of the pieties for the most part: but also by new religions and moralities! The same “wickedness” is in every teacher and preacher of the new, — the wickedness that brings a conqueror into ill repute, even if it expresses itself more finely, does not immediately set the muscles in motion and just for that reason does not bring so much ill repute either! The new is, however, under all circumstances the evil, as that which wants to conquer, to overturn the old boundary stones and the old pieties; and only the old is the good! The good men of every age are those who dig the old thoughts deep into the ground and make them bear fruit, the farmers of the spirit. But every land is finally exhausted, and again and again the plowshare of evil must come. — There is now a thorough false doctrine of morality, which is much celebrated especially in England: according to it the judgments “good” and “evil” are the collection of experiences about “purposive” and “unpurposive”; according to it what is called good is what preserves the species, while what is called evil is what harms the species. In truth, however, the evil drives are to just as high a degree purposive, species-preserving and indispensable as the good ones: — only their function is a different one.

5 Unconditional Duties. — All men who feel that they need the strongest words and sounds, the most eloquent gestures and attitudes, in order to have any effect at all — revolutionary politicians, socialists, preachers of repentance with and without Christianity, with all of whom there must be no half successes — all these speak of “duties,” and always of duties with the character of the unconditional: without such they would have no right to their great pathos, and that they know very well! So they reach for philosophies of morality that preach some categorical imperative, or they take a good piece of religion into themselves, as for instance Mazzini has done. Because they want to be unconditionally trusted, they first of all need to trust themselves unconditionally, on the ground of some last indisputable and in itself sublime commandment, as whose servants and instruments they feel and wish to give themselves out. Here we have the most natural and mostly very influential opponents of moral enlightenment and skepticism: but they are rare. On the other hand there is a very extensive class of these opponents wherever interest teaches submission, while reputation and honor seem to forbid it. Whoever feels degraded at the thought of being the tool of a prince or of a party and sect or even of a money power — for example as the descendant of an old, proud family — but precisely wants or must be this tool, before himself and before the public, needs pathetic principles that one can take in one's mouth at any time: — principles of an unconditional ought, to which one may submit, and show oneself submitted, without shame. All finer servility holds fast to the categorical imperative and is the mortal enemy of those who want to take the unconditional character from duty: that is what decency demands of them, and not decency only.

6 Loss of Dignity. — Reflection has lost all its dignity of form; the ceremonial and the solemn gesture of reflection have been made a mockery of, and a wise man of the old style would no longer be endured. We think too quickly, and on the way, and in the middle of walking, in the middle of business of all kinds, even when we think of the most serious things; we need little preparation, even little stillness: — it is as if we carried about in our heads an unstoppably rolling machine that goes on working even under the most unfavorable circumstances. Formerly one could see in everyone that he meant to think — that was indeed the exception! — that he now meant to become wiser and was preparing himself for a thought: one pulled a face at it, as at a prayer, and stopped one's step; yes, one stood still for hours in the street when the thought “came” — on one leg or on two. That was “worthy of the matter”!

7 Something for the Industrious. — Whoever now wants to make a study of moral matters opens up an immense field of work. All kinds of passions must be thought through individually, individually pursued through times, peoples, great and small individuals; their whole reason and all their valuations and illuminations of things must be brought out into the light! So far all that has given color to existence still has no history: or where would there be a history of love, of greed, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty? Even a comparative history of law, or even only of punishment, is still entirely missing. Has the different division of the day, the consequences of a regular fixing of work, festival and rest, already been made an object of research? Does one know the moral effects of foods? Is there a philosophy of nutrition? (The noise that keeps breaking out for and against vegetarianism already proves that there is no such philosophy!) Have the experiences of living together, for example the experiences of monasteries, already been collected? Has the dialectic of marriage and friendship already been presented? The customs of scholars, of merchants, artists, craftsmen — have they already found their thinkers? There is so much to think about here! Everything that men have so far regarded as their “conditions of existence,” and all the reason, passion and superstition in this regard — has this already been researched to the end? The mere observation of the different growth that human drives have had and could still have according to the different moral climate already gives too much work for the most industrious; whole generations are needed, generations of scholars working together in a planned way, to exhaust the viewpoints and the material here. The same holds for showing the grounds for the difference of moral climate (“why does this sun of a basic moral judgment and chief measure of value shine here — and that one there?”). And again a new work is to establish the erroneousness of all these grounds and the whole nature of moral judgment so far. Supposing all these works were done, the most delicate of all questions would step to the fore: whether science is in a position to give aims of action after it has proved that it can take and destroy them — and then an experimenting would be in place in which every kind of heroism could find satisfaction, an experimenting lasting centuries, which could put in the shade all the great works and sacrifices of history so far. So far science has not yet built its Cyclopean works; the time will come for that too.

8 Unconscious Virtues. — All the qualities of a man of which he is conscious — and especially when he presupposes their visibility and evidence even for those around him — stand under quite different laws of development than those qualities which are unknown to him or poorly known, and which also hide themselves from the eye of the finer observer by their fineness and know how to hide as if behind nothing. So it is with the fine sculptures on the scales of reptiles: it would be an error to suspect in them an ornament or a weapon — for one sees them only with the microscope, that is with an eye so artificially sharpened as no similar animals, for which they might mean ornament or weapon, possess! Our visible moral qualities, and especially our supposedly visible ones, go their way — and the invisible ones of the same name, which are neither ornament nor weapon for us with regard to others, go their way too: a quite different one probably, and with lines and finenesses and sculptures that might perhaps give pleasure to a god with a divine microscope. We have, for example, our industry, our ambition, our acuteness: all the world knows of it —, and besides that we probably have once again our industry, our ambition, our acuteness; but for these our reptile scales the microscope has not yet been invented! — And here the friends of instinctive morality will say: “Bravo! He at least holds unconscious virtues to be possible, — that is enough for us!” — Oh you easily satisfied!

9 Our Eruptions. — Uncounted things that humanity appropriated at earlier stages, but so weakly and embryonically that no one knew how to perceive them as appropriated, suddenly come to light long afterward, perhaps after centuries: it has meanwhile grown strong and ripe. Some ages seem entirely to lack this or that talent, this or that virtue, as some people do: but just wait until the grandchildren and great-grandchildren, if one has time to wait, — they bring the interior of their grandfathers into the sun, that interior of which the grandfathers themselves still knew nothing. Often the son is already the betrayer of his father: the father understands himself better since he has his son. We all have hidden gardens and plantations in us; and, with another simile, we are all growing volcanoes that will have their hour of eruption: — how near, however, or how far off this is, no one knows, not even the good God.

10 A Kind of Atavism. — The rare men of an age I understand best as suddenly emerging after-shoots of past cultures and their forces: as it were the atavism of a people and its civilization: — so there really is still something about them to be understood! Now they appear strange, rare, extraordinary: and whoever feels these forces in himself has to cultivate, defend, honor and raise them large against a resisting other world: and so he becomes either a great man or a mad and peculiar one, insofar as he does not go to ruin in good time at all. Formerly these same qualities were ordinary and consequently counted as common: they did not distinguish. Perhaps they were demanded, presupposed; it was impossible to become great with them, and precisely because the danger was lacking of also becoming crazy and lonely with them. — It is chiefly the preserving generations and castes of a people in which such after-shoots of old drives occur, while there is no probability of such atavism where races, habits and valuations change too quickly. Tempo means as much among the forces of development in peoples as in music; for our case an andante of development is absolutely necessary, as the tempo of a passionate and slow spirit: — and of that kind the spirit of conservative generations is.

11 Consciousness. — Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and therefore also the most unfinished and least powerful part of it. From consciousness come innumerable mistakes that make an animal, a man, go to ruin earlier than would be necessary, “against fate,” as Homer says. Were not the preserving bond of the instincts so exceedingly much more powerful, did it not serve on the whole as regulator: humanity would have to perish of its perverse judgments and fantasies with open eyes, of its groundlessness and credulity, in short precisely of its consciousness: or rather, without that, this would long since be gone! Before a function is developed and ripe, it is a danger to the organism: good if it is tyrannized over energetically for that long! So consciousness is energetically tyrannized over — and not least by pride in it! One thinks that here is the core of man; his abiding, eternal, last, most original part! One holds consciousness to be a fixed given magnitude! Denies its growth, its intermittences! Takes it as “unity of the organism”! — This ridiculous overestimation and misjudgment of consciousness has the great utility as a consequence, that a too-rapid development of it has thereby been prevented. Because men believed they already had consciousness, they took little trouble to acquire it — and even now it is no different! It is still a quite new, and only just dawning on the human eye, barely yet clearly recognizable task, to incorporate knowledge and make it instinctive — a task seen only by those who have grasped that so far only our errors have been incorporated in us and that all our consciousness refers to errors!

12 On the Goal of Science. — How? The last goal of science should be to create for man as much pleasure and as little displeasure as possible? What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together by one rope that whoever wants as much of the one must also have as much of the other — that whoever wants to learn the “jubilation high as heaven” must also hold himself ready for “sad to the point of death”? And so it perhaps is! The Stoics at least believed it was so, and were consistent when they desired as little pleasure as possible in order to have as little displeasure from life (if one used the saying “the virtuous man is the happiest,” one had in it both a signboard of the school for the great mass and a casuistic subtlety for the fine). Even today you still have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, in short painlessness — and at bottom socialists and politicians of all parties should honestly promise their people nothing more than that — or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of a fullness of fine and hitherto rarely tasted pleasures and joys! If you decide for the former, if you therefore want to press down and diminish the painfulness of men, well then you must also press down and diminish their capacity for joy. In fact one can further the one as well as the other goal with science! Perhaps it is now still better known for its power to rob man of his joys and to make him colder, more statue-like, more stoical. But it could also still be discovered as the great bringer of pain! — And then perhaps its counter-force would be discovered at the same time, its immense capacity to light up new star-worlds of joy!

13 On the Doctrine of the Feeling of Power. — In doing good and in doing harm one exercises one's power over others — one wants nothing more than that! With harming those to whom we must first make our power perceptible; for pain is a much more sensitive means to that than pleasure: — pain always asks for the cause, while pleasure is inclined to stand still with itself and not look back. With benefiting and good will toward those who already somehow depend on us (that is, are used to thinking of us as their causes); we want to increase their power, because we thus increase ours, or we want to show them the advantage of standing in our power, — so they will be more content with their situation and more hostile and ready to fight against the enemies of our power. Whether we bring sacrifices in benefiting or in harming does not change the final value of our actions; even if we stake our life on it, as the martyr does in favor of his church, it is a sacrifice brought to our desire for power, or for the sake of preserving our feeling of power. Whoever feels “I am in possession of the truth,” how many possessions does he not let go in order to save this feeling! What does he not throw overboard in order to keep himself “above” — that is, above the others who lack the “truth”! Certainly the state in which we do harm is seldom as pleasant, as unmixedly pleasant, as that in which we do good, — it is a sign that we still lack power, or it betrays the vexation over this poverty, it brings new dangers and uncertainties for our present possession of power and clouds our horizon with the prospect of revenge, mockery, punishment, failure. Only for the most irritable and covetous people of the feeling of power may it be more pleasurable to press the seal of power on the resisting; for those to whom the sight of the already subjugated (which is the object of good will) is a burden and a boredom. It depends on how one is used to spicing one's life; it is a matter of taste whether one prefers the slow or the sudden, the sure or the dangerous and reckless increase of power, — one seeks this or that spice always according to one's temperament. An easy prey is something contemptible to proud natures; they feel a sense of well-being only at the sight of unbroken men who could become enemies to them, and likewise at the sight of all possessions hard of access; toward the suffering they are often hard, for he is not worthy of their striving and pride — but all the more obliging do they show themselves toward their equals, with whom a fight and a struggle would in any case be honorable if an opportunity should ever offer itself. Under the sense of well-being of this perspective the men of the knightly caste have grown used to a select courtesy toward one another. — Pity is the most pleasant feeling in those who are not proud and have no prospect of great conquests: for them the easy prey — and every sufferer is that — is something delightful. One praises pity as the virtue of the pleasure girls.

14 What All Is Called Love. — Greed and love: how differently we feel at each of these words! — and yet it could be the same drive, named twice, once disparaged from the standpoint of those who already possess, in whom the drive has come to rest and who now fear for their “property”; the other time from the standpoint of the unsatisfied, the thirsty, and therefore glorified as “good.” Is our love of neighbor not a craving for new property? And likewise our love of knowledge, of truth, and in general all that craving for novelties? We gradually grow weary of the old, the surely possessed, and stretch out our hands again; even the most beautiful landscape in which we live for three months is no longer certain of our love, and some farther coast provokes our greed: possession mostly grows smaller through possessing. Our pleasure in ourselves wants to keep itself upright in such a way that it keeps transforming something new in ourselves — that is precisely what possessing means. To grow weary of a possession, that is: to grow weary of ourselves. (One can also suffer from too much — the desire to throw away, to distribute, can also attach the honorific name “love” to itself.) When we see someone suffer, we gladly use the opportunity now offered to take possession of him; that is what the beneficent and the compassionate do, for example, and he too calls the desire awakened in him for new possession “love,” and has his pleasure in it as in a new conquest beckoning him. Most clearly, however, the love of the sexes betrays itself as a craving for property: the lover wants the unconditional sole possession of the person he longs for, he wants as unconditional a power over her soul as over her body, he wants to be loved alone and to dwell and rule as the highest and most desirable thing in the other soul. If one considers that this means nothing other than to exclude all the world from a precious good, happiness and enjoyment: if one considers that the lover aims at the impoverishment and deprivation of all other competitors and would like to become the dragon of his golden hoard, as the most inconsiderate and selfish of all “conquerors” and exploiters: if one considers finally that to the lover himself the whole other world appears indifferent, pale, worthless, and he is ready to bring every sacrifice, to disturb every order, to put every interest behind: then one is indeed astonished that this wild greed and injustice of sexual love has been so glorified and deified as has happened at all times, yes, that from this love one has taken the concept of love as the opposite of egoism, while it is perhaps precisely the most naive expression of egoism. Here obviously the non-possessors and the desiring have made the usage — there were probably always too many of them. Those to whom much possession and satiety was granted in this domain have now and then let fall a word about the “raging demon,” like that most amiable and most beloved of all Athenians, Sophocles: but Eros always laughed at such blasphemers — they were always precisely his greatest favorites. — There is probably here and there on earth a kind of continuation of love, in which that covetous craving of two persons for each other has given way to a new desire and covetousness, a common higher thirst for an ideal standing above them: but who knows this love? Who has lived it? Its right name is friendship.

15 From a Distance. — This mountain makes the whole region it dominates charming and significant in every way: after we have said this to ourselves for the hundredth time, we are so unreasonable and so grateful toward it that we believe it, the giver of this charm, must itself be the most charming thing in the region — and so we climb up it and are disappointed. Suddenly it itself, and the whole landscape around us, beneath us, is as if disenchanted; we had forgotten that some greatness, like some goodness, wants to be seen only at a certain distance, and decidedly from below, not from above, — only so does it work. Perhaps you know people near you who may look at themselves only from a certain distance in order to find themselves at all tolerable or attractive and strength-giving; self-knowledge is to be dissuaded from them.

16 Over the Footbridge. — In dealings with persons who are shy of their feelings one must be able to dissemble; they feel a sudden hatred toward anyone who catches them in a tender or enthusiastic and high-running feeling, as though he had seen their secrets. If one wants to do them good in such moments, one should make them laugh or say some cold, jesting malice: — their feeling freezes at that, and they are once more master of themselves. But I give the moral before the story. — Once in our lives we were so close to each other that nothing seemed any longer to hinder our friendship and brotherhood, and there was only a little footbridge between us. Just as you were about to step onto it, I asked you: “will you come across the bridge to me?” — But then you no longer wanted to; and when I asked again, you kept silent. Since then mountains and raging rivers, and whatever else separates and makes strange, have been thrown between us, and even if we wanted to reach each other, we no longer could! But if you think now of that little footbridge, you have no words left, — only sobbing and astonishment.

17 To Give a Reason for His Poverty. — We certainly cannot, by any trick, make a rich, richly flowing virtue out of a poor one, but we can well reinterpret its poverty beautifully into necessity, so that the sight of it no longer hurts us, and on its account we no longer make reproachful faces at fate. So does the wise gardener who lays the poor little stream of his garden in a nymph's arms and thus gives a reason for the poverty: — and who would not need the nymphs as he does!

18 Ancient Pride. — We lack the ancient coloring of nobility because our feeling lacks the ancient slave. A Greek of noble descent found between his height and that last lowliness such monstrous intermediate steps and such a distance that he could hardly still see the slave distinctly: even Plato no longer saw him entirely. We are otherwise, accustomed as we are to the doctrine of the equality of men, though not to equality itself. A being that cannot dispose of itself and lacks leisure — that still does not count with our eye as anything contemptible; there is perhaps too much of this slavishness in each of us, according to the conditions of our social order and activity, which are fundamentally different from those of the ancients. — The Greek philosopher went through life with the secret feeling that there were far more slaves than one supposed — namely, that everyone was a slave who was not a philosopher; his pride swelled when he considered that even the most powerful on earth were among these his slaves. This pride too is strange and impossible to us; not even in simile does the word “slave” still have its full force for us.

19 The Evil. — Examine the life of the best and most fruitful men and peoples and ask yourselves whether a tree that is to grow proudly upward can do without bad weather and storms: whether disfavor and resistance from outside, whether any kinds of hatred, envy, obstinacy, mistrust, hardness, greed and violence do not belong among the favoring circumstances without which a great growth even in virtue is hardly possible? The poison on which the weaker nature perishes is strengthening to the strong man — and he does not call it poison either.

20 Dignity of Folly. — A few thousand years further along the track of the last century! — and in everything man does the highest cleverness will be visible: but precisely thereby cleverness will have lost all its dignity. It will then indeed be necessary to be clever, but also so ordinary and so common that a more fastidious taste will feel this necessity as a vulgarity. And just as a tyranny of truth and science would be capable of driving up the price of the lie, so a tyranny of cleverness could drive out a new kind of nobility. To be noble — that would then perhaps mean: to have follies in one's head.

21 To the Teachers of Selflessness. — One calls a man's virtues good, not with regard to the effects which they have for himself, but with regard to the effects which we presuppose they have for us and for society: — one has always been very little “selfless,” very little “unegoistic” in the praise of virtues! Otherwise, namely, one would have had to see that the virtues (such as industry, obedience, chastity, piety, justice) are mostly harmful to their possessors, as drives that rule too violently and covetously in them and will not at all let themselves be held by reason in balance with the other drives. If you have a virtue, a real, whole virtue (and not only a little drive toward a virtue!) — then you are its victim! But the neighbor praises your virtue precisely for that reason! One praises the industrious man even though he damages the keenness of his eyes or the originality and freshness of his spirit with this industry; one honors and pities the young man who has “worked himself to ruin,” because one judges: “For the whole greatness of society even the loss of the best individual is only a small sacrifice! Bad that the sacrifice is necessary! Much worse, certainly, if the individual should think otherwise and take his preservation and development more important than his work in the service of society!” And so one pities this young man, not for his own sake, but because a devoted instrument, inconsiderate toward itself — a so-called “good man” — has been lost to society through this death. Perhaps one even considers whether it would have been more useful in the interest of society if he had worked less inconsiderately against himself and had preserved himself longer, — indeed one does concede an advantage in that, but one holds that other advantage higher and more lasting, that a sacrifice has been brought and the disposition of the sacrificial animal has once again been visibly confirmed. So it is once the instrument-nature in the virtues that is really praised when the virtues are praised, and then the blind drive ruling in every virtue, which will not let itself be held in bounds by the total advantage of the individual, in short: the unreason in virtue, by virtue of which the individual lets himself be transformed into a function of the whole. The praise of the virtues is the praise of something privately harmful — the praise of drives that take from man his noblest egoism and the power of the highest guardianship over himself. — Certainly: for education and for the incorporation of virtuous habits one turns out a series of effects of virtue that make virtue and private advantage appear as siblings, — and there is in fact such a siblinghood! Blindly raging industry, for example, this typical virtue of a tool, is presented as the way to wealth and honor and as the most salutary poison against boredom and the passions: but its danger is kept silent, its highest dangerousness. Education proceeds throughout in this way: it seeks to determine the individual, through a series of stimuli and advantages, to a way of thinking and acting which, once it has become habit, drive and passion, rules in him and over him against his last advantage, but “for the common good.” How often do I see that blindly raging industry indeed creates wealth and honor, but at the same time takes from the organs the fineness by virtue of which there could be any enjoyment of wealth and honors, and likewise that this chief means against boredom and the passions at the same time makes the senses dull and the spirit refractory to new stimuli. (The most industrious of all ages — our age — knows how to make nothing out of its much industry and money except always again more money and always again more industry: it takes more genius to spend than to acquire! — Well, we shall have our “grandchildren”!) If education succeeds, then every virtue of the individual is a public utility and a private disadvantage in the sense of the highest private goal, — probably some spiritual-sensual stunting or even early ruin: one may consider in turn from this viewpoint the virtue of obedience, of chastity, of piety, of justice. The praise of the selfless, sacrificing, virtuous man — that is, of him who does not apply his whole strength and reason to his preservation, development, elevation, furtherance, increase of power, but lives modestly and thoughtlessly with regard to himself, perhaps even indifferently or ironically — this praise has certainly not sprung from the spirit of selflessness! The “neighbor” praises selflessness because he has advantages from it! If the neighbor himself thought “selflessly,” he would reject that loss of strength, that damage done in his favor, he would work against the emergence of such inclinations and, above all, would show his selflessness precisely by not calling it good! — Hereby the fundamental contradiction of that morality which is just now much honored is indicated: the motives for this morality stand in opposition to its principle! That by which this morality wants to prove itself refutes itself out of its own criterion of the moral! The proposition “you shall renounce yourself and bring yourself as a sacrifice” could, in order not to contradict its own morality, be decreed only by a being that thereby renounced its own advantage and perhaps brought about its own ruin in the demanded sacrifice of individuals. But as soon as the neighbor (or society) recommends altruism for the sake of the use, the precisely opposite proposition “you shall seek your advantage even at the cost of everything else” is brought into application, so that in one breath a “you shall” and a “you shall not” are preached!

22 L'ordre du jour pour le roi. — The day begins: let us begin by ordering for this day the business and festivities of our most gracious master, who now still deigns to rest. His Majesty has bad weather today: we shall beware of calling it bad; there will be no talk of the weather — but we shall take the business somewhat more solemnly today and the festivities somewhat more festively than would otherwise be necessary. His Majesty will perhaps even be ill: we shall present at breakfast the last good piece of news from the evening, the arrival of Monsieur de Montaigne, who knows so pleasantly how to jest about his illness — he suffers from the stone. We shall receive a few persons (persons! — what would that old inflated frog among them say if he heard this word! “I am no person,” he would say, “but always the thing itself.”) — and the reception will last longer than is pleasant to anyone: reason enough to tell of that poet who wrote on his door: “whoever enters here will do me an honor; whoever does not — a pleasure.” — That is truly to say a rudeness in a polite manner! And perhaps this poet is quite right, for his part, to be rude:

they say his verses are better than the verse-smith. Well, then let him make many more and withdraw himself from the world as much as possible: and that is indeed the sense of his pretty ill-manners! Conversely a prince is always worth more than his “verse,” even if — but what are we doing? We chat, and the whole court thinks we are already working and breaking our heads over it: one sees no light earlier than the one burning in our window. — Hark! Was that not the bell? To the devil! The day and the dance begin, and we do not know its turns! So we must improvise, — all the world improvises its day. Let us do it today once as all the world does! — And with that my strange morning dream vanished, probably before the hard strokes of the tower clock, which just then, with all the importance that is proper to it, announced the fifth hour. It seems to me that this time the god of dreams wanted to make fun of my habits, — it is my habit to begin the day in such a way that I lay it out for myself and make it tolerable, and it may be that I have often done this too formally and too princely.

23 The Signs of Corruption. — One should note the following signs in those conditions of society which from time to time become necessary and are designated by the word “corruption.” As soon as corruption sets in anywhere, a colorful superstition gains the upper hand and the previous total faith of a people grows pale and powerless against it: superstition, namely, is free-thinking of the second rank — whoever gives himself over to it chooses certain forms and formulas that suit him and permits himself a right of choice. The superstitious man is, compared with the religious man, always much more a “person” than he, and a superstitious society will be one in which there are already many individuals and a taste for individuality. Seen from this standpoint, superstition always appears as a progress against faith and as a sign that the intellect is becoming more independent and wants its rights. It is over corruption that the admirers of the old religion and religiosity complain — they have so far also determined the usage of words and given superstition a bad reputation even among the freest spirits. Let us learn that it is a symptom of enlightenment. — Second, one accuses a society in which corruption takes hold of slackness: and visibly the valuation of war and the delight in war decline in it, and the comforts of life are now pursued as hotly as formerly the honors of war and the gymnasium. But one is used to overlook the fact that that old energy of a people and passion of a people, which through war and the contests of arms attained a splendid visibility, has now converted itself into innumerable private passions and has only become less visible; indeed, in conditions of “corruption” the might and violence of the energy now spent by a people is probably greater than ever, and the individual gives it out as lavishly as he formerly could not, — he was then not yet rich enough for that! And so it is precisely the times of “slackness” in which tragedy runs through the houses and alleys, in which great love and great hatred are born, and the flame of knowledge shoots up bright into the sky. — Third, one is used to say of such times of corruption, as it were in compensation for the censure of superstition and slackness, that they are milder and that cruelty is now very much on the decline, measured against the older, more believing and stronger time. But I cannot agree with the praise either, any more than with that censure: I grant only this much, that cruelty now refines itself, and that its older forms from now on go against the taste; but the wounding and torturing by word and glance attains its highest development in times of corruption — only now is malice created, and the delight in malice. The men of corruption are witty and slanderous; they know that there are other kinds of murder than by dagger and assault — they also know that everything well said is believed. — Fourth: when “the customs decay,” those beings first come to the surface which one calls tyrants: they are the forerunners and, as it were, the precocious first fruits of individuals. A little while longer: and this fruit of fruits hangs ripe and yellow on the tree of a people — and only for the sake of these fruits was there this tree! When the decay has reached its height and the struggle of tyrants of every kind as well, then there always comes the Caesar, the final tyrant, who puts an end to the weary wrestling for sole rule by letting the weariness work for him. In his time the individual is usually at his ripest and consequently “culture” at its highest and most fruitful, but not for his sake and not through him: although the highest cultured men like to flatter their Caesar by giving themselves out as his work. The truth is, however, that they need quiet from outside because they have their unrest and work within themselves. In these times venality and betrayal are greatest: for the love of the ego just discovered is now much more powerful than the love of the old, used-up, talked-to-death “fatherland”; and the need to secure oneself somehow against the fearful fluctuations of fortune also opens nobler hands as soon as a powerful and rich man shows himself ready to pour gold into them. There is now so little sure future: so one lives for today: a state of the soul in which all seducers have an easy game, — one lets oneself be seduced and bribed, namely, only “for today” too, and reserves the future and virtue for later! Individuals, these true beings-for-and-in-themselves, look after the moment more than their opposites, the herd men, as is well known, because they hold themselves to be as incalculable as the future; likewise they like to attach themselves to men of violence, because they trust themselves with actions and answers that can count on neither understanding nor mercy from the crowd — but the tyrant or Caesar understands the right of the individual even in its excess and has an interest in speaking a good word for a bolder private morality and even in lending a hand. For he thinks of himself and wants to be thought of as Napoleon once expressed it in his classical manner: “I have the right to answer everything of which one accuses me with an eternal 'that is what I am.' I stand apart from all the world, I accept conditions from no one. I want people to submit to my fantasies too and to find it quite simply natural when I give myself up to this or that distraction.” So Napoleon once spoke to his wife when she had grounds to call her husband's marital fidelity into question. — The times of corruption are those in which the apples fall from the tree: I mean the individuals, the seed-bearers of the future, the authors of the spiritual colonization and new formation of state and social unions. Corruption is only a term of abuse for the autumn times of a people.

24 Various Discontent. — The weak and, as it were, feminine malcontents are the inventors of the beautifying and deepening of life, the strong malcontents — the men among them, to keep the image — for the improving and securing of life. In this the former show their weakness and womanly nature, that they gladly let themselves be deceived for a time and are well content with a little intoxication and enthusiasm now and then, but on the whole are never to be satisfied and suffer from the incurability of their discontent; besides this they are the furtherers of all those who know how to produce opiate and narcotic consolations, and precisely for that reason are angry at those who esteem the physician higher than the priest — thereby they maintain the continuance of the real states of distress! Had there not been, since the Middle Ages, a surplus of malcontents of this kind in Europe, the famous European capacity for continual transformation would perhaps never have arisen at all: for the demands of the strong malcontents are too coarse and at bottom too modest not to be finally brought to rest. China is the example of a land where discontent on a large scale and the capacity for transformation have died out many centuries ago; and the socialists and state-idolaters of Europe could easily, with their measures for the improving and securing of life, bring Europe too into Chinese conditions and a Chinese “happiness,” supposing that they could first root out here that more sickly, tenderer, more feminine discontent and romanticism, of which there is for the present still an overabundant supply. Europe is a sick man who owes the highest thanks to his incurability and eternal transformation of his suffering; these continual new situations, these equally continual new dangers, pains and expedients have at last produced an intellectual irritability which is almost as much as genius, and in any case the mother of all genius.

25 Not Predestined for Knowledge. — There is a not at all rare, dull humility with which, once afflicted, one is for good and all unfit to be a disciple of knowledge. Namely: at the moment when a man of this kind notices something striking, he turns, as it were, on the spot and says to himself: “You have deceived yourself! Where were your senses! This cannot be the truth!” — and then, instead of looking and listening once more more sharply, he runs out of the way of the striking thing as if intimidated and seeks to get it out of his head as quickly as possible. His inner canon, namely, reads: “I will see nothing that contradicts the usual opinion about things! Am I made to discover new truths? There are already too many of the old ones.”

26 What Does Living Mean? — Living — that means: continually casting off something of oneself that wants to die; living — that means: being cruel and inexorable toward everything that grows weak and old in us, and not only in us. Living — that means, then: being without piety toward the dying, the wretched and the aged? Being forever a murderer? — And yet old Moses said: “You shall not kill!”

27 The Renouncer. — What does the renouncer do? He strives after a higher world, he wants to fly farther and higher than all men of affirmation, — he throws much away that would weigh down his flight, and among it much that is not worthless to him, not unpleasing: he sacrifices it to his craving for height. This sacrificing, this throwing away is now precisely what alone becomes visible in him: on account of it one gives him the name of the renouncer, and as such he stands before us, wrapped in his hood and like the soul of a hair shirt. But with this effect that he makes on us he is well content: he wants to keep hidden from us his craving, his pride, his intention to fly beyond us. — Yes! He is cleverer than we thought, and so polite toward us — this man of affirmation! For that he is, like us, even in renouncing.

28 To Harm with One's Best. — Our strengths sometimes drive us so far ahead that we can no longer endure our weaknesses and perish of them: we even foresee this outcome and yet will it no otherwise. Then we grow hard toward what in us wants to be spared, and our greatness is our ruthlessness too. — Such an experience, which we must in the end pay for with our life, is a parable for the whole effect of great men upon others and upon their time: — precisely with their best, with what only they can do, they ruin many weak, unsure, becoming, willing people, and are harmful thereby. Yes, the case can occur that, reckoned on the whole, they only do harm, because their best is accepted and, as it were, drunk up only by those who lose their understanding and their egoism over it, as over too strong a drink: they become so intoxicated that they must break their limbs on all the wrong paths wherever the intoxication drives them.

29 The Liars-Added-To. — When in France people began to combat the unities of Aristotle and consequently also to defend them, there was once again to be seen what is so often to be seen but so reluctantly seen: — people lied reasons to themselves, for the sake of which those laws should continue to exist, simply in order not to admit that one had grown accustomed to the rule of these laws and wanted it no otherwise. And so people do within every ruling morality and religion, and have always done: the reasons and the intentions behind the habit are always lied onto it only when some begin to dispute the habit and ask for reasons and intentions. Here lies the great dishonesty of the conservatives of all times: — they are the liars-added-to.

30 Comedy Playing of the Famous. — Famous men who need their fame, as for example all politicians, never choose their allies and friends any more without ulterior thoughts: from this one they want a piece of the splendor and reflected glow of his virtue, from that one the fear-inspiring quality of certain questionable traits that everybody knows in him, from another they steal the reputation of his idleness, of his lying in the sun, because it serves their own purposes to count for a time as inattentive and indolent: — it conceals that they are lying in wait; now they need the enthusiast near them, now the connoisseur, now the brooder, now the pedant, and as it were as their present self, but just as soon they no longer need the same ones! And so their surroundings and outsides keep dying off, while everything seems to press into this surrounding and want to become their “character”: in this they resemble the great cities. Their fame is continually in change like their character, for their changing means demand this change, and push now this, now that real or invented quality forward and out onto the stage: their friends and allies belong, as said, to these stage qualities. By contrast, what they want must stand all the more firm and brazen and shining far and wide — and this too sometimes needs its comedy and its stage play.

31 Trade and Nobility. — Buying and selling now counts as common, like the art of reading and writing; everyone is now practiced in it, even if he is no merchant, and practices himself in this technique every day: quite as formerly, in the age of wilder humanity, everyone was a hunter and practiced himself day after day in the technique of the hunt. Then hunting was common: but as this finally became a privilege of the powerful and noble and thereby lost the character of the everyday and the common — by ceasing to be necessary and becoming a matter of mood and luxury: — so it could one day be with buying and selling. Conditions of society are conceivable in which there is no selling and buying and in which the necessity of this technique is gradually entirely lost: perhaps individuals, who are less subject to the law of the general condition, would then permit themselves buying and selling as a luxury of feeling. Only then would trade acquire nobility, and the nobles would then perhaps occupy themselves with trade as gladly as hitherto with war and politics: while conversely the valuation of politics could then have changed entirely. Already it is ceasing to be the craft of the nobleman: and it would be possible that one day people would find it so common as to bring it, like all party and day literature, under the heading “prostitution of the spirit.”

32 Unwelcome Disciples. — What am I to do with these two young men! cried with vexation a philosopher who “corrupted” the young as Socrates once corrupted them, — they are unwelcome disciples to me. That one cannot say No, and the other says of everything: “Half and half.” Supposing they took up my teaching, the first would suffer too much, for my way of thinking requires a warlike soul, a will to do harm, a delight in saying No, a hard skin, — he would waste away from open and inner wounds. And the other will make for himself a mediocrity out of every cause he represents and thus make it a mediocrity — such a disciple I wish upon my enemy.

33 Outside the Lecture Hall. — “To prove to you that man at bottom belongs among the good-natured animals, I would remind you how credulous he has been for so long. Only now has he become a mistrustful animal, quite late and after monstrous self-overcoming — yes! man is now more evil than ever.” — I do not understand this: why should man now be more mistrustful and more evil? — “Because he now has a science — needs one!”

34 Historia abscondita. — Every great man has a retroactive force: all history is put back on the scales for his sake, and a thousand secrets of the past crawl out of their hiding places — into his sun. It is quite impossible to foresee what all will one day still be history. The past is perhaps still essentially undiscovered! So many retroactive forces are still needed!

35 Heresy and Witchcraft. — To think differently from custom — that is by far not so much the effect of a better intellect as the effect of strong, evil inclinations, of detaching, isolating, defiant, malicious, spiteful inclinations. Heresy is the counterpart of witchcraft and certainly as little as that something harmless or even in itself worthy of veneration. The heretics and the witches are two kinds of evil people: they have in common that they also feel themselves as evil, but that their unconquerable delight is to vent themselves harmfully on what rules (men or opinions). The Reformation, a kind of doubling of the medieval spirit, at a time when it no longer had a good conscience with it, brought both of them forth in the greatest abundance.

36 Last Words. — It will be remembered that the Emperor Augustus, that terrible man who had himself under such control and who could keep silent as well as any wise Socrates, became indiscreet about himself with his last word. For the first time he let his mask fall, when he gave to understand that he had worn a mask and played a comedy: he had played the father of his country and wisdom on the throne, well enough to be taken for real! Plaudite, amici, comoedia finita est! — The thought of the dying Nero, qualis artifex pereo!, was also the thought of the dying Augustus: the vanity of the actor! The chatter of the actor! The exact opposite of the dying Socrates! But Tiberius died in silence, that most tormented of all self-tormentors. He was genuine and no actor! What may have crossed his mind at the last? Perhaps this: "Life is a long death. Fool that I am, who have shortened the lives of so many! Was I made to be a benefactor? I should have given them eternal life; then I could have watched them dying forever. For that I had such good eyes: qualis spectator pereo!" When, after a long death struggle, he seemed to be regaining his strength once more, it was thought advisable to smother him with bed pillows. He died a double death.

37 From Three Errors. — In the last centuries, science has been advanced for three reasons. Partly because people hoped that through it they could best understand God's goodness and wisdom. That was the chief motive in the souls of the great English (such as Newton). Partly because people believed in the absolute usefulness of knowledge, above all in the innermost bond between morality, knowledge and happiness. That was the chief motive in the souls of the great French (such as Voltaire). And partly because people thought that in science they had and could love something selfless, harmless, self-sufficient and truly innocent, in which the wicked drives of humanity had no share at all. That was the chief motive in the soul of Spinoza, who felt himself divine as a knower. So: from three errors.

38 The Explosives. — If one considers how much in need of explosion the strength of young men lies, one will not be surprised to see them choose this or that cause so coarsely and so unselectively. What excites them is the sight of the zeal that surrounds a cause, and, as it were, the sight of the burning fuse, not the cause itself. For that reason the subtler seducers know how to hold out the prospect of an explosion, and to disregard the grounding of their cause. These powder kegs are not won over with reasons!

39 Changed Taste. — A change in the general taste is more powerful than a change in opinions. Opinions, with all their proofs, refutations and the whole intellectual masquerade, are only symptoms of changed taste, and most certainly not that for which they are so often taken, namely its causes. How does the general taste change? When single, powerful, influential people, without any sense of shame, pronounce their hoc est ridiculum, hoc est absurdum, the verdict of their taste and disgust, and enforce it tyrannically. By this they impose a compulsion on many, from which in time there grows a habit in still more, and finally a need of all. But that these individuals feel and "taste" otherwise usually has its ground in some peculiarity of their way of life, their diet, their digestion, perhaps in more or fewer of the inorganic salts in their blood and brain; in short, in the physis. They have the courage, however, to confess their physis and to listen to its demands even in their finest tones. Their aesthetic and moral judgments are such "finest tones" of the physis.

40 On the Lack of Noble Form. — Soldiers and leaders still have a far higher relationship with one another than workers and employers do. For the time being, at least, all culture founded on the military still stands high above all so-called industrial culture. The latter, in its present form, is the most common mode of existence that has yet existed. Here the law of need simply operates: one wants to live and must sell oneself, but one despises the person who exploits this need and buys the worker. It is strange that submission to powerful, frightening, even terrible persons, to tyrants and commanders, is by no means felt as painful as this submission to unknown and uninteresting persons, as all the great figures of industry are. In the employer the worker usually sees nothing but a cunning, bloodsucking, need-speculating dog of a man, whose name, appearance, manners and reputation are entirely indifferent to him. The manufacturers and great merchant-entrepreneurs have probably so far lacked all those forms and marks of the higher race which first make persons interesting. If they had the nobility of hereditary rank in their look and gesture, perhaps there would be no socialism of the masses. For at bottom the masses are ready for slavery of every kind, provided that the higher person over them keeps legitimating himself as higher, as born to command, through noble form! The commonest man feels that nobility cannot be improvised, and that in it he must honor the fruit of long ages. But the absence of higher form, and the notorious manufacturers' vulgarity with red, fat hands, lead him to think that only chance and luck have raised one man above another. Well then, he concludes to himself, let us try chance and luck! Let us throw the dice! And socialism begins.

41 Against Remorse. — The thinker sees in his own actions experiments and questions, meant to yield some information about something. Success and failure are above all answers to him. But to be annoyed that something has gone wrong, or even to feel remorse, he leaves to those who act because they are ordered to, and who expect a beating if the gracious lord is not satisfied with the result.

42 Work and Boredom. — To seek work for the sake of wages: in the lands of civilization nearly all people are now alike in this. For all of them work is a means and not the end in itself, which is why they are not particular about what work they take, provided it brings in an ample profit. Now there are rarer people who would rather perish than work without pleasure in the work. They are the fastidious, the hard to satisfy, who are not served by ample profit if the work is not itself the profit of all profits. To this rarer kind of person belong the artists and contemplatives of every sort, but also those idlers who spend their lives hunting, traveling, or in love affairs and adventures. All these want work and hardship, so far as they are joined with delight, and the heaviest, hardest work if it must be. Otherwise they are resolutely idle, even if poverty, dishonor, or danger to health and life should be bound up with that idleness. They fear boredom less than work without delight. Indeed, they need a great deal of boredom if their work is to succeed. For the thinker and for all inventive spirits, boredom is that unpleasant "calm" of the soul which comes before the happy voyage and the favorable winds. He must endure it. He must wait within himself for its effect. That is precisely what the lesser natures can by no means bring themselves to do! To chase boredom away by any means is common, just as working without delight is common. Perhaps what distinguishes the Asians from the Europeans is that they are capable of a longer and deeper rest than the Europeans. Even their narcotics act slowly and demand patience, in contrast to the hateful suddenness of the European poison, alcohol.

43 What the Laws Betray. — One gravely errs when one studies the penal laws of a people as if they were an expression of its character. The laws betray not what a people is, but what appears strange, peculiar, monstrous and foreign to it. The laws concern the exceptions to morality as custom. And the harshest punishments fall on whatever goes against the custom of the neighboring people. Thus among the Wahhabis there are only two deadly sins: having another god than the Wahhabi god, and — smoking (among them it is called "the shameful way of drinking"). "And how stands it with murder and adultery?" asked the Englishman, astonished, when he learned of these matters. "Well, God is gracious and merciful!" said the old chief. So among the ancient Romans there was the notion that a woman could commit a mortal sin in only two ways: first by adultery, and then by drinking wine. The old Cato thought that kissing among relatives had been made a custom only so that women could be kept under control in this matter: a kiss meant, does she smell of wine? Women caught drinking wine were indeed punished with death, and certainly not only because women sometimes, under the influence of wine, unlearn how to say no. The Romans feared above all the orgiastic and Dionysian character, to which the women of southern Europe were then subject from time to time, when wine was still new in Europe. It was a monstrous foreignness that overturned the foundation of the Roman feeling. To them it was like a betrayal of Rome, like the incorporation of the foreign.

44 The Motives Believed In. — However important it may be to know the motives according to which humanity has actually acted until now, perhaps the belief in these or those motives, that is, what humanity has so far palmed off on itself and imagined as the true levers of its doing, is something even more essential for the knower. For the inner happiness and misery of human beings has come to them according to their belief in these or those motives, and not through what was actually the motive! All of this latter has a second-rate interest.

45 Epicurus. — Yes, I am proud to feel the character of Epicurus differently from perhaps anyone else. In everything I hear and read of him, I enjoy the happiness of the afternoon of antiquity. I see his eye looking out over a wide whitish sea, past shoreline rocks on which the sun lies, while large and small creatures play in its light, as sure and calm as that light and that eye itself. Such happiness could only have been invented by someone who was in constant pain: the happiness of an eye before which the sea of existence has become still, and which can no longer get enough of looking at its surface, at this colorful, delicate, shuddering skin of the sea. There had never before been such a modesty of voluptuousness.

46 Our Astonishment. — There is a deep and thorough happiness in the fact that science establishes things which hold their ground, and which again and again provide the basis for new investigations. It could well be otherwise! Indeed, we are so convinced of all the uncertainty and fantasy of our judgments, and of the eternal change of all human laws and concepts, that we are actually astonished how much the results of science hold their ground! Earlier people knew nothing of this changeability of everything human. The custom of morality kept alive the belief that the whole inner life of humans was fastened by eternal clamps to iron necessity. Perhaps people then felt a similar voluptuousness of astonishment when they let themselves be told fairy tales and stories of enchantment. The marvelous did such good to those people, who might sometimes grow tired of rule and eternity. To lose the ground for once! To float! To err! To be mad! That belonged to the paradise and the revelry of earlier times. Our happiness, however, is like that of the shipwrecked man who has come ashore and planted both feet on the old firm earth, astonished that it does not sway.

47 On the Suppression of the Passions. — If one persistently forbids the expression of the passions, as something to be left to the "common," coarser, bourgeois, peasant natures, then one wants not so much to suppress the passions themselves as only their language and gesture. Even so, one attains precisely what one does not want: the suppression of the passions themselves, or at least their weakening and alteration. The court of Louis XIV and everything dependent on it provides the most instructive example of this. The age that followed, brought up in the suppression of expression, no longer had the passions themselves, but in their place a graceful, shallow, playful being, an age afflicted with an inability to be rude, so that even an insult could be received and returned only in courteous words. Perhaps our own present offers the most remarkable counterpart. I see everywhere, in life and on the stage, and not least in everything that is written, a pleasure in all the coarser outbursts and gestures of passion. A certain convention of passionateness is now demanded, but not passion itself! Nevertheless, in the end one will attain it by this means, and our descendants will have a genuine wildness, and not merely a wildness and unruliness of forms.

48 Knowledge of Need. — Perhaps nothing separates human beings and ages so much as the different degree of knowledge of need they possess: need of the soul as well as of the body. Concerning the latter, we who live now are perhaps all, in spite of our infirmities and frailties, bunglers and fantasts at once, for lack of rich self-experience. Compare us with an age of fear, the longest of all ages, when the individual had to protect himself against violence and for that purpose had to become a man of violence himself. In those days a man went through his rich school of bodily torments and privations. He understood even a certain cruelty toward himself, a voluntary exercise of pain, as a means of preservation necessary to him. In those days people trained their surroundings to endure pain. They gladly inflicted pain and watched the most terrible kinds of it fall upon others, with no feeling but that of their own safety. As for the need of the soul, I now look at every person to see whether he knows it from experience or only from description; whether he still considers it necessary to pretend to know it, perhaps as a sign of finer culture; or whether he does not, at bottom, believe in great sufferings of the soul at all, and when they are named, it goes with him as when great physical endurance is named: he thinks of his toothache and his stomach ache. But so it seems to me to stand with most people now. From the general untrained state in pain of both kinds, and from a certain rarity of seeing someone suffer, an important consequence follows. People now hate pain much more than earlier people did, and speak of it more ill than ever. They even find the mere presence of pain as a thought hardly bearable, and make of the whole of existence a matter of conscience and a reproach. The rise of pessimistic philosophies is by no means the mark of great, terrible distress. These question marks against the value of all life are made in times when refinement and the easing of existence already judge the unavoidable mosquito bites of soul and body to be far too bloody and malicious. In their poverty of real experience of pain, such times would most like to make painful general ideas appear as the suffering of the highest kind. There would already be a recipe against pessimistic philosophies and the excessive sensitivity which seems to me the true "distress of the present." But perhaps this recipe already sounds too cruel, and would itself be counted among the signs by which people now judge: "Existence is something evil." Well! The recipe against "distress" runs: distress.

49 Magnanimity and Its Kin. — Those paradoxical phenomena, such as the sudden coldness in the manner of the warm-hearted person, the humor of the melancholic, and above all magnanimity, as a sudden renunciation of revenge or of the satisfaction of envy, appear in people who have a powerful inner slinging force, in people of sudden satiety and sudden disgust. Their satisfactions are so quick and so strong that excess and aversion follow them at once, and a flight into the opposite taste on their heels. In this opposition the cramp of feeling is released: in one person through sudden coldness, in another through laughter, in a third through tears and self-sacrifice. To me the magnanimous person, at least that kind of magnanimous person who has always made the greatest impression, appears as a man of the most extreme thirst for revenge, to whom a satisfaction shows itself close at hand, and who drinks it up so abundantly, thoroughly and down to the last drop, already in imagination, that an enormous quick disgust follows this quick excess. He now rises "above himself," as one says, and forgives his enemy, indeed blesses and honors him. But with this violation of himself, this mockery of his revenge drive, which had just been so powerful, he merely yields to the new drive that has now become powerful in him, namely disgust. And he does this as impatiently and excessively as shortly before he anticipated the joy of revenge in fantasy and, as it were, drained it. In magnanimity there is the same degree of egoism as in revenge, but a different quality of egoism.

50 The Argument of Loneliness. — Even for the most conscientious person, the reproach of conscience is weak compared with the feeling that says: "This or that is against the good custom of your society." A cold look, or a twisted mouth, from those among whom and for whom one has been raised, is feared even by the strongest. What is really feared here? Loneliness! It is the argument that defeats even the best arguments for a person or a cause. So speaks the instinct of the herd within us.

51 The Sense of Truth. — I praise any skepticism that allows me to answer: "Let us try it!" But of all things and all questions that do not permit an experiment, I want to hear nothing more. This is the limit of my "sense of truth," for there courage has lost its right.

52 What Others Know of Us. — What we know about ourselves and keep in memory is not as decisive for the happiness of our life as people think. One day what others know of us (or think they know) falls upon us, and then we recognize that it is the stronger power. One gets along with a bad conscience more easily than with a bad reputation.

53 Where the Good Begins. — Where the eye's weak sight can no longer see the bad drive as such, because it has become refined, there people set up the realm of the good. The feeling of having now entered the realm of the good stirs up along with it all those drives that were threatened and restricted by the bad drives, such as the feeling of security, comfort and goodwill. So: the duller the eye, the farther the good reaches! Hence the lasting cheerfulness of the people and of children! Hence the gloom of the great thinkers, and their grief, which is akin to a bad conscience!

54 Awareness of Appearance. — How wonderful, new, and at the same time how dreadful and ironic I feel, placed by my knowledge in relation to all existence! I have discovered that the old humanity and animality, indeed the whole primordial and past of all feeling being, keeps on composing, loving, hating and drawing conclusions within me. I have suddenly awoken in the middle of this dream, but only to the awareness that I am dreaming, and that I must keep on dreaming in order not to perish, just as a sleepwalker must keep on dreaming so as not to fall down. What is "appearance" to me now! Certainly not the opposite of some being. What can I say about any being except the predicates of its appearance? Certainly not a dead mask that one might put on an unknown X and perhaps take off again! Appearance is for me the working and living thing itself, which goes so far in its self-mockery as to make me feel that here there is only appearance, will-o'-the-wisp, ghostly dance and nothing more. Among all these dreamers, I too, the "knower," dance my dance. The knower is a means of prolonging the earthly dance, and in that respect belongs among the organizers of existence's festival. And the sublime consistency and connectedness of all knowledge may be, and will be, the highest means for keeping the common dreaming going, the mutual intelligibility of all these dreamers, and by that very means for keeping the dream alive.

55 The Last Nobility. — What makes anything "noble"? Certainly not that one makes sacrifices; the madly voluptuous person makes sacrifices too. Certainly not that one follows a passion at all; there are contemptible passions. Certainly not that one does something for others and without selfishness; perhaps the consequence of selfishness is greatest precisely in the most noble. — Rather, the passion that seizes the noble is a peculiarity, without his knowing about this peculiarity: the use of a rare and singular standard, and almost a madness: the feeling of heat in things that feel cold to everyone else; a guessing at values for which the scales have not yet been invented; making sacrifices on altars consecrated to an unknown god; a courage without the will to honor; a self-sufficiency that has a surplus and gives it to people and things. Until now, then, it was the rare, and ignorance about that rarity, that made something noble. But consider that by this yardstick everything customary, nearest and indispensable, in short what is most conducive to the preservation of the species, and in general the rule in human history so far, has been judged unfairly and slandered on the whole in favor of exceptions. To become the advocate of the rule: that might perhaps be the last form and refinement in which nobility reveals itself on earth.

56 The Desire for Suffering. — When I think of the desire to do something, which constantly tickles and spurs on the millions of young Europeans who cannot bear boredom or themselves, I understand that there must also be in them a desire to suffer, so that they can take their suffering as a probable reason for doing, for action. Distress is necessary! Hence the outcry of the politicians, hence the many false, invented and exaggerated "states of distress" of every class, and the blind willingness to believe in them. This young world demands that from outside there should come, or become visible, not happiness but misfortune. Its imagination is already busy shaping a monster out of it, so that afterward it can fight a monster. If these distress-seekers felt in themselves the strength to do themselves good from within, to do something to themselves, then they would also understand how to create for themselves, from within, a distress that is their own. Their inventions could then be finer, and their satisfactions could sound like good music. As it is, they fill the world with their outcry of need, and therefore all too often fill it first with the feeling of need! They do not know what to do with themselves, and so they paint the misfortune of others on the wall. They always need others! And ever more others! — Forgive me, my friends, I have dared to paint my own happiness on the wall.

1 The Teachers of the Purpose of Existence.—Whether I look at people with a kind eye or a hostile one, I always find them busy with one task, all of them and each individual in particular: doing what is good for the survival of the human species. And truly not out of a feeling of love for this species, but simply because nothing in them is older, stronger, more relentless or harder to overcome than that instinct—because this instinct is the very nature of our kind and our herd. People are quick enough, with their usual shortsightedness that sees only five steps ahead, to sort their neighbors neatly into useful and harmful, good and evil. But when you add things up on a large scale, when you think longer about the whole, you become suspicious of this sorting and dividing, and in the end you give it up. Even the most harmful person may still be the most useful of all when it comes to preserving the species. For such a person keeps alive in themselves, or through their effect on others, drives without which humanity would long ago have gone limp or rotten. Hatred, gloating over other people’s misfortune, the lust to plunder and to rule, and everything else that is called evil: all of it belongs to the astonishing economy of preserving the species. It is a costly, wasteful economy, and on the whole a highly foolish one—but one that has, as is proven, kept our kind alive so far.

I no longer know whether you, my dear fellow human and neighbor, can live at all to the harm of the species, that is, “unreasonably” and “badly.” Whatever could have harmed the species has perhaps died out many thousands of years ago, and now belongs to the things that are no longer possible even for God. Follow your best desires or your worst, and above all: go to ruin! In both you are probably still somehow a promoter and benefactor of humanity, and on that basis you may keep your praisers—and also your mockers! But you will never find the one who knew how to mock you, the individual, completely, even at your best; who could bring home to you your boundless fly-and-frog wretchedness as fully as the truth would allow. To laugh at oneself in the way one would have to laugh in order to laugh out of the whole truth—for that the best until now did not have enough sense of truth, and the most gifted had far too little genius! Perhaps there is a future even for laughter! That will be when the sentence “the species is everything, one person is always no one” has become part of humanity, and when everyone at every moment has access to this last liberation and freedom from responsibility. Perhaps by then laughter will have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps then there will be only “gay science.” For now it is still quite different. For now the comedy of existence has not yet “become aware of itself.” For now it is still the time of tragedy, the time of moralities and religions. What does the constant new appearance of those founders of moralities and religions mean, those instigators of the struggle over moral valuations, those teachers of pangs of conscience and wars of religion? What do these heroes on this stage mean? For up to now they have been its heroes, and everything else, which at times was the only thing visible and was all too close, has always served only to prepare these heroes, whether as machinery and backdrop or in the role of confidants and valets. (The poets, for example, were always the valets of some morality.)—It goes without saying that these tragedians, too, are working in the interest of the species, even if they may believe they are working in God’s interest and as God’s envoys. They, too, promote the life of the species by promoting belief in life. “It is worth living,” each of them cries, “there is something to this life, life has something behind it, beneath it, so take care!” That drive which rules equally in the highest and the commonest people, the drive to preserve the species, breaks out from time to time as reason and as passion of the mind. It then has a brilliant retinue of reasons around it, and with all its force wants to make us forget that at bottom it is drive, instinct, folly, groundlessness. Life should be loved, because! People should promote themselves and their neighbors, because! And whatever else all these shoulds and becauses are called, or may be called in the future! So that what happens necessarily and always, of itself and without any purpose, may from now on appear to be done for a purpose, and may seem clear to people as reason and as the final commandment—for this the ethical teacher steps forward, as the teacher of the purpose of existence. For this the teacher invents a second and different existence, and with a new mechanism lifts this old common existence off its old common hinges. Yes! Such a teacher does not at all want us to laugh at existence, or at ourselves—or at the teacher. For the teacher, one person is always one person, something first and last and enormous; for the teacher there are no species, no sums, no zeros. However foolish and fanatical these inventions and valuations may be, however much the teacher misjudges the course of nature and denies its conditions—and all ethics up to now have been so foolish and so against nature that humanity would have perished from any one of them, if it had gained power over humanity—still! every time “the hero” stepped onto the stage, something new was achieved, the dreadful counterpart of laughter: that deep shock in many individuals at the thought: “Yes, it is worth living! Yes, I am worth living!” Life and I and you and all of us became interesting to one another once again, for some time.—It cannot be denied that in the long run laughter and reason and nature have so far become master over each of these great teachers of purposes. The short tragedy always passed in the end into the eternal comedy of existence, and back again, and the “waves of countless laughter”—to speak with Aeschylus—must in the end wash over even the greatest of these tragedians. But with all this correcting laughter, human nature has still been changed, on the whole, by the constant new appearance of these teachers of the purpose of existence. It now has one need more, namely the need for the constant new appearance of such teachers and teachings of a “purpose.” Human beings have gradually become a fantastic animal that has to meet one more condition of existence than any other animal: human beings must believe from time to time that they know why they exist; their species cannot flourish without a periodic trust in life! Without belief in the reason in life! And again and again, from time to time, the human race will decree: “There is something that absolutely may no longer be laughed at!” And the most cautious friend of humanity will add: “Not only laughter and cheerful wisdom, but also the tragic, with all its sublime unreason, belongs among the means and necessities of preserving the species!”—And therefore! Therefore! Therefore! Oh, do you understand me, my brothers? Do you understand this new law of ebb and flow? We too have our time!

2 The Intellectual Conscience.—I keep having the same experience, and I keep resisting it anew; I do not want to believe it, even though I can grasp it with my hands: most people lack an intellectual conscience. Indeed it has often seemed to me that anyone who demands one is as lonely as in a desert, even in the most crowded cities. Everyone looks at you with strange eyes and goes on handling their scales, calling this good and that evil. Nobody blushes when you let them see that these weights are not full weight, and nobody is outraged at you either; perhaps they laugh at your doubt. I mean to say: the great majority do not find it contemptible to believe this or that and live by it without first having become aware of the final and surest reasons for and against, and without even taking the trouble afterward to look for such reasons. The most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this “great majority.” But what are kindheartedness, refinement and genius to me, if the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in believing and judging, if the desire for certainty does not count for them as the innermost craving and deepest need—as that which separates the higher people from the lower! I found among certain pious people a hatred of reason, and I was fond of them for it: at least this still betrayed a bad intellectual conscience! But to stand in the midst of this discordant harmony of things and the whole wonderful uncertainty and ambiguity of existence and not ask, not tremble with craving and delight in asking, not even hate the one who asks, perhaps even find a feeble amusement in that person—that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this feeling is what I look for first in everyone. Some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has this feeling, as a human being. It is my kind of injustice.

3 Noble and Common.—To common natures, all noble, generous feelings seem impractical, and so, first of all, unbelievable. They wink when they hear of such things, and seem to want to say, “There must be some good advantage in it somewhere; you can’t see through all walls.” They are suspicious of the noble person, as if that person were looking for an advantage by sneaky routes. If they become too clearly convinced that selfish aims and profits are absent, the noble person counts to them as a kind of fool: they look down on the noble person’s joy and laugh at the shine in those eyes. “How can anyone be glad to be at a disadvantage? How can anyone want to land in a disadvantage with open eyes! There must be a disease of reason joined to the noble feeling,” they think, and look down on it as they look down on the joy that an insane person gets from a fixed idea. The common nature is marked by keeping its advantage steadily in view, and by the fact that this thinking about purpose and advantage is itself stronger in it than the strongest drives. Not letting those drives lead it into impractical actions—that is its wisdom and its self-regard. Compared with it, the higher nature is the less reasonable one: for the noble, generous, self-sacrificing person in fact gives way to their drives, and in their best moments their reason pauses. An animal that protects its young at risk of its life, or in the mating season follows the female even into death, does not think of danger and death. Its reason also pauses, because the pleasure in its brood or in the female, and the fear of being robbed of this pleasure, completely rule it; it becomes stupider than it otherwise is, just like the noble and generous person. Such a person has some feelings of pleasure and displeasure in such strength that the intellect must fall silent against them or put itself in their service. Then the heart moves into the head, and people speak of “passion.” (Here and there the opposite also occurs, and as it were the “reversal of passion,” for example with Fontenelle, on whose heart someone once laid a hand, with the words: “What you have there, my dearest sir, is brain too.”) The unreason, or contrary reason, of passion is what the common person despises in the noble, especially when passion turns to objects whose value seems to the common person entirely fantastic and arbitrary. The common person is annoyed at someone who gives in to the passion of the belly, but still understands the charm that makes a tyrant of it here; what the common person does not understand is how anyone could, for example, risk health and honor out of love for a passion for knowledge. The taste of the higher nature is directed at exceptions, at things that usually leave people cold and seem to have no sweetness; the higher nature has a singular standard of value. Moreover, it mostly believes that it does not have a singular standard of value in its idiosyncrasy of taste; it rather sets up its values and disvalues as the generally valid values and disvalues, and so falls into the unintelligible and impractical. It is very rare that a higher nature keeps enough reason left over to understand and treat everyday people as such; for the most part it believes in its passion as the secretly held passion of everyone, and it is precisely in this belief that it is full of glow and eloquence. Now if such exceptional people do not feel themselves to be exceptions, how could they ever understand the common natures and judge the rule fairly! And so they too speak of the folly, pointlessness and fantasy of humanity, full of wonder at how madly the world runs and why it will not admit what it “needs.”—This is the eternal injustice of the noble.

4 What Preserves the Species.—The strongest and most evil minds have so far moved humanity forward the most. Again and again they kindled the dozing passions—all ordered society puts the passions to sleep—and again and again they woke the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of delight in the new, the daring, the untried; they forced people to set opinions against opinions, models against models. They did it with weapons, by overturning boundary stones, mostly by violating what people held sacred, but also by new religions and moralities! The same “wickedness” is in every teacher and preacher of the new—the wickedness that gives a conqueror a bad name, even if it shows itself more finely, does not immediately set the muscles moving, and for exactly that reason does not give such a bad name! But the new is in all circumstances the evil, as that which wants to conquer and to overturn the old boundary stones and the old sacred things; and only the old is the good! The good people of every age are those who dig the old thoughts deep and bear fruit with them, the farmers of the mind. But every piece of land is finally used up, and the plowshare of evil must come again and again.—There is now a thoroughgoing false doctrine of morality, especially celebrated in England: according to it, the judgments “good” and “evil” are the collected experiences of what is “useful” and “not useful”; according to it, what is called good is what preserves the species, and what is called evil is what harms the species. In truth, though, the evil drives are just as useful, species-preserving and indispensable as the good ones—only their function is different.

5 Unconditional Duties.—All the people who feel that they need the strongest words and tones, the most eloquent gestures and poses, in order to have any effect at all—revolutionary politicians, socialists, preachers of repentance with or without Christianity, for all of whom there must be no half successes—all of these talk about “duties,” and always about duties of the unconditional kind. Without that they would have no right to their great pathos: they know this quite well! So they reach for philosophies of morality that preach some categorical imperative, or they take a good piece of religion into themselves, as Mazzini, for example, did. Because they want to be trusted unconditionally, they first need to trust themselves unconditionally, on the basis of some final, undiscussable commandment, sublime in itself, whose servants and instruments they would like to feel and present themselves as. Here we have the most natural and often very influential opponents of moral enlightenment and skepticism: but they are rare. Alongside them there is a very large class of such opponents everywhere that self-interest teaches submission while reputation and honor seem to forbid submission. Anyone who feels degraded at the thought of being the tool of a prince, of a party and sect, or even of a money power—for example as the descendant of an old, proud family—but who nonetheless wants or has to be this tool, in their own eyes and before the public, needs pathetic principles that can be taken into the mouth at any time: principles of an unconditional ought, to which one may submit and show oneself submitted without shame. All finer servility holds fast to the categorical imperative and is the deadly enemy of those who want to take the unconditional character away from duty: decency demands this of them, and not decency alone.

6 Loss of Dignity.—Thinking has lost all its dignity of form. The ceremony and solemn gesture of thinking have been made a laughingstock, and people would no longer put up with a wise man of the old style. We think too fast, and on the way, in the middle of walking, in the middle of business of all kinds, even when we are thinking about the most serious things. We need little preparation, even little quiet—it is as if we carried around in our heads a relentlessly rolling machine that keeps working even under the most unfavorable conditions. In the past you could see in everyone that they wanted to think for once—it was probably the exception!—that they now wanted to become wiser and were getting ready for a thought. People put on a face for it, as for a prayer, and stopped walking. Yes, they stood still on the street for hours when the thought “came”—on one leg or on two. That was how it was “worthy of the subject”!

7 Something for the Industrious.—Whoever now wants to make a study of moral things opens up an enormous field of work for themselves. All kinds of passions must be thought through one by one, and followed one by one through times, peoples, and great and small individuals; all their reasoning and all their ways of valuing things and putting them in a particular light must be brought out into the open! So far, everything that has given color to existence has no history yet: or where is there a history of love, of greed, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty? Even a comparative history of law, or just of punishment, is so far completely missing. Has anyone yet made the different divisions of the day, or the results of a regular arrangement of work, festival and rest, a subject of research? Do we know the moral effects of foods? Is there a philosophy of nutrition? (The noise for and against vegetarianism that keeps breaking out again already proves that there is no such philosophy yet!) Have the experiences of living together, for example the experiences of monasteries, been collected yet? Has the dialectic of marriage and friendship been set out yet? The customs of scholars, merchants, artists, craftsmen—have they found their thinkers yet? There is so much to think about in this! Everything that people have so far regarded as their “conditions of existence,” and all the reason, passion and superstition in this way of regarding them—has that been researched to the end yet? Merely observing the different growth that human drives have had, and could still have, in different moral climates already gives too much work for the most industrious person; whole generations, and generations of scholars working together according to a plan, are needed to exhaust the viewpoints and the material here. The same holds for tracing the reasons for the differences in moral climate (“why does this sun of a basic moral judgment and chief measure of value shine here—and that one there?”). And again it is a new piece of work to establish that all these reasons are mistaken, and to establish the whole nature of previous moral judgment. Suppose all this work were done; then the most delicate of all questions would step into the foreground: whether science is able to give goals for action, after it has proved that it can take such goals away and destroy them—and then experimenting would be in order, experimenting in which every kind of heroism could find satisfaction, experimenting lasting for centuries, which could put all the great labors and sacrifices of history so far in the shade. So far science has not yet built its Cyclopean structures; the time for that will come too.

8 Unconscious Virtues.—All the qualities of a person of which they are conscious—and especially if they assume that these qualities are also visible and obvious to those around them—are subject to quite different laws of development than those qualities that are unknown or poorly known to the person, and that, through their subtlety, hide even from the eye of a finer observer and know how to conceal themselves as if behind nothing. It is like the fine sculptures on the scales of reptiles: it would be a mistake to suppose that they are an ornament or a weapon—for you see them only with the microscope, that is, with an eye so artificially sharpened as similar animals, for which they might mean ornament or weapon, do not possess! Our visible moral qualities, and especially those we believe to be visible, go their way—and the invisible ones of exactly the same name, which are neither ornament nor weapon for us with regard to others, also go their way: quite a different one, probably, and with lines and subtleties and sculptures that might perhaps give pleasure to a god with a divine microscope. We have, for example, our diligence, our ambition, our sharp wits: everyone knows about them—and besides, we probably have our diligence, our ambition, our sharp wits a second time; but the microscope for these reptile scales of ours has not yet been invented!—And here the friends of instinctive morality will say: “Bravo! At least he considers unconscious virtues possible—that is enough for us!”—Oh, you who are so easily satisfied!

9 Our Eruptions.—Countless things that humanity acquired at earlier stages, but so weakly and in such an embryonic form that no one could perceive them as acquired, suddenly push into the light long afterward, perhaps after centuries: in the meantime they have become strong and mature. To some ages this or that talent, this or that virtue seems to be entirely lacking, as it does to some people: but just wait for the grandchildren and great-grandchildren, if you have time to wait—they bring the inner life of their grandfathers into the sun, that inner life of which the grandfathers themselves still knew nothing. Often the son is already the betrayer of his father: the father understands himself better since he has his son. We all have hidden gardens and plantations in us; and, to use another comparison, we are all growing volcanoes that will have their hour of eruption—but how near or how far that is, nobody knows, of course, not even dear God.

10 A Kind of Atavism.—The rare people of an age I like best to understand as suddenly appearing offshoots of past cultures and their powers: as it were, the atavism of a people and its civilization—in that way there is really something about them that can be understood! Now they appear strange, rare, extraordinary; and whoever feels these powers in themselves has to nurture them, defend them, honor them and raise them up against an opposing other world: and so such a person becomes either a great person or a crazy and peculiar one, unless they perish early. Formerly these same qualities were common and so counted as ordinary: they did not set anyone apart. Perhaps they were demanded and taken for granted; it was impossible to become great with them, and for that reason alone, because the danger was missing of becoming mad and lonely with them as well.—It is chiefly in the preserving families and castes of a people that such throwbacks of old drives occur, while there is no probability of such atavism where races, habits and valuations change too fast. For tempo means as much among the forces of development in peoples as it does in music; for our case an andante of development is absolutely necessary, as the tempo of a passionate and slow spirit—and that, indeed, is the spirit of conservative families.

11 Consciousness.—Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and consequently also the most unfinished and least powerful part of it. Countless blunders come from consciousness, which make an animal or a human being perish earlier than necessary, “beyond fate,” as Homer says. If the preserving bond of the instincts were not so overwhelmingly much more powerful, if it did not serve on the whole as a regulator, humanity would have to perish of its wrong judgments and its fantasizing with open eyes, of its shallowness and credulity, in short precisely of its consciousness: or rather, without that bond there would long since have been no humanity! Before a function is developed and mature, it is a danger to the organism: good, if it is thoroughly tyrannized in the meantime! So consciousness is thoroughly tyrannized—and not least by the pride people take in it! People think that here is the core of the human being, the lasting, eternal, final, most original part! They take consciousness to be a fixed, given quantity! They deny its growth, its intermittences! They take it as the “unity of the organism”!—This ridiculous overestimation and misjudging of consciousness has the great usefulness that it has prevented too fast a development of it. Because people believed they already had consciousness, they took little trouble to acquire it—and it is no different even now! It is still a quite new task, just dawning on the human eye and barely recognizable even now, to take knowledge into ourselves and make it instinctive—a task seen only by those who have understood that so far only our errors have been taken into us, and that all our consciousness relates to errors!

12 On the Aim of Science.—What? The final aim of science is supposed to be to create as much pleasure and as little displeasure as possible for human beings? What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together with one rope that whoever wants as much as possible of the one must also have as much as possible of the other—that whoever wants to learn to be “jubilant up to heaven” must also keep ready to be “sad to the point of death”? And perhaps that is how it is! The Stoics at least believed that it was so, and were consistent when they desired as little pleasure as possible, in order to have as little displeasure as possible from life. (When people used the saying “The virtuous person is the happiest,” they had in it both a shop sign of the school for the great masses and a piece of hair-splitting cleverness for the refined.) Even today you have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, in short painlessness—and basically socialists and politicians of all parties could honestly promise their people no more—or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of a wealth of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been tasted so far! If you decide for the former, that is, if you want to push down and reduce people’s capacity for pain, well, then you must also push down and reduce their capacity for joy. In fact one can promote the one aim as well as the other with science! Perhaps it is, for now, better known for its power to rob human beings of their joys and to make them colder, more statue-like, more Stoic. But it could also yet be discovered as the great bringer of pain!—And then perhaps its counter-power would be discovered at the same time, its enormous ability to make new starry worlds of joy light up!

13 On the Doctrine of the Feeling of Power.—By doing good and by hurting, one exercises one’s power on others—one wants nothing more by it! By hurting those on whom we first have to make our power felt; for pain is a much more sensitive means for this than pleasure: pain always asks for the cause, while pleasure tends to stay with itself and not look backward. By doing good and showing goodwill to those who already depend on us in some way (that is, who are used to thinking of us as their causes); we want to increase their power, because in this way we increase our own, or we want to show them the advantage of being in our power—so they will be more satisfied with their situation and more hostile and ready to fight against the enemies of our power. Whether we make sacrifices in doing good or in hurting does not change the final value of our actions; even if we stake our life on it, like the martyr for the sake of his church, it is a sacrifice made to our craving for power, or for the purpose of preserving our feeling of power. Whoever feels “I am in possession of the truth”—how many possessions does that person let go in order to save this feeling! What does that person not throw overboard in order to keep themselves “on top”—that is, over the others who lack “the truth”! Certainly the state in which we hurt is seldom so pleasant, so unmixedly pleasant, as the one in which we do good—it is a sign that we still lack power, or it betrays vexation at this poverty; it brings new dangers and uncertainties for the power we already possess and clouds our horizon with the prospect of revenge, scorn, punishment, failure. Only for the most irritable and greediest people in the feeling of power may it be more pleasurable to press the seal of power on the one who resists; for those to whom the sight of the already subjugated (which is the object of goodwill) is a burden and a bore. It depends on how one is used to spicing one’s life; it is a matter of taste whether one prefers a slow or a sudden gain in power, a safe one or a dangerous and daring one—one always looks for this or that spice according to one’s temperament. An easy prey is something contemptible to proud natures; they feel pleasure only at the sight of unbroken people who might become their enemies, and likewise at the sight of all possessions that are hard to get at; toward the sufferer they are often hard, for the sufferer is not worthy of their striving and pride—but all the more obliging they show themselves toward their equals, with whom a fight and struggle would in any case be honorable, if an occasion for it should ever come. Under the pleasure of this prospect, the people of the knightly caste have grown accustomed to a choice politeness toward one another.—Pity is the most pleasant feeling for those who are not very proud and have no prospect of great conquests: for them the easy prey—and that is every sufferer—is something delightful. People praise pity as the virtue of prostitutes.

14 Everything That Is Called Love.—Greed and love: how differently we feel at each of these words!—and yet it could be the same drive, named twice, once slandered from the standpoint of those who already have, in whom the drive has come somewhat to rest and who now fear for their “possessions”; the other time from the standpoint of the unsatisfied, the thirsty, and therefore glorified as “good.” Our love of neighbor—is it not an urge for new property? And likewise our love of knowledge, of truth, and in general all that urge for novelties? We gradually grow weary of the old, securely possessed, and reach out our hands again; even the most beautiful landscape in which we have lived for three months is no longer sure of our love, and some farther coast attracts our greed: possession mostly becomes less through possessing. Our pleasure in ourselves wants to maintain itself in such a way that it keeps transforming something new in ourselves—that is just what possessing means. To grow tired of a possession is to grow tired of ourselves. (One can also suffer from too much—the desire to throw away, to hand out, can also give itself the honorable name of “love.”) When we see someone suffer, we gladly use the opportunity now offered to take possession of that person; this is what the benefactor and the pitying person do, for example; they too call the desire for new possession awakened in them “love,” and have their pleasure in it as in a new conquest beckoning to them. But the love between the sexes betrays itself most clearly as an urge for property: the lover wants unconditional sole possession of the person longed for, wants just as unconditional power over that person’s soul as over their body, wants to be loved alone and to dwell and rule in the other soul as the highest and most desirable thing. If one considers that this means nothing other than excluding the whole world from a precious good, happiness and enjoyment; if one considers that the lover is out to impoverish and deprive all other competitors and would like to become the dragon guarding a golden hoard, as the most ruthless and selfish of all “conquerors” and exploiters; if one considers, finally, that to the lover the whole rest of the world seems indifferent, pale, worthless, and the lover is ready to make any sacrifice, disturb any order, put any interest behind: then one is indeed amazed that this wild greed and injustice of sexual love has been glorified and deified to such an extent as has happened at all times—indeed, that from this love the concept of love as the opposite of egoism has been taken, whereas it is perhaps precisely the most unguarded expression of egoism. Here, evidently, those who do not possess and who desire have made the usage of language—there were probably always too many of them. Those who were granted much possession and satiety in this area have probably let fall here and there a word about the “raging demon,” like that most lovable and most beloved of all Athenians, Sophocles; but Eros always laughed at such blasphemers—they were always precisely his greatest favorites.—There is probably here and there on earth a kind of continuation of love, in which that greedy longing of two persons for each other has given way to a new desire and greed, a shared higher thirst for an ideal standing above them: but who knows this love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is friendship.

15 From a Distance.—This mountain makes the whole region that it dominates charming and meaningful in every way. After we have told ourselves this for the hundredth time, we are so unreasonably and so gratefully disposed toward it that we believe it, the giver of this charm, must itself be the most charming thing in the region—and so we climb it and are disappointed. Suddenly the mountain itself, and the whole landscape around us and below us, seems disenchanted. We had forgotten that some greatness, like some goodness, wants to be seen only from a certain distance, and strictly from below, not from above—only in this way does it work. Perhaps you know people near you who may look at themselves only from a certain distance in order to find themselves bearable at all, or attractive and strength-giving; they should be advised against self-knowledge.

16 On the Footbridge. — When you deal with people who are shy about their feelings, you have to be able to pretend. They feel a sudden hatred for anyone who catches them in a tender or excited moment, as if that person had seen their secrets. If you want to do them good at such a moment, make them laugh, or say something cold, joking, and a little nasty. Their feeling freezes, and they are back in control of themselves. But I will put the lesson before the story. — Once in our lives we were so close that nothing seemed to stand in the way of our friendship and brotherhood; there was only a small footbridge between us. Just as you were about to step onto it, I asked you: "Do you want to come across the footbridge to me?" But you did not want to anymore, and when I asked again, you kept silent. Since then mountains and rushing rivers, and everything that divides people and makes them strangers, have been thrown between us, and even if we both wanted to reach each other, we could not! But if you now think back to that little footbridge, you no longer have words — only sobbing and wonder.

17 Giving His Poverty a Reason. — We cannot, by any trick, turn a poor virtue into a rich, overflowing one. But we can reinterpret its poverty as something necessary and make it look beautiful, so that seeing it no longer hurts us, and we stop making accusing faces at fate on its account. That is what the wise gardener does when he puts the poor little trickle of water in his garden into the arms of a river nymph, and so gives its poverty a reason. And who would not need the nymphs as much as he does!

18 Ancient Pride. — We lack the ancient coloring of nobility because we lack the ancient slave in our feelings. A Greek of noble birth found such enormous steps and such a distance between his own height and that last lowliness that he could hardly see the slave clearly. Even Plato no longer saw him fully. We are different. We are used to the doctrine that all people are equal, even if we are not used to the equality itself. A being who cannot dispose of itself, and who has no leisure — our eye does not yet regard that as something contemptible. Each of us perhaps has too much of this slave-like quality in him, given the conditions of our social order and our work, which are completely different from those of the ancients. The Greek philosopher went through life with a secret feeling that there were more slaves than people thought: that everyone who was not a philosopher was a slave. His pride swelled when he considered that even the most powerful people on earth were among his slaves. This pride is also foreign and impossible for us. We no longer even feel the full force of the word "slave," not even as a comparison.

19 Evil. — Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples, and ask yourselves whether a tree that is meant to grow proudly upward can do without bad weather and storms. Are hostility and resistance from outside, or hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, distrust, hardness, greed and violence of every kind, not among the helpful conditions without which great growth is hardly possible, even in virtue? The poison that destroys a weaker nature is a strengthening for the strong, and he does not even call it poison.

20 The Dignity of Folly. — A few thousand years further along the road of the last century! — and in everything people do, the highest wisdom will be visible. But for that very reason wisdom will have lost all its dignity. Then it will be necessary to be wise, yet so ordinary and so common that a more refined taste will feel this necessity as a vulgarity. Just as a tyranny of truth and science could make lying very valuable, so a tyranny of wisdom could bring forth a new kind of nobility of spirit. To be noble might then mean something like having follies in one's head.

21 To the Teachers of Selflessness. — We call a person's virtues good not because of the effects they have on that person, but because of the effects we expect them to have on us and on society. People have always been very far from "selfless" and "unselfish" when they praise virtues! Otherwise they would have seen that the virtues (such as diligence, obedience, chastity, piety, justice) are mostly harmful to those who have them. They are drives that rage too fiercely and greedily inside a person, and reason can never get them to stay in balance with the other drives. If you have a virtue, a real and whole virtue (and not just a little urge toward one!), then you are its victim! But your neighbor praises your virtue for exactly that reason! People praise the diligent man, even though he damages the sight of his eyes or the freshness and originality of his mind with all his industry. People honor and pity the young man who has "worked himself to death," because they judge: "For the great whole of society, even the loss of the best individual is only a small sacrifice. It is unfortunate that a sacrifice is needed. It would be much worse if the individual thought differently and considered his preservation and development more important than his work in the service of society!" So people pity this young man, not for his own sake, but because a devoted tool that had no regard for itself — a so-called "good man" — has been lost to society through this death. Perhaps people also consider whether it would have been more useful to society if he had worked less recklessly and lived longer. They may admit that there was some advantage in that, but they rate the other advantage higher and more lasting: that a sacrifice was made, and that the attitude of the sacrificial animal was once again clearly confirmed. So it is the nature of a tool in the virtues that is actually praised when virtues are praised, and then the blind drive that works in every virtue, which the individual's overall advantage cannot keep within limits. In short, it is the unreason in virtue that allows the single being to be turned into a function of the whole. The praise of virtues is praise of something that harms the person privately. It is praise of drives that take away from a person his noblest self-interest and his power to take the highest care of himself. Of course, when people educate others and build virtuous habits, they point to a series of effects of virtue that make virtue and private advantage look like siblings. And there really is such a kinship! Blind, furious diligence, for example, the typical virtue of a tool, is presented as the way to wealth and honor, and as the most healthful poison against boredom and the passions. But its danger is hidden, its greatest danger. Education always works this way. It tries to steer the individual, through a series of attractions and advantages, toward a way of thinking and acting which, once it has become habit, drive and passion, rules within him and over him against his final advantage, but "for the common good." How often I see that blind, furious diligence does create wealth and honor, but at the same time takes away the fineness of the senses that would make it possible to enjoy wealth and honor. In the same way, that main remedy against boredom and the passions also dulls the senses and makes the mind stubborn toward new stimuli. (The most diligent of all ages, our age, knows nothing to do with all its diligence and money except to make more money and work harder again. It takes more talent to spend than to earn! Well, we will have our "grandchildren"!) If education succeeds, then every virtue of the individual is a public benefit and a private loss, measured by the highest private goal. This loss is probably some kind of mental and sensual stunting, or even early ruin. Think through, one after another, the virtues of obedience, chastity, piety and justice from this point of view. The praise of the selfless, self-sacrificing, virtuous person — that is, of someone who does not spend all his strength and reason on his own preservation, development, elevation, advancement and expansion of power, but who lives modestly and thoughtlessly with regard to himself, perhaps even indifferently or ironically — this praise has certainly not grown out of the spirit of selflessness! The "neighbor" praises selflessness because he gets advantages from it! If the neighbor thought of himself as "selfless," he would refuse the loss of strength and the harm to himself that such tendencies bring, he would work against the rise of such inclinations, and above all he would show his selflessness by refusing to call it good! Here is the basic contradiction of the morality that is especially honored today: the motives for this morality stand against its principle! What this morality tries to prove is refuted by its own standard of what is moral! The sentence "you must give up yourself and offer yourself as a sacrifice" could only be decreed, without contradicting its own morality, by a being that had itself given up its advantage, and perhaps brought about its own ruin by demanding the sacrifice of individuals. But as soon as the neighbor (or society) recommends altruism for the sake of usefulness, the exact opposite sentence is put to use: "you must seek your advantage even at the cost of everyone else." So in one breath, "you should" and "you should not" are preached together!

22 Order of the Day for the King. — The day begins. Let us now start arranging the business and the festivities of our most gracious lord, who is still resting for the moment. His Majesty has bad weather today. We will take care not to call it bad. No one will talk about the weather. But we will treat the business a little more solemnly today, and the festivities a little more festively, than would otherwise be needed. His Majesty may even be ill. Then at breakfast we will present the latest good news from the evening, the arrival of Monsieur de Montaigne, who knows how to joke so pleasantly about his illness: he suffers from stones in the bladder. We will receive some people. (People! What would that old, puffed-up frog who will be among them say if he heard the word! "I am not a person," he would say, "I am always the thing itself.") The reception will last longer than anyone enjoys: reason enough to tell the story of the poet who wrote on his door: "Whoever comes in does me an honor; whoever does not — a pleasure." That is truly a rudeness said in a polite manner! And perhaps this poet is entirely right to be rude:

they say his verses are better than the versifier. Well, then, let him write many more, and withdraw from the world as much as he can. That is the meaning of his well-mannered rudeness! On the other hand, a prince is always worth more than his "verse," even when — but what are we doing? We are chatting, and the whole court thinks we are already working and racking our brains. People see no light earlier than the one burning in our window. Listen! Was that not the bell? Damn it! The day and the dance are beginning, and we do not know the steps! So we must improvise. Everyone improvises their day. Let us, just once, do what everyone else does! — And with that my strange morning dream vanished, probably under the hard strokes of the tower clock, which announced the fifth hour with all the importance that belongs to it. It seems to me that this time the god of dreams wanted to make fun of my habits. It is my habit to begin the day by arranging it for myself and making it bearable, and perhaps I have done this too formally and too much like a prince.

23 The Signs of Corruption.—There are conditions of society that come around from time to time, and people call them “corruption.” Watch for the following signs in them. As soon as corruption sets in anywhere, a motley superstition takes over, and the faith a whole people has shared until then turns pale and powerless beside it. For superstition is free-thinking of the second rank. Whoever gives in to it picks out certain forms and formulas that suit him and allows himself a right to choose. Compared with the religious person, the superstitious person is always much more of a “person,” and a superstitious society will be one that already has many individuals and a taste for individuality. Seen from this point of view, superstition always appears as progress over faith, and as a sign that the intellect is becoming more independent and wants its rights. The admirers of the old religion and religiousness then complain about corruption. They have also shaped how we use words until now, and have given superstition a bad name even among the freest minds. Let us learn that it is a symptom of enlightenment.—Second, a society in which corruption spreads is accused of slackness. And it is plain that in such a society the value placed on war and the taste for war fade, and the comforts of life are now pursued as hotly as military and athletic honors once were. But people tend to overlook that the old energy and passion of the people, which became magnificently visible through war and the contests, has now turned into countless private passions and has only become less visible. In fact, in states of “corruption” the power and force of the energy a people now spends is probably greater than ever, and the individual spends it as lavishly as he could not before—he was not yet rich enough for it then! And so it is precisely the times of “slackness” when tragedy runs through the houses and streets, when great love and great hatred are born, and the flame of knowledge shoots blazing up to the sky.—Third, as if to make up for the blame about superstition and slackness, people tend to say of such times of corruption that they are milder, and that cruelty is now sharply on the decline compared with the older age, which believed more and was stronger. But I cannot agree with this praise any more than with that blame. I will only grant this much: cruelty is now becoming more refined, and its older forms offend people’s taste from now on. But wounding and torturing by word and look reach their highest development in times of corruption—only now is malice created, and the pleasure in malice. The people of corruption are witty and slanderous. They know there are other ways of murder than by dagger and ambush—they also know that everything said well is believed.—Fourth: when “morals decay,” the beings we call tyrants appear first. They are the forerunners and, so to speak, the early-ripening first fruits of individuals. A little while longer, and this fruit of fruits hangs ripe and yellow on the tree of a people—and it was only for the sake of this fruit that the tree existed! When decay has reached its height, and the struggle among tyrants of every kind has too, then Caesar always comes, the final tyrant, who ends the weary scramble for sole rule by making the weariness work for him. In his time the individual is usually at his ripest, and so “culture” is at its highest and most fruitful. But that is not for his sake and not through him, although the highest men of culture like to flatter their Caesar by presenting themselves as his work. The truth is that they need quiet from outside because they carry their unrest and their work inside themselves. In these times bribery and betrayal are at their worst. For the love of the newly discovered ego is now much stronger than the love of the old, worn-out “fatherland” that has been talked to death. And the need to protect oneself somehow against the terrible swings of fortune opens even nobler hands, as soon as someone powerful and rich shows he is ready to pour gold into them. There is so little secure future now, so people live for today. In that state of soul every seducer has an easy game—for people let themselves be seduced and bribed only “for today,” and keep the future and virtue in reserve! Individuals, these people who are truly “in and for themselves,” care more for the moment than their opposites, the herd-men, as everyone knows, because they consider themselves just as unpredictable as the future. Likewise they gladly attach themselves to men of force, because they believe themselves capable of actions and expedients that can count on neither understanding nor mercy from the crowd. But the tyrant or Caesar understands the right of the individual even in its excess, and has an interest in speaking up for a bolder private morality and even lending it a hand. For he thinks about himself, and wants others to think about him, as Napoleon once put it in his classic way: “I have the right to answer everything people complain of in me with an eternal ‘That is who I am.’ I stand apart from the whole world; I accept conditions from no one. I want people to submit even to my fancies, and to find it perfectly natural when I give myself over to this or that amusement.” Napoleon once said this to his wife, when she had reason to question her husband’s marital faithfulness.—The times of corruption are those in which the apples fall from the tree. I mean the individuals, the seed-bearers of the future, the authors of spiritual colonization and of the new formation of states and social bonds. Corruption is only a term of abuse for the autumn seasons of a people.

24 Different Kinds of Discontent.—The weak, and so to speak feminine, discontented people are the inventive ones when it comes to making life more beautiful and deeper. The strong discontented people—the males among them, to stay with the image—are inventive when it comes to improving and securing life. The first group show their weakness and womanishness in that they like to let themselves be deceived for a while, and are ready enough to make do with a little intoxication and enthusiasm, but on the whole can never be satisfied and suffer from the incurability of their discontent. Besides, they are the supporters of everyone who knows how to produce opiate and narcotic comforts, and for that very reason they resent those who value the doctor above the priest—and so they keep real hardships going! If there had not been a surplus of discontented people of this kind in Europe since the Middle Ages, the famous European capacity for constant transformation might never have arisen at all. For the demands of the strong discontented are too crude and at bottom too modest not to be brought to rest at last. China is the example of a country where large-scale discontent and the capacity for transformation died out many centuries ago. And the socialists and worshippers of the state in Europe, with their measures to improve and secure life, could easily bring Europe too to Chinese conditions and a Chinese “happiness”—provided that they first managed to root out here that sicklier, more delicate, more feminine discontent and romanticism, of which there is still more than enough for now. Europe is a sick man who owes the greatest thanks to his incurability and to the endless transformation of his suffering. These constantly new situations, these equally constant new dangers, pains and expedients have finally produced an intellectual sensitivity that amounts almost to genius, and is in any case the mother of all genius.

25 Not Predestined for Knowledge.—There is a stupid humility, not at all rare, and anyone afflicted with it is unfit once and for all to be a disciple of knowledge. That is: the moment a person of this kind notices something striking, he turns around on his heel, so to speak, and tells himself: “You have deceived yourself! Where were your senses? This cannot be the truth!” And then, instead of looking and listening once more, more sharply, he runs away from the striking thing as if intimidated and tries to knock it out of his head as fast as he can. His inner rule, you see, reads: “I do not want to see anything that contradicts the usual opinion about things! Am I made to discover new truths? There are too many old ones already.”

26 What Does It Mean to Live?—Living means: continually pushing away from oneself something that wants to die. Living means: being cruel and merciless toward everything in us that grows weak and old, and not only in us. Does living mean, then, having no piety toward the dying, the wretched and the aged? Always being a murderer?—And yet old Moses said: “You shall not kill!”

27 The Renouncer.—What does the renouncer do? He strives for a higher world. He wants to fly farther and further and higher than all the people who say Yes to life—he throws a lot away that would weigh down his flight, and some of it is not worthless or unlovable to him. He sacrifices it to his longing for the heights. This sacrificing, this throwing away, is now exactly what alone becomes visible in him. That is why we give him the name of the renouncer, and as such he stands before us, wrapped in his hood and like the soul of a hair shirt. But he is quite pleased with the effect he has on us. He wants to keep hidden from us his longing, his pride, his intention to fly over us.—Yes! He is cleverer than we thought, and so polite to us—this man who says Yes! For that is what he is, like us, even in renouncing.

28 Harming with One’s Best.—Our strengths sometimes drive us so far forward that we can no longer bear our weaknesses and are ruined by them. We may even foresee this outcome and still not want it any other way. Then we become hard toward whatever in us wants to be spared, and our greatness is also our ruthlessness.—An experience like this, which in the end we must pay for with our lives, is a parable for the whole effect great people have on others and on their age. Precisely with their best, with what only they can do, they ruin many who are weak, unsure, still becoming, still wishing, and so they do harm. Indeed, it can happen that, all in all, they only do harm, because their best is taken in and, so to speak, drunk down only by people who lose their reason and their self-interest on it, as on a drink that is too strong. These people become so intoxicated that they must break their limbs on all the wrong paths where the intoxication drives them.

29 The Add-On Liars.—When people in France began to attack the unities of Aristotle, and therefore also to defend them, it was once again to be seen—what is so often seen, but so unwillingly seen—that people lied to themselves with reasons why those rules should exist. They did it merely to avoid admitting that they had become used to the rule of these laws and no longer wanted it otherwise. And this is how people act within every ruling morality and religion, and have always acted: the reasons and purposes behind the habit are always lied onto it afterward, when some start to dispute the habit and to ask for reasons and purposes. Here lies the great dishonesty of conservatives of all times.—They are the add-on liars.

30 The Comedy of the Famous.—Famous men who need their fame, like all politicians for example, never choose their allies and friends any more without ulterior motives. From one they want a piece of the glow and reflected glow of his virtue. From another they want the frightening quality of certain questionable traits that everyone knows in him. From a third they steal the reputation of his idleness, of his lying in the sun, because it serves their own purposes to be thought careless and lazy for a while.—It hides that they are lying in wait. Now they need the dreamer near them, now the expert, now the brooder, now the pedant, as their present self, so to speak. But just as soon they no longer need them! And so their surroundings and outer layers are continually dying off, while everything seems to crowd into this surrounding and wants to become their “character.” In this they are like great cities. Their reputation is always changing, like their character, for their changing means demand this change, and push now this, now that real or invented quality forward and out onto the stage. Their friends and allies belong, as I said, among these stage qualities. By contrast, what they want must stand all the more firm, as hard as bronze, and shining far and wide—and even this at times needs its comedy and its stage play.

31 Trade and Nobility.—Buying and selling is now considered common, like the art of reading and writing. Everyone is practiced in it now, even if he is not a merchant, and practices this technique every day—just as in the past, in the age of wilder humanity, everyone was a hunter and practiced the technique of hunting day after day. Back then hunting was common. But hunting finally became a privilege of the powerful and noble, and so lost its character of everydayness and commonness, because it stopped being necessary and became a matter of whim and luxury. Buying and selling could go the same way someday. One can imagine states of society where nothing is sold or bought and where the necessity of this technique is gradually lost altogether. Perhaps then certain individuals, who are less bound by the law of the general condition, will allow themselves buying and selling as a luxury of feeling. Only then would trade acquire nobility, and the nobles would perhaps be as glad to occupy themselves with trade as they have been so far with war and politics. Conversely, the value placed on politics might by then have changed completely. Already now it is ceasing to be the trade of the nobleman. And it is possible that one day people would find it so common that they would put it, like all party and daily-news writing, under the heading “prostitution of the spirit.”

32 Unwelcome Disciples.—“What am I supposed to do with these two young men!” cried a philosopher with annoyance. He “corrupted” the young, as Socrates once corrupted them. “They are students I do not want. This one cannot say No, and that one says to everything: ‘Half and half.’ Suppose they took up my teaching. The first would suffer too much, for my way of thinking requires a warlike soul, a wish to do hurt, a pleasure in saying No, a tough skin—he would waste away from open and inner wounds. And the other will make a mediocrity out of every cause he stands for, and so turn it into a mediocrity—a disciple like that I wish upon my enemy.”

33 Outside the Lecture Hall.—“To prove to you that man at bottom belongs among the good-natured animals, I would remind you how gullible he has been for so long. Only now, very late and after enormous self-conquest, has he become a distrustful animal—yes! man is now more wicked than ever.”—I do not understand this: why should man now be more distrustful and more wicked?—“Because he now has a science—needs one!”—

34 Hidden History.—Every great person has a power that works backward. All of history is put on the scales again for his sake, and a thousand secrets of the past creep out of their hiding places—into his sun. There is no telling at all what will yet turn out to be history. Perhaps the past is still essentially undiscovered! So many backward-working forces are still needed!

35 Heresy and Witchcraft.—Thinking differently from what custom prescribes is by no means so much the effect of a better intellect as the effect of strong, wicked inclinations—inclinations that detach, isolate, defy, gloat, and sneer. Heresy is the counterpart of witchcraft, and surely just as little as witchcraft is it something harmless or even worthy of respect in itself. Heretics and witches are two kinds of wicked people. What they have in common is that they also feel themselves to be wicked. But their irresistible desire is to vent harm on whatever rules (people or opinions). The Reformation, a kind of doubling of the medieval spirit at a time when it no longer had a good conscience, brought forth both in the greatest abundance.

36 Last Words. — You will remember that the Emperor Augustus, a fearsome man who controlled himself completely and could keep quiet as well as any wise Socrates, gave himself away with his final words. For the first time he dropped his mask, when he let it be understood that he had been wearing a mask and playing a part. He had acted the father of the country and wisdom on the throne, and acted it so well that it looked real! "Applaud, friends, the play is over!" The thought of the dying Nero, "What an artist dies in me!", was also the thought of the dying Augustus: the vanity of an actor, the chatter of an actor. It is the exact opposite of the death of Socrates. Tiberius, though, died silently, the most tormented of all self-tormentors. He was genuine and no actor. What may have gone through his mind at the end? Perhaps this: "Life is a long death. What a fool I have been, shortening the lives of so many people! Was I ever made to be a benefactor? I should have given them eternal life. Then I could have watched them dying forever. I had such good eyes for that: what a spectator I am dying as!" When, after a long struggle with death, he seemed to be getting his strength back, people thought it wise to smother him with bed pillows. He died a double death.

37 Three Mistakes. — In recent centuries, science has been promoted for three reasons. Some people hoped that through science they could understand God's goodness and wisdom best. This was the main motive in the minds of the great English thinkers, such as Newton. Others believed that knowledge is absolutely useful, and especially that morality, learning and happiness are tied together at the core. This was the main motive in the minds of the great French thinkers, such as Voltaire. And others thought that science was something selfless, harmless, self-sufficient and truly innocent, something they could have and love, in which the bad drives of human beings had no part at all. This was the main motive in the mind of Spinoza, who felt divine as a knower. So: three mistakes.

38 The Powder Kegs. — If you think about how badly the strength of young men needs an outlet, you will not be surprised to see them choose this or that cause so carelessly and so little selectively. What excites them is the sight of the enthusiasm around a cause, like the sight of a burning fuse, not the cause itself. That is why the cleverer seducers know how to promise them an explosion and say nothing about the reasons for their cause. You cannot win these powder kegs with arguments.

39 Changed Taste. — A change in general taste is stronger than a change in opinions. Opinions, with all their proofs, rebuttals and intellectual costume, are only symptoms of a changed taste. They are certainly not the cause, which is what people so often take them to be. How does general taste change? When a few powerful and influential people, without any embarrassment, declare their hoc est ridiculum, hoc est absurdum, which means their verdict of taste and disgust, and push it through by force. In this way they put pressure on many people. Over time the pressure becomes a habit for even more people, and at last a need for everyone. But when these few people feel and "taste" differently, the reason is usually something unusual in the way they live, eat, or digest. Perhaps it is a matter of more or fewer mineral salts in their blood and brain. In short, it is their physical makeup. They have the courage to admit their physical makeup and to listen to its demands even in its finest tones. Their aesthetic and moral judgments are exactly these "finest tones" of the body.

40 On the Lack of Noble Form. — Soldiers and their commanders still relate to each other in a much higher way than workers and their employers do. For now at least, every culture built on the military stands far above what is called industrial culture. Industrial culture, in its present form, is the most common way of life that has ever existed. Here the law of necessity simply applies: a person wants to live and has to sell himself. But people look down on the one who takes advantage of that need and buys the worker. It is strange that submitting to powerful, frightening, even terrible people, to tyrants and generals, is not felt nearly as humiliating as submitting to unknown and uninteresting people, like all the big names in industry. A worker usually sees in his employer only a sly, bloodsucking man who profits from every hardship, and whose name, looks, manners and reputation mean nothing to him. Manufacturers and big traders have probably lacked the forms and marks of the higher race that make people interesting. If they had the bearing and gestures of old noble birth, there might be no socialism of the masses. Deep down, the masses are ready for slavery of every kind, as long as the person above them keeps proving that he is higher, that he was born to command, through noble manners. The most ordinary man feels that nobility cannot be made up on the spot, and that it is the fruit of long periods of history that he must respect. But the lack of higher manners, and the notorious vulgarity of factory owners with red, fat hands, make him think that only chance and luck have raised one man above another. Very well, he says to himself, let us try chance and luck. Let us roll the dice! And socialism begins.

41 Against Regret. — A thinker treats his own actions as experiments and questions meant to find out something. Success and failure are, first of all, answers to him. Being annoyed that something went wrong, or even feeling regret, he leaves to those who act because they are ordered to, and who expect a beating if the master is not pleased with the result.

42 Work and Boredom. — Looking for work for the sake of the pay: in the civilized countries nearly everyone is alike in this now. For all of them, work is a means and not the goal itself. So they are not picky about what kind of work they do, as long as it brings in a good profit. There are, however, rarer people who would rather be ruined than work without enjoying it. They are the choosy ones who are hard to satisfy, and who are not helped by a large profit if the work is not itself the greatest reward. Artists and thinkers of every kind belong to this rare group, and so do those idlers who spend their lives hunting, traveling, or in love affairs and adventures. All of them want work and hardship, as long as these come with pleasure, and even the hardest, heaviest work if it has to be done. Otherwise they are determined to do nothing, even if poverty, disgrace, or danger to health and life come with that idleness. They fear boredom less than work without pleasure. In fact they need a lot of boredom if their work is to succeed. For the thinker and for every inventive mind, boredom is that unpleasant calm of the soul which comes before a good voyage and the favorable winds. He has to put up with it and wait inside himself for its effect. That is exactly what the lesser kinds of people cannot bring themselves to do! Driving boredom away by any means is common, just as working without pleasure is common. Perhaps what sets Asians apart from Europeans is that they can rest longer and more deeply than Europeans do. Even their narcotics work slowly and require patience, unlike the nasty suddenness of the European poison, alcohol.

43 What the Laws Reveal. — It is a serious mistake to study a people's criminal laws as if they showed its character. The laws do not reveal what a people is. They reveal what seems strange, odd, monstrous and foreign to it. The laws deal with the exceptions to morality as custom. The harshest punishments fall on whatever goes against the customs of a neighboring people. Among the Wahhabis, for example, there are only two deadly sins: having a god other than the Wahhabi god, and smoking, which they call "the shameful way of drinking." "And what about murder and adultery?" asked an Englishman in surprise when he heard about this. "Well, God is kind and merciful!" said the old chief. Likewise, the ancient Romans believed that a woman could commit a mortal sin in only two ways: by adultery, and by drinking wine. The old Cato thought that kissing relatives had become a custom only so that women could be kept under watch in this matter. A kiss meant asking, does she smell of wine? Women caught drinking wine were in fact put to death, and certainly not only because wine sometimes makes women forget how to say no. The Romans feared above all the wild, Dionysian character that the women of southern Europe were prone to now and then, back when wine was still new in Europe. It was a monstrous foreignness that overturned the basis of Roman feeling. To the Romans it felt like a betrayal of Rome, like taking in something from outside.

44 The Motives People Believe In. — However important it is to know the motives by which humanity has actually acted, perhaps the belief in these or those motives matters even more to the person who wants to understand. That belief is what humanity has so far invented and passed off to itself as the real levers of its actions. People's inner happiness and misery have come to them according to what they believed their motives were, and not according to what the motives actually were! Everything in the second category is of secondary importance.

45 Epicurus. — Yes, I am proud to feel Epicurus's character differently from perhaps anyone else. With everything I hear and read about him, I enjoy the happiness of the afternoon of antiquity. I see his eye looking out over a wide, whitish sea, past the rocks of the shore where the sun lies, while large and small creatures play in its light, as steady and calm as that light and that eye. Only someone who was in constant pain could have invented such happiness: the happiness of an eye before which the sea of existence has gone still, and which can never get enough of looking at its surface, at this colorful, fine, trembling skin of the sea. Never before was pleasure so modest.

46 Our Astonishment. — There is a deep and solid happiness in the fact that science establishes things which stand firm, and which again and again give the ground for new discoveries. It could just as well have been otherwise! We are so convinced of how uncertain and fanciful our judgments are, and of the constant change in all human laws and ideas, that we are actually astonished how well the results of science hold up! Earlier people knew nothing about this changeability of everything human. The custom of morality kept alive the belief that the whole inner life of a person was fixed by iron chains to unbreakable necessity. People may then have felt a similar pleasure of astonishment when they listened to fairy tales and stories of magic. The marvelous did such good to people who were sometimes tired of rules and of eternity. To lose the ground for once! To float! To go astray! To be mad! That belonged to the paradise and the indulgence of earlier times. Our happiness, by contrast, is like that of a shipwrecked sailor who has reached land and stands on the old firm earth with both feet, amazed that it does not sway.

47 On Suppressing the Passions. — If you keep forbidding the expression of the passions, treating them as something left to the "common," coarser, middle-class and peasant natures, then you are not really trying to suppress the passions themselves. You are only trying to suppress their language and gestures. Even so, you end up with exactly what you did not want: the suppression of the passions themselves, or at least their weakening and change. The court of Louis XIV and everything that depended on it is the most instructive example of this. The age that came after, raised on the suppression of expression, no longer had the passions themselves. In their place it had a graceful, shallow, playful character, an age that could not be rude. Even an insult was taken and answered only with polite words. Perhaps our own time offers the most remarkable counterpart. Everywhere I look, in life and on the stage, and not least in everything that is written, I see pleasure in the coarser outbursts and gestures of passion. A certain convention of passionateness is now demanded, but not passion itself! Still, in the end people will reach it this way, and our descendants will have a real wildness, not just a wildness and unruliness of forms.

48 Knowing Need. — Perhaps nothing separates people and ages as much as the different degree to which they know need: need of the soul as well as need of the body. As for the body, we who live now are probably all bunglers and dreamers at once, despite our weaknesses and frailties, because we lack rich experience of ourselves. Compare us with an age of fear, the longest of all ages, when each person had to protect himself against violence, and for that purpose had to become a violent man himself. In those days a man went through a rich school of physical pain and deprivation. He understood even a certain cruelty toward himself, a voluntary practice of pain, as a means of staying alive that he needed. In those days people trained those around them to endure pain. They gladly inflicted pain, and watched the most terrible forms of it fall on others, feeling nothing but relief at their own safety. As for the need of the soul, I now look at each person to see whether he knows it from experience or only from description. Does he still think it necessary to pretend to know it, perhaps as a mark of finer education? Or does he, deep down, not believe in great suffering of the soul at all? When it is mentioned, he responds as he does when great physical suffering is mentioned: he thinks of his toothache and his stomachache. That, however, seems to be how most people stand now. From the general lack of practice in pain, of both kinds, and from the rarity of seeing someone suffer, an important result follows. People now hate pain much more than earlier people did, and speak of it more badly than ever. They even find the mere presence of pain as a thought hardly bearable, and they make the whole of existence into a question of conscience and a reproach. The appearance of pessimistic philosophies is by no means a sign of great, terrible distress. These question marks about the value of all life are made in times when refinement and comfort already consider the unavoidable mosquito bites of the soul and body far too bloody and malicious. Lacking real experience of pain, such times would most like to make painful general ideas seem the highest kind of suffering. There would already be a cure for pessimistic philosophy and for the excessive sensitivity that seems to me the real "distress of the present." But perhaps this cure already sounds too cruel, and would itself be counted among the signs people now use to judge: "Existence is something evil." Well! The cure for "distress" is: distress.

49 Magnanimity and Its Relatives. — Those puzzling phenomena, such as the sudden coldness of a warm-hearted person, the humor of the melancholic, and above all magnanimity, which is a sudden giving up of revenge or of the satisfaction of envy, appear in people who have a powerful inner force that throws them from one extreme to the other. They are people of sudden satisfaction and sudden disgust. Their pleasures come so fast and so strong that excess and distaste follow right behind, and then a flight into the opposite taste. In this opposition the tension of their feeling is released. In one person it comes out as sudden coldness, in another as laughter, in a third as tears and self-sacrifice. To me the magnanimous person, at least the kind of magnanimity that has always made the greatest impression, looks like someone with an extreme thirst for revenge. A chance for satisfaction shows itself close by, and he drinks it up so fully, down to the last drop, already in his imagination, that a huge, quick disgust follows that quick excess. Now he rises "above himself," as people say, and forgives his enemy, even blesses and honors him. But by this violence against himself, this mockery of the revenge drive that was so powerful a moment ago, he only gives in to a new drive that has become powerful in him, namely disgust. He does it as impatiently and excessively as he had earlier anticipated the joy of revenge in his imagination and, so to speak, drained it dry. Magnanimity has the same degree of egoism as revenge does, but a different quality of egoism.

50 The Argument of Being Alone. — Even the most conscientious person is moved less by the reproach of his conscience than by a feeling that says: "This or that goes against the good customs of your group." Even the strongest person fears a cold look or a sour mouth from the people among whom he was raised and for whom he was raised. What is really being feared here? Being alone! It is the argument that beats even the best arguments for a person or a cause. This is the herd instinct speaking inside us.

51 Sense of Truth. — I appreciate any kind of doubt that lets me answer, "Let's try it!" But about all things and questions that cannot be tested by experiment, I do not want to hear anything more. This is the limit of my "sense of truth," because there courage has lost its claim.

52 What Others Know About Us. — What we know about ourselves and keep in memory matters less to the happiness of our lives than we think. One day what others know about us, or think they know, comes crashing down on us, and then we see that it is the more powerful force. People cope with a bad conscience more easily than with a bad reputation.

53 Where Goodness Begins. — Where the eye's poor sight can no longer see the bad drive as such, because the drive has become refined, people mark the beginning of the realm of the good. Having now crossed into the realm of the good, they feel all the drives that the bad drives had threatened and limited stirring with them: a feeling of safety, comfort and goodwill. So the duller the eye, the farther goodness reaches! That is why ordinary people and children are always cheerful! And that is why the great thinkers are gloomy, with a sadness that is related to a bad conscience.

54 Awareness of Appearance. — How wonderful and new, and at the same time how dreadful and ironic, I feel my knowledge puts me in relation to all of existence! I have discovered that the old human and animal nature, indeed the whole prehistory and past of all feeling beings, keeps writing poems, loving, hating and drawing conclusions inside me. I have suddenly woken in the middle of this dream, but only to become aware that I am dreaming, and that I have to keep on dreaming in order not to be destroyed, the way a sleepwalker has to keep dreaming so that he does not fall. What does "appearance" mean to me now? It is certainly not the opposite of some true being. What can I say about any being except the properties of its appearance? It is certainly not a dead mask that you could put on some unknown X and take off again. For me, appearance is the active and living thing itself. It goes so far in mocking itself that it makes me feel that here there is only appearance, a will-o'-the-wisp, a ghostly dance, and nothing more. Among all these dreamers, I too, the "knower," dance my dance. The knower is a tool for stretching out the earthly dance, and in that way belongs to the people who arrange the festival of existence. The strict logic and connectedness of all knowledge may be, and will be, the greatest tool for keeping the common dream going: for keeping all these dreamers able to understand one another, and so for keeping the dream alive.

55 The Last Nobility. — What makes someone "noble"? Certainly not making sacrifices, since the wildly lustful person makes sacrifices too. Certainly not following a passion, since there are contemptible passions. Certainly not doing something for others without selfishness, since perhaps the logic of selfishness is strongest in the most noble people. What makes someone noble is that the passion which seizes him is a peculiarity, and he does not know that it is one. He uses a rare and unusual measure, almost a kind of madness. He feels heat in things that feel cold to everyone else. He guesses at values for which no scale has been invented yet. He makes sacrifices on altars dedicated to an unknown god. He has a courage without the wish to be honored. He has a self-sufficiency that overflows and gives to people and things. Until now, then, it was the rare, and not knowing how rare it is, that made someone noble. But consider that by this standard everything familiar, close and indispensable, in short what does most to preserve the species, and in general the rule in human history so far, has been judged unfairly and slandered on the whole, in favor of the exceptions. Becoming the defender of the rule: that might be the last form and refinement in which nobility shows itself on earth.

56 The Desire to Suffer. — When I think of the urge to do something, which constantly tickles and spurs on millions of young Europeans who cannot stand boredom or themselves, I understand that there must also be in them a desire to suffer, so that they can take their suffering as a plausible reason to act. They need distress! That is why politicians keep shouting, and why there are so many false, invented and exaggerated "states of emergency" in every class, and why people are so willing to believe them. This young generation wants misfortune, not happiness, to come or to become visible from outside. Their imagination is already busy shaping a monster out of it, so that afterward they can fight a monster. If these people who crave distress felt the strength in themselves to do good for themselves from within, to do something to themselves, then they would also understand how to create their own distress from within, a distress that belongs to them. Their inventions could then be subtler, and their satisfactions could sound like good music. As it is, they fill the world with their cries of need, and so, too often, they first fill it with the feeling of need! They do not know what to do with themselves, so they paint other people's misfortune on the wall. They always need others, and ever more others! — Forgive me, my friends. I have dared to paint my own happiness on the wall.