Book III

108 New Struggles. — After Buddha was dead, for centuries people still showed his shadow in a cave, an enormous and dreadful shadow. God is dead. But given how people are, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow is shown. And we — we must still conquer his shadow too!

109 Let Us Beware! — Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being. Where would it expand to? What would it feed on? How could it grow and multiply? We have some idea of what the organic is. Should we reinterpret the unspeakably derived, late, rare, accidental things that we perceive only on the crust of the earth as the essential, general, eternal, as those do who call the whole an organism? That disgusts me. Let us beware, too, of believing that the whole is a machine. It is certainly not constructed for a single purpose; calling it a "machine" pays it far too high an honor. Let us beware of assuming that something so full of form as the cyclical motions of our neighboring stars occurs everywhere and always. A glance at the Milky Way alone raises doubts whether there are not much rougher and more contradictory motions there, stars with eternal straight-line trajectories and the like. The astral order in which we live is an exception. This order, and the fairly long duration it makes possible, in turn made possible the exception of exceptions: the formation of the organic. The overall character of the world, by contrast, is for all eternity chaos. I do not mean the absence of necessity, but the absence of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever else all our aesthetic human names are. Judged from our reason, the failed throws are by far the rule, and the exceptions are not the secret goal. The whole game repeats its manner eternally, a manner that may never be called a melody. Finally, even the phrase "failed throw" is already a humanizing that carries a reproach. But how could we blame or praise the whole! Let us beware of ascribing to it heartlessness or unreason, or their opposites. It is neither perfect nor beautiful nor noble, and it wants to become none of these. It does not strive at all to imitate human beings! No one of our aesthetic or moral judgments touches it in any way! It also has no instinct for self-preservation, and no drives at all. It knows no laws either. Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities. There is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses. If you know that there are no purposes, then you also know that there is no chance, for the word "chance" has a meaning only beside a world of purposes. Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. What is alive is only a kind of what is dead, and a very rare kind. Let us beware of thinking that the world creates something new forever. There are no eternally enduring substances. Matter is just as much an error as the god of the Eleatics. But when will we finally be done with our caution and our guardianship? When will all these shadows of God no longer darken us? When will we have fully de-deified nature? When will we be allowed to begin naturalizing ourselves, using the pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature!

110 The Origin of Knowledge. — For immense stretches of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. Some of them turned out to be useful and to preserve the species. Whoever hit upon them, or inherited them, fought his battle for himself and his offspring with greater luck. Such mistaken articles of belief, which were inherited ever further and at last became almost the basic stock of the human species, are for example these: that there are lasting things, that there are equal things, that there are things, substances, bodies, that a thing is what it appears to be, that our willing is free, that what is good for me is also good in and of itself. Only very late did deniers and doubters of such propositions appear. Only very late did truth appear, as the weakest form of knowledge. It seemed that one could not live with it, since our organism was built for its opposite. All its higher functions, the perceptions of the senses and every kind of feeling whatever, worked with those ancient, incorporated basic errors. More than that: those propositions became the very norms within knowledge by which one measured "true" and "untrue," right down into the most remote regions of pure logic. So the power of knowledge lies not in its degree of truth, but in its age, its incorporation, its character as a condition of life. Where life and knowing seemed to come into conflict, there was never any serious fight. Denial and doubt were then taken as madness. Those exceptional thinkers, like the Eleatics, who nevertheless set up and held fast to the opposites of the natural errors, believed it possible to live this opposite too. They invented the sage as the human being of unchangeability, impersonality, and universality of perception, as one and all at once, with a special faculty for that reversed knowledge. They believed that their knowledge was at the same time the principle of life. But in order to be able to assert all this, they had to deceive themselves about their own condition. They had to ascribe to themselves impersonality and duration without change, misjudge the nature of the knower, deny the power of the drives within knowing, and in general grasp reason as a completely free activity that arose from itself. They closed their eyes to the fact that they too had come to their propositions by contradicting what was valid, or from a desire for rest, for sole possession, or for power. The finer development of honesty and skepticism finally made these people impossible too. Their life and judgment also turned out to depend on the ancient drives and basic errors of all feeling existence. That finer honesty and skepticism arose wherever two opposite propositions seemed applicable to life, because both were compatible with the basic errors. There one could argue about the higher or lower degree of use to life. It also arose where new propositions showed themselves useless to life, but at least not harmful: as expressions of an intellectual play drive, innocent and happy like all play. Gradually the human brain filled with such judgments and convictions, and in this tangle there arose fermentation, struggle and a craving for power. Not only usefulness and pleasure, but every kind of drive took sides in the struggle over the "truths." The intellectual struggle became an occupation, a stimulus, a calling, a duty, a dignity. Knowing and striving after the true finally ranked itself among the other needs as one more need. From then on, not only belief and conviction, but also examination, denial, distrust and contradiction were a power. All the "evil" instincts were subordinated to knowledge and placed in its service, and they received the glamor of the permitted, the honored, the useful, and finally the eye and innocence of the good. Knowledge thus became a piece of life itself, and as life it became an ever-growing power, until at last the knowledge and those ancient basic errors collided, both as life, both as power, both within the same human being. The thinker:

That is now the being in whom the drive to truth and those life-preserving errors fight their first battle, now that the drive to truth too has proved itself a life-preserving power. Compared with the importance of this struggle, everything else is indifferent. The last question about the conditions of life is posed here, and the first attempt is made to answer this question with experiment. To what extent can truth bear incorporation? That is the question, that is the experiment.

111 The Origin of Logic. — Where did logic in the human head come from? Surely from the illogical, whose realm must originally have been enormous. But countless beings that inferred differently from the way we infer now perished. It could still have been truer! For example, whoever did not find the "same" often enough, with regard to food or to the animals that threatened him, and who therefore subsumed too slowly and was too cautious in subsumption, had only a smaller chance of surviving than the one who guessed sameness at once in everything similar. But the predominant tendency to treat the similar as the same, an illogical tendency, since in itself nothing is the same, first created the whole foundation of logic. In the same way, for the concept of substance to arise, which is indispensable to logic, although nothing real corresponds to it in the strictest sense, the changing in things must for a long time not have been seen or felt. Beings that did not see precisely had an advantage over those that saw everything "in flux." In itself, every high degree of caution in inference, every skeptical tendency, is already a great danger to life. No living beings would have been preserved if the opposite tendency had not been bred enormously strong: the tendency to affirm rather than suspend judgment, to err and invent rather than wait, to agree rather than deny, to judge rather than be just. The course of logical thoughts and conclusions in our present brain corresponds to a process and struggle of drives, each of which is in itself very illogical and unjust. We usually experience only the result of the struggle. This ancient mechanism works in us so quickly and so hidden.

112 Cause and Effect. — We call it "explanation." But it is "description" that distinguishes us from earlier stages of knowledge and science. We describe better. We explain no more than all earlier people did. We have uncovered a manifold succession where the naive human being and the researcher of older cultures saw only two things, "cause" and "effect," as the phrase went. We have perfected the picture of becoming, but we have not got beyond the picture, behind the picture. In every case the series of "causes" stands much more completely before us. We conclude: this and that must come first, so that that follows. But we have understood nothing with this. Quality, for example in every chemical becoming, still appears as a "miracle," and so does every movement. No one has "explained" the impact. How could we explain at all! We operate with nothing but things that do not exist: lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible times, divisible spaces. How can explanation even be possible when we first turn everything into a picture, our picture! It is enough to regard science as the most faithful possible humanizing of things. We keep learning to describe ourselves more and more precisely while we describe things and their succession. Cause and effect: probably such a pairing never exists. In truth a continuum stands before us, from which we isolate a few pieces. In the same way we only ever perceive a movement as isolated points, so that we do not really see it but infer it. The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us. But it is only sudden for us. In this second of suddenness there is an infinite number of processes that escape us. An intellect that saw cause and effect as a continuum, not as we do, as an arbitrary dividing-up and chopping-up, that saw the flow of what happens, would reject the concept of cause and effect and deny all conditionality.

113 On the Doctrine of Poisons. — So much has to come together for scientific thinking to arise, and all these necessary powers had to be invented, practiced and cultivated one by one! In isolation, however, they very often had a quite different effect from what they have now, when within scientific thinking they check and discipline one another. They worked as poisons. For example the doubting drive, the denying drive, the waiting drive, the collecting drive, the dissolving drive. Many hecatombs of human beings were sacrificed before these drives learned to understand their coexistence and to feel themselves as functions of a single organizing power within one human being! And how far we still are from the artistic powers and the practical wisdom of life joining scientific thinking, from a higher organic system forming, in relation to which the scholar, the physician, the artist and the lawgiver, as we now know them, would have to appear as meager antiquities!

114 The Scope of the Moral. — We construct a new picture that we see, at once, with the help of all the old experiences we have had, in proportion to our degree of honesty and justice. There are no experiences at all except moral ones, not even within the realm of sense perception.

115 The Four Errors. — Human beings have been educated by their errors. First, they always saw themselves only incompletely. Second, they ascribed invented qualities to themselves. Third, they felt themselves in a false ranking with respect to animals and nature. Fourth, they kept inventing new tables of goods and took them for a time as eternal and unconditional, so that now this, now that human drive or state stood in first place, and as a result of this valuation was refined. If you subtract the effect of these four errors, then you have also subtracted humanity, human kindness, and "human dignity."

116 The Herd Instinct. — Wherever we find a morality, we find an estimate and a ranking of human drives and actions. These estimates and rankings are always the expression of the needs of a community and a herd. What first benefits the herd, and second and third, is also the highest standard for the value of every individual. Through morality the individual is taught to be a function of the herd, and to ascribe value to himself only as a function. Since the conditions for preserving one community have been very different from those for preserving another, there have been very different moralities. And with regard to the essential transformations of herds, communities, states and societies that still lie ahead, one can prophesy that there will still be very divergent moralities. Morality is the herd instinct in the individual.

117 The Herd's Bad Conscience. — In the longest and most distant times of humanity there was a quite different bad conscience from today's. Today one feels responsible only for what one wills and does, and has one's pride in oneself. All our teachers of law start from this feeling of self and pleasure in the individual, as if the source of right had always sprung from here. But for most of human history nothing was more dreadful than feeling oneself alone. Being alone, feeling individually, neither obeying nor ruling, signifying an individual: that was then not a pleasure but a punishment. One was sentenced "to be an individual." Freedom of thought counted as discomfort itself. While we experience law and classification as constraint and loss, people in earlier times experienced egoism as a painful thing, a real distress. To be oneself, to value oneself by one's own measure and weight: that then went against taste. The inclination to it would have been felt as madness, for every misery and every fear was linked with being alone. Then "free will" had the bad conscience as its closest neighbor. And the less free one acted, the more the herd instinct rather than personal feeling spoke from the action, the more moral one judged oneself. Everything that harmed the herd, whether the individual had willed it or not, then gave the individual a bad conscience, and his neighbor too, and indeed the whole herd! We have learned the most of all to unlearn this.

118 Goodwill. — Is it virtuous when one cell turns itself into the function of a stronger cell? It must. And is it evil when the stronger assimilates that one? It must too. For it is necessary for it, since it strives for an overabundant replacement and wants to regenerate itself. Accordingly, in goodwill one must distinguish between the drive to appropriate and the drive to subordinate, depending on whether the stronger or the weaker feels goodwill. Joy and desire go together in the stronger, who wants to shape something into his function. Joy and the wish to be desired go together in the weaker, who wants to become a function. Pity is essentially the former, a pleasant stirring of the drive to appropriate, at the sight of the weaker. In this we must also remember that "strong" and "weak" are relative concepts.

119 No Altruism! — I see in many people a surplus of strength and a delight in wanting to be a function. They press toward it and have the finest sense for all those places where precisely they can be a function. To this belong those women who turn themselves into the function of a man in the area where he is weakly developed, and in this way become his purse, or his politics, or his social life. Such beings preserve themselves best when they fit into a foreign organism. If they do not succeed, they become annoyed and irritated, and they devour themselves.

120 Health of the Soul. — The popular medical formula for morality (whose originator is Ariston of Chios), "virtue is the health of the soul," would at least have to be altered to be of use: "your virtue is the health of your soul." For there is no health in itself, and all attempts to define a thing in this way have miserably failed. What health means, even for your body, depends on your goal, your horizon, your strengths, your impulses, your errors, and above all on the ideals and phantasms of your soul. Thus there are countless healths of the body. And the more one allows the single and incomparable to raise its head once more, the more one unlearns the dogma of the "equality of human beings," the more the concept of a normal health, along with a normal diet and a normal course of illness, must vanish from our physicians. Only then would it be time to reflect on the health and sickness of the soul, and to place each person's peculiar virtue in its health, which of course might look, in one person, like the opposite of health in another. Finally, the great question would remain open whether we could do without sickness, even for the development of our virtue. And whether our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge does not need the sick soul just as much as the healthy one. In short, whether the sole will to health is not a prejudice, a cowardice, and perhaps a piece of the finest barbarism and backwardness.

121 Life Is No Argument. — We have made for ourselves a world in which we can live, by assuming bodies, lines, surfaces, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content. Without these articles of faith no one could now bear to live! But that does not make them proven. Life is no argument. Under the conditions of life, error might be the very thing.

122 Moral Skepticism in Christianity. — Christianity too has made a great contribution to enlightenment, and it taught moral skepticism in a very penetrating and effective way: accusingly, embitteringly, but with tireless patience and subtlety. It destroyed in every individual person the belief in his "virtues." It made forever disappear from the earth those great virtuous people of whom antiquity was not short, those popular figures who went about in the belief in their own perfection with the dignity of a bullfight hero. When we now read the moral books of the ancients, for example Seneca's and Epictetus's, educated in this Christian school of skepticism, we feel an amusing superiority. We are full of secret insights and overviews. We feel as if a child were speaking before an old man, or as if a young, beautiful enthusiast were speaking before La Rochefoucauld. We know better what virtue is! But in the end we have applied this same skepticism to all religious states and processes as well, such as sin, repentance, grace and sanctification, and we have let the worm dig so well that now we have the same feeling of subtle superiority and insight when we read all the Christian books. We know the religious feelings better too!

And it is time to know them well and to describe them well, for the devout of the old faith are dying out too. Let us at least preserve their image and their type for knowledge!

123 Knowledge as More Than a Means. — Even without this new passion, I mean the passion of knowledge, science would still be advanced. Without it, science has grown and become great until now. The good faith in science, the favorable prejudice by which our states are now governed (formerly it was even the church), rests at bottom on the fact that this unconditional urge has revealed itself so rarely within science, and that science is regarded precisely not as a passion but as a state and an "ethos." Indeed, the amour-plaisir of knowledge (curiosity) is often enough, the amour-vanité is enough, a habit of it, with the ulterior aim of honor and bread is enough. For many people it is enough that, with a surplus of leisure, they know nothing to do but read, collect, arrange, observe, and then retell. Their "scientific drive" is their boredom. Pope Leo the Tenth once sang the praises of science (in a brief to Beroaldus). He called it the finest adornment and the greatest pride of our life, a noble occupation in happiness and unhappiness. "Without it," he finally says, "all human undertakings would be without firm support. Even with it they are changeable and uncertain enough!" But this moderately skeptical pope, like all the other church panegyrists of science, keeps silent about his final judgment of it. From his words one may pick out what is remarkable enough for such a friend of the arts: that he puts science above art. In the end, however, it is only a courtesy when he does not speak here of what he too places far above all science: of "revealed truth" and of the "eternal salvation of the soul." Compared with these, what are adornment, pride, entertainment, and securing of life! "Science is something of second rank, nothing final, unconditional, no object of passion." This judgment remained in Leo's soul: the properly Christian judgment of science! In antiquity its dignity and recognition were diminished, because even among its most eager disciples the striving for virtue came first, and people thought they had given knowledge its highest praise once they celebrated it as the best means of virtue. It is something new in history that knowledge wants to be more than a means.

124 On the Horizon of the Infinite. — We have left the land and gone to sea! We have the bridge behind us, or rather, we have broken off the land behind us! Now, little ship, watch out! Beside you lies the ocean. It is true that it does not always roar, and at times it lies there like silk and gold and the dreaminess of kindness. But there will come hours when you recognize that it is infinite, and that there is nothing more terrible than infinity. Oh, poor bird, that felt free and now bumps against the walls of this cage! Woe, when homesickness for land comes over you, as if there had been more freedom there. And there is no "land" anymore!

125 The Madman. — Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning, ran to the marketplace, and cried out unceasingly: "I seek God! I seek God!" As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around together there, he caused great laughter. Has he then got lost? said one. Has he strayed like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on board a ship? Emigrated? — So they cried out and laughed all at once. The madman leaped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Where has God gone?" he cried. "I will tell you! We have killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers! But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving now? Where are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not falling continually? Backward, sideways, forward, in every direction? Is there still an up and a down? Are we not wandering as if through an endless nothing? Does not empty space breathe on us? Has it not become colder? Does not night keep coming, more and more night?

Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decay? — Gods too decay! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? The holiest and most powerful thing the world has possessed until now has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What atonement festivals, what sacred games will we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods, merely to appear worthy of it? There was never a greater deed, and whoever is born after us, for the sake of this deed, belongs to a higher history than all history has been until now!" — Here the madman fell silent and looked at his listeners again. They too were silent and looked at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, so that it broke into pieces and went out. "I come too early, he said then. I am not yet at the right time. This tremendous event is still on its way, wandering. It has not yet reached the ears of human beings. Lightning and thunder need time. The light of the stars needs time. Deeds need time, even after they have been done, to be seen and heard. This deed is still farther from them than the farthest stars, and yet they have done it themselves!" It is also told that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there intoned his Requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he always answered only this: "What are these churches still, if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

126 Mystical Explanations. — Mystical explanations are considered profound. The truth is that they are not even superficial.

127 The Aftereffect of the Oldest Religiosity. — Every thoughtless person believes that the will is the only thing that acts. Willing seems to him something simple, simply given, not derivable, self-evidently understood. He is convinced that when he does something, for example delivers a blow, he is the one who strikes, and that he struck because he wanted to strike. He notices no problem in this at all. The feeling of the will is enough for him, not only to accept cause and effect, but also to believe that he understands their relation. Of the mechanism of what happens, and of the hundredfold fine work that must be accomplished before the blow can come about, and likewise of the inability of the will itself to do even the smallest part of this work, he knows nothing. For him the will is a magically working force. Belief in the will as the cause of effects is belief in magically working forces. Now, originally humans believed that wherever they saw something happen, a will was its cause, and that personal, willing beings were at work in the background. The concept of mechanics was quite remote from them. But because human beings believed for enormous stretches of time only in persons, and not in materials, forces, things and so on, belief in cause and effect became their basic belief, which they apply wherever something happens. They still do so now, instinctively, as a piece of atavism of the oldest descent. The statements "no effect without a cause" and "every effect in turn a cause" appear as generalizations of much narrower propositions: "where something is effected, something has been willed," "only willing beings can be affected," "there is never a pure, consequence-free undergoing of an effect; all undergoing is an arousal of the will (to act, to defend, to take revenge, to retaliate)." But in the earliest times of humanity, these propositions and those were identical. The first were not generalizations of the second. Rather, the second were explanations of the first. Schopenhauer, with his assumption that everything that exists is only something willing, lifted an ancient mythology to the throne. He never seems to have tried an analysis of the will, because he believed in the simplicity and immediacy of all willing, like everyone else. Yet willing is only a mechanism so well practiced that it almost escapes the observing eye. Against him I set up these propositions. First, for will to arise, a representation of pleasure and displeasure is needed. Second, that a violent stimulus is felt as pleasure or displeasure is the business of the interpreting intellect, which, to be sure, mostly works for us unconsciously. And one and the same stimulus can be interpreted as pleasure or as displeasure. Third, only among intellectual beings are there pleasure, displeasure and will. The overwhelming majority of organisms have none of these.

128 The Value of Prayer. — Prayer was invented for people who in fact never have thoughts of their own, and for whom an elevation of the soul is unknown or passes unnoticed. What should such people do in holy places, and in all the important situations of life that require calm and a kind of dignity? So that they at least do not disturb, the wisdom of all founders of religions, small and great, has commanded them a formula of prayer, as a long mechanical labor of the lips, joined with an effort of memory and with an equally fixed posture of hands, feet and eyes! So let them chew over their "om mane padme hum" countless times, like the Tibetans. Or, as in Benares, let them count off the name of the god Ram-Ram-Ram on their fingers (and so on, with or without grace). Or let them honor Vishnu with his thousand names, or Allah with his ninety-nine names of invocation. Or let them use prayer wheels and rosaries. The main thing is that for a time they are fixed in this work and offer a tolerable sight. Their kind of prayer was invented for the benefit of the devout, who know thoughts and elevations of their own. And even these have their weary hours, when a row of venerable words and sounds, and a pious mechanics, does them good. But suppose these rare people (in every religion the religious person is an exception) know how to help themselves. Those poor in spirit do not know how to help themselves, and to forbid them the clatter of prayer is to take their religion away from them, as Protestantism keeps showing more and more. Religion does not want more from such people than that they keep still, with eyes, hands, legs and organs of every kind. In this way they are temporarily made more beautiful, and more human-like!

129 The Conditions of God. — "God himself cannot exist without wise people," said Luther, and with good reason. But "God can exist even less without unwise people," the good Luther did not say!

130 A Dangerous Decision. — The Christian decision to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

131 Christianity and Suicide. — At the time of its origin, Christianity turned the immense longing for suicide into a lever of its power. It left only two forms of suicide, clothed them in the highest dignity and the highest hopes, and forbade all others in a terrible way. But martyrdom, and the slow self-destruction of the ascetic, were allowed.

132 Against Christianity. — Now our taste decides against Christianity, no longer our reasons.

133 Principle. — An unavoidable hypothesis, to which humanity must keep falling back, is in the long run more powerful than even the most firmly believed faith in something untrue (such as the Christian faith). "In the long run" here means for a hundred thousand years.

134 The Pessimists as Victims. — Where a deep displeasure with existence gets the upper hand, the aftereffects of a great dietary error come to light, one that a people has long been guilty of. Thus the spread of Buddhism (not its origin) depends in large part on the Indians' excessive and almost exclusive diet of rice, and on the general lethargy that follows from it. Perhaps the European dissatisfaction of modern times should be seen in the light of this: our forebears, the whole Middle Ages, thanks to the influence of Germanic tendencies on Europe, were devoted to drink. Middle Ages, that is, the alcohol poisoning of Europe. The German displeasure with life is essentially a winter sickness, not counting the effects of cellar air and stove fumes in German living rooms.

135 The Origin of Sin. — Sin, as it is now felt everywhere that Christianity rules or once ruled, is a Jewish feeling and a Jewish invention. Against this background of all Christian morality, Christianity was indeed set on "Judaizing" the whole world. We feel most finely how far it succeeded in Europe in the degree of strangeness that the Greek antiquity, a world without feelings of sin, still has for our feeling, despite all the good will toward closeness and assimilation, which whole generations and many outstanding individuals did not lack. "Only if you repent will God be gracious to you": to a Greek this is a laughing matter and a scandal. He would say, "That is how slaves may feel." Here a powerful being is presupposed, an overpowerful one, and yet one who is eager for revenge. His power is so great that no harm can be done to him at all, except in the point of honor. Every sin is a violation of respect, a crimen laesae majestatis divinae, and nothing more! Contrition, humiliation, rolling in the dust: these are the first and last conditions to which his grace is tied, that is, the restoration of his divine honor! Whether harm is done to anything else through sin, whether a deep, growing ruin is planted by it that seizes and strangles one person after another like a disease, this honor-hungry Oriental in heaven does not care. Sin is an offense against him, not against humanity! To whomever he has given his grace, he also gives this indifference to the natural consequences of sin. God and humanity are thought of here as so separated and opposed that, at bottom, nothing can be sinned against humanity at all. Every deed is to be considered only in terms of its supernatural consequences, not its natural ones. That is what the Jewish feeling wants, for which everything natural is unworthy in itself. The Greeks, by contrast, were more inclined to think that even a crime could have dignity: even theft, as in Prometheus, even the slaughter of cattle as an expression of a maddened envy, as in Ajax. In their need to invent dignity for a crime and to take it in, they invented tragedy, an art and a pleasure which, despite all his poetic gift and his inclination toward the sublime, has remained at the deepest level foreign to the Jew.

136 The Chosen People. — The Jews feel themselves to be the chosen people among the peoples, and indeed because they are the moral genius among the peoples, by virtue of the capacity that they have despised humanity within themselves more deeply than any other people. The Jews enjoy their divine monarch and saint in a way similar to the enjoyment the French nobility had of Louis XIV. That nobility had let all its power and self-rule be taken away and had become contemptible. To avoid feeling this, to be able to forget it, they needed a royal splendor, a royal authority and a plenitude of power without equal, to which only the nobility had access. By this privilege they raised themselves to the height of the court, and from there, looking down on everything below them, they saw everything as contemptible. In this way they rose above all sensitivity of conscience. So they deliberately piled the tower of royal power higher and higher into the clouds, and set the last building blocks of their own power on top.

137 Spoken in a Parable. — A Jesus Christ was possible only in a Jewish landscape, I mean one over which the dark and sublime thundercloud of the wrathful Jehovah constantly hung. Only here was the rare, sudden shining through of a single ray of sun through the dreadful, general, lasting day-and-night felt as a miracle of "love," as the ray of the most undeserved "grace." Only here could Christ dream his rainbow and his ladder to heaven, by which God came down to human beings. Everywhere else, bright weather and sun counted too much as the rule and as everyday fact.

138 The Error of Christ. — The founder of Christianity thought that human beings suffered from nothing so much as from their sins. It was his error, the error of a man who felt himself without sin and lacked experience in this respect! So his soul filled with that wonderful, fantastic compassion that was meant for a distress which, even among his own people, the inventors of sin, was seldom a great distress. But the Christians have understood how to create the right for their master after the fact, and to hallow his error as "truth."

139 The Color of the Passions. — Natures like that of the apostle Paul have an evil eye for the passions. They know from them only what is dirty, disfiguring and heartbreaking. Their ideal drive therefore aims at the annihilation of the passions. In the divine they see their complete purity. Quite differently from Paul and the Jews, the Greeks turned their ideal drive precisely toward the passions, and loved them, raised them up, gilded them and deified them. Evidently they felt in passion not only happier, but also purer and more divine than otherwise. And now the Christians? Did they want to become Jews in this? Perhaps they have become them.

140 Too Jewish. — If God wanted to become an object of love, he would first have had to give up judging and justice. A judge, even a gracious judge, is not an object of love. The founder of Christianity did not feel this finely enough, being a Jew.

141 Too Oriental. — What? A God who loves human beings, provided they believe in him, and who hurls terrible looks and threats against the one who does not believe in this love! What? A conditional love as the feeling of an almighty God! A love that has not even gained mastery over the feeling of honor and of irritated vengefulness! How Oriental it all is! "If I love you, what business is it of yours?" is already a sufficient critique of the whole of Christianity.

142 Incense. — Buddha says: "Do not flatter your benefactor!" Repeat this saying in a Christian church: it at once cleanses the air of everything Christian.

143 The Greatest Benefit of Polytheism. — That the individual should set up his own ideal and derive from it his own law, his own joys and his own rights: until now this was considered the most monstrous of all human aberrations, and idolatry in itself. In fact, the few who dared to do it always needed an apology before themselves, and it usually went: "Not I! Not I! It is a god, working through me!" The marvelous art and power of creating gods, polytheism, was the place where this drive could be discharged, where it purified itself, perfected itself, and ennobled itself. For originally it was a common and unsightly drive, related to obstinacy, disobedience and envy. To be hostile to this drive toward one's own ideal was once the law of all morality. There was only one norm: "man." And each people believed it had this one and final norm. But above and outside oneself, in a distant beyond-world, one could see a plurality of norms. One god was not the denial or blasphemy of another god! Here people first permitted individuals; here they first honored the right of individuals. The invention of gods, heroes and superhumans of every kind, as well as of lesser and lower beings, dwarfs, fairies, centaurs, satyrs, demons and devils, was the priceless preparation for justifying the selfishness and self-rule of the individual. The freedom that people granted to their god against the other gods, they finally granted to themselves against laws, customs and neighbors. Monotheism, on the other hand, that rigid consequence of the teaching of one normal human being, which means belief in a normal god, beside whom there are only false, lying gods, was perhaps the greatest danger humanity has faced: here threatened that premature standstill which, as far as we can see, most other animal species reached long ago. All of them believe in one normal animal and ideal in their kind, and the morality of custom has finally translated itself into flesh and blood. In polytheism the freethinking and the many-mindedness of human beings was prefigured: the power to create new and their own eyes, and again new and even more their own. So for humans alone, of all animals, there are no eternal horizons and perspectives.

144 Wars of Religion. — The greatest progress of the masses so far has been the war of religion, for it proves that the masses have begun to treat concepts with reverence. Wars of religion arise only when, through the finer disputes of sects, general reason has been refined, so that even the common people become subtle and take trifles seriously, indeed consider it possible that the "eternal salvation of the soul" hangs on small differences of concepts.

145 The Danger of the Vegetarians. — The predominantly enormous consumption of rice drives toward the use of opium and narcotic things, just as the predominantly enormous consumption of potatoes drives toward brandy. But in a finer aftereffect it also drives toward ways of thinking and feeling that work narcotically. This fits with the fact that the promoters of narcotic ways of thinking and feeling, like those Indian teachers, want precisely to praise a diet that is purely vegetable and to make it the law for the masses. In this way they want to awaken and increase the need which they are able to satisfy.

146 German Hopes. — Let us not forget that the names of peoples are usually insults. The Tatars, for example, are by their name "the dogs." This is what the Chinese called them. The "Germans": originally this meant "the heathens." After their conversion, the Goths called the great mass of their unbaptized kinsmen this, following their translation of the Septuagint, in which the heathens are designated by the word that in Greek means "the peoples." See Ulfilas. It would still be possible for the Germans to make an honorary name out of their old insult, by becoming the first unchristian people of Europe. Schopenhauer counted it to their credit that they had a great talent for this. So the work of Luther would come to completion, for he taught them to be unroman and to speak: "Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise!"

147 Question and Answer. — What do wild tribes first take over from Europeans? Brandy and Christianity, the European narcotics. And what do they perish of most quickly? Of the European narcotics.

148 Where Reformations Arise. — At the time of the great corruption of the church, in Germany the church was least corrupt. That is why the Reformation arose here, as a sign that even the beginnings of corruption were felt to be unbearable. Relatively speaking, no people was ever more Christian than the Germans at the time of Luther. Their Christian culture was just ready to burst into a hundredfold splendor of bloom. Only one night was missing. But that night brought the storm that put an end to everything.

149 The Failure of Reformations. — It speaks for the higher culture of the Greeks, even in fairly early times, that several attempts to found new Greek religions failed. It speaks for the fact that there must have been, early on, a great number of differently constituted individuals in Greece, whose differing distress could not be cured with a single recipe of belief and hope. Pythagoras and Plato, perhaps also Empedocles, and much earlier the Orphic enthusiasts, were all bent on founding new religions. The first two had such genuine souls and talents of religious founders that one cannot marvel enough at their failure. But they only ever achieved sects. Every time the reformation of an entire people fails and only sects raise their heads, one may conclude that the people is already very varied within itself, and is beginning to detach itself from the coarse herd instincts and from the morality of custom. This is a meaningful state of suspension, which people are used to disparaging as decline of morals and corruption, while it announces the ripening of the egg and the imminent breaking of the eggshell. That Luther's Reformation succeeded in the North is a sign that the North had remained behind the South of Europe, and still knew fairly uniform and one-colored needs. And there would never have been a Christianization of Europe at all, if the culture of the old southern world had not gradually been barbarized and lost its cultural superiority through an excessive admixture of Germanic barbarian blood. The more generally and unconditionally a single person, or a single person's thought, can have an effect, the more uniform and the lower the mass must be on which it works. Counter-efforts, by contrast, reveal inner counter-needs that also want to satisfy themselves and prevail. Conversely, one may always infer a real height of culture when powerful and domineering natures achieve only a small and sectarian effect. This holds for the individual arts too, and for the fields of knowledge. Where there is rule, there are masses. Where there are masses, there is a need for slavery. Where there is slavery, there are only a few individuals, and these have the herd instincts and the conscience against them.

150 A Critique of the Saints. — Must one, in order to have a virtue, want to have it in its most brutal form? That is how the Christian saints wanted it, and needed it. They endured life only with the thought that at the sight of their virtue everyone would be overcome by contempt for himself. A virtue with such an effect I call brutal.

151 The Origin of Religion. — The metaphysical need is not the origin of religions, as Schopenhauer claims. It is only a sprout from them. Under the rule of religious thoughts, people have become used to the idea of an "other world" (behind, below or above). When religious thoughts are destroyed, people feel an uncomfortable emptiness and lack. And now from this feeling another "other world" grows out again, but now only a metaphysical one, no longer a religious one. What led in the earliest times to the assumption of an "other world" at all was not a drive or a need, but an error in interpreting certain natural events, an embarrassment of the intellect.

152 The Greatest Change. — The lighting and the colors of all things have changed! We no longer fully understand how the ancient people felt the nearest and most common things, for example the day and being awake. Because the ancients believed in dreams, waking life had different lights. And the same goes for the whole of life, with the reflection of death and its meaning: our "death" is an entirely different death. All experiences shone differently, for a god gleamed out of them. All decisions and views of the distant future did too, for people had oracles and secret signs and believed in prophecy. "Truth" was felt differently, for at one time a madman could pass as its mouthpiece, which makes us shudder or laugh. Every injustice affected feeling differently, for people feared divine retribution, and not only civil punishment and disgrace. What was joy in the time when one believed in devils and tempters! What was passion, when one saw demons lurking nearby! What was philosophy, when doubt was felt as a sin of the most dangerous kind, and indeed as an offense against eternal love, as mistrust of everything good, high, pure and merciful! We have newly colored things, and we keep painting on them. But what can we, for now, set against the splendor of colors of that old mistress? I mean the old humanity.

153 Homo poeta. — "I myself, who with the greatest care have made this tragedy of tragedies, as far as it is finished; I, who first knotted the knot of morality into existence and drew it so tight that only a god can loosen it (so Horace demands!), I have now in the fourth act killed all the gods, out of morality! What is to become of the fifth! Where shall I still get the tragic resolution from! Must I begin to think about a comic resolution?"

154 Different Dangers of Life. — You have no idea what you are living through. You stagger through life as if drunk and now and then tumble down a flight of stairs. But thanks to your drunkenness, you do not break your limbs in the process. Your muscles are too limp and your head too dim for you to find the stones of that staircase as hard as we others do! For us, life is a greater danger. We are made of glass. Woe to us if we bump into something! And everything is lost if we fall!

155 What We Lack. — We love great nature and have discovered it. This is because the great human beings are missing from our heads. The Greeks were the other way round. Their feeling for nature is different from ours.

156 The Most Influential. — When a person resists his whole age, holds it up at the gate and calls it to account, that must exert influence! Whether he wants to is beside the point. That he can is the matter.

157 Mentiri. — Pay attention! He ponders, and at once he has a lie ready. This is a stage of culture on which whole peoples have stood. Consider what the Romans expressed with mentiri!

158 An Uncomfortable Quality. — To find all things deep is an uncomfortable quality. It makes one constantly strain one's eyes, and in the end one always finds more than one wished for.

159 Every Virtue Has Its Time. — For someone who is unbending now, his honesty often brings a bad conscience. For unbendingness is the virtue of another age than honesty is.

160 In Dealings with Virtues. — One can also be undignified and fawning toward a virtue.

161 To the Lovers of the Times. — The runaway priest and the discharged convict keep making faces: what they want is a face without a past. But have you ever seen people who know that the future is reflected in their face, and who are so polite toward you, you lovers of "the times," that they make a face without a future?

162 Egoism. — Egoism is the perspectival law of feeling, by which what is nearest appears large and heavy, while everything diminishes in size and weight as it recedes into the distance.

163 After a Great Victory. — The best thing about a great victory is that it takes away the victor's fear of defeat. "Why not lose once? he says to himself. I am rich enough now to afford it."

164 Those Who Seek Rest. — I recognize spirits that seek rest by the many dark objects they set up around them. Whoever wants to sleep makes his room dark or crawls into a cave. A hint for those who do not know what they really seek most, and would like to know!

165 The Happiness of Those Who Deny Themselves. — Whoever denies himself something thoroughly and for a long time will, when he happens to meet it again, almost believe that he has discovered it. And what happiness every discoverer has! Let us be wiser than the snakes, which lie too long in the same sun.

166 Always in Our Own Company. — Everything of my kind, in nature and in history, speaks to me, praises me, drives me forward, comforts me. The rest I do not hear, or I forget it at once. We are always only in our own company.

167 Misanthropy and Love. — One speaks of being sick of people only when one can no longer digest them and yet still has one's stomach full of them. Misanthropy is the consequence of a love of humanity that is too greedy, a "man-eating." But who asked you, my Prince Hamlet, to swallow people like oysters?

168 Of a Sick Man. — "Things are going badly for him!" What is lacking? "He suffers from the desire to be praised, and finds no food for it." Incomprehensible! The whole world celebrates him, and people carry him not only on their hands but on their lips! "Yes, but he has a poor ear for praise. If a friend praises him, it sounds to him as if the friend were praising himself. If an enemy praises him, it sounds to him as if the enemy wanted to be praised for it. If at last one of the rest praises him (there are not so many of the rest left, he is so famous!), it insults him that they do not want him as either friend or enemy. He is in the habit of saying: 'What do I care for someone who can even play the just man against me!'"

169 Open Enemies. — Courage in the face of the enemy is a thing of its own. With it one can still be a coward and an irresolute muddlehead. Napoleon judged this way about the "bravest man" he knew, Murat. From this it follows that open enemies are indispensable for some people, if they are to rise to their virtue, their manliness and their cheerfulness.

170 With the Crowd. — Until now he has run with the crowd and been its praiser. But one day he will be its opponent! For he follows it believing that his laziness will be served by this. He has not yet learned that the crowd is not lazy enough for him! That it always presses forward! That it lets no one stand still! And he likes so much to stand still!

171 Fame. — When the gratitude of many toward one throws off all shame, fame comes into being.

172 The Spoiler of Taste. — A: "You are a spoiler of taste, so everyone says!" B: "Certainly! I spoil every party's taste for itself. No party forgives me for that."

173 Deep Being and Deep Seeming. — Whoever knows himself to be deep strives for clarity. Whoever wants to seem deep to the crowd strives for darkness. For the crowd considers everything deep whose bottom it cannot see. It is so timid, and goes into the water so unwillingly.

174 Off to the Side. — Parliamentarism, that is, the public permission to choose between five basic political opinions, flatters those many people who like to seem independent and individual and who would like to fight for their opinions. In the end, however, it makes no difference whether the herd has been ordered one opinion or allowed five. Whoever departs from the five public opinions and steps aside always has the whole herd against him.

175 On Eloquence. — Who has possessed the most convincing eloquence until now? The drumroll. And as long as kings have command of this, they are still the best orators and rabble-rousers.

176 Compassion. — The poor ruling princes! All their rights are now unexpectedly turning into claims, and all these claims soon sound like presumption! And when they only say "we" or "my people," the old malicious Europe already smiles. Truly, a chief master of ceremonies of the modern world would make few ceremonies with them. Perhaps he would decree: "les souverains rangent aux parvenus."

177 On "Education." — In Germany the higher human being lacks a great means of education: the laughter of higher human beings. These do not laugh in Germany.

178 On Moral Enlightenment. — The Germans must be talked out of their Mephistopheles, and their Faust along with him. There are two moral prejudices against the value of knowledge.

179 Thoughts. — Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings, always darker, emptier and simpler than these.

180 The Good Time of Free Spirits. — Free spirits still take their freedoms even with regard to science, and for the time being people allow them these, as long as the church still stands! In this respect they now have their good time.

181 Following and Going Ahead. — A: "Of the two, one will always follow and the other always go ahead, wherever fate leads them. And yet the former stands above the latter, by his virtue and his spirit!" B: "And yet? And yet? That is said for the others; not for me, not for us! Fit secundum regulam."

182 In Solitude. — When one lives alone, one does not speak too loudly, nor does one write too loudly, for one fears the hollow echo, the criticism of the nymph Echo. And all voices sound different in solitude!

183 The Music of the Best Future. — The first musician for me would be the one who knew only the sadness of the deepest happiness, and no other sadness. No such musician has existed until now.

184 Justice. — Better to be robbed than to have scarecrows around one. That is my taste. And under all circumstances it is a matter of taste, and nothing more!

185 Poor. — He is poor today, but not because everything has been taken from him. He is poor because he has thrown everything away. What does that matter to him? He is used to finding things. It is the poor who misunderstand his voluntary poverty.

186 Bad Conscience. — Everything he now does is fine and orderly, and yet he has a bad conscience about it. For the extraordinary is his task.

187 What Offends in the Delivery. — This artist offends me by the way he presents his ideas, his very good ideas: so broadly and emphatically, with such coarse tricks of persuasion, as if he were speaking to the mob. After a time, the time we have given to his art, we always feel as if we were "in bad company."

188 Work. — How close labor and the laborer now stand even to the idlest of us! The royal courtesy in the words "we are all workers!" would still have been cynicism and indecency under Louis XIV.

189 The Thinker. — He is a thinker: that is, he knows how to take things more simply than they are.

190 Against Those Who Praise. — A: "One is praised only by one's equals!" B: "Yes! And whoever praises you says to you: you are my equal!"

191 Against Certain Defenses. — The most treacherous way of harming a cause is to defend it on purpose with faulty reasons.

192 The Good-Natured. — What distinguishes those good-natured people, from whose faces goodwill shines, from other people? They feel at ease in the presence of a new person and fall in love with them quickly. They wish them well for it, and their first judgment is "I like them." In them the following come one after another: the wish to appropriate (they have few scruples about the worth of the other), a quick appropriation, pleasure in possession, and acting for the benefit of the one possessed.

193 Kant's Joke. — Kant wanted to prove, in a way that shocked "all the world," that "all the world" was right. That was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in favor of popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people.

194 The "Open-Hearted" Man. — That person probably always acts on unspoken reasons. For he always has shareable reasons on his tongue, and almost in his open hand.

195 Laughable! — Look there! Look there! He runs away from people. But they follow him, because he runs ahead of them. So much are they a herd!

196 The Limit of Our Hearing. — One hears only the questions to which one is able to find an answer.

197 Therefore Caution! — Nothing do we share so gladly with others as the seal of secrecy, along with what lies beneath it.

198 The Annoyance of the Proud. — The proud man is annoyed even with those who push him forward. He looks angrily at the horses of his carriage.

199 Generosity. — Generosity among the rich is often only a kind of shyness.

200 Laughter. — Laughing means taking pleasure in another's misfortune, but with a good conscience.

201 In Applause. — There is always a kind of noise in applause, even in the applause we give ourselves.

202 A Spendthrift. — He does not yet have the poverty of the rich man who has already counted his whole treasure through once. He squanders his spirit with the unreason of the spendthrift Nature.

203 Hic niger est. — As a rule he has no thoughts at all, but for the exception bad thoughts come to him.

204 Beggars and Politeness. — "One is not impolite when one knocks on the door with a stone, since the bell-pull is missing." That is how beggars and the needy of every kind think. But no one agrees with them.

205 Need. — Need is regarded as the cause of an origin. In truth it is often only an effect of what has come into being.

206 In the Rain. — It is raining, and I think of the poor people who now crowd together with their many worries, and without the practice of hiding them. So each is ready and willing to hurt the other, and even in bad weather to make for himself a wretched kind of well-being. That, only that, is the poverty of the poor!

207 The Envious Man. — He is an envious fellow. One should not wish him children, for he would envy them, because he can no longer be a child himself.

208 Great Man! — From the fact that someone is "a great man," one may not yet conclude that he is a man. Perhaps he is only a boy, or a chameleon of every age of life, or a bewitched little woman.

209 One Way of Asking for Reasons. — There is a way of asking us for our reasons in which we not only forget our best reasons, but also feel a defiance and aversion to reasons in general awaken in us. It is a very dulling way of asking, and a real trick of tyrannical people!

210 Measure in Diligence. — One must not want to outdo one's father's diligence. That makes one sick.

211 Secret Enemies. — To be able to keep a secret enemy is a luxury for which even the morality of high-minded spirits is usually not rich enough.

212 Not Being Deceived. — His mind has bad manners. He is hasty and always stammers from impatience. So one hardly suspects in what long-winded and broad-chested soul he is at home.

213 The Way to Happiness. — A wise man asked a fool what the way to happiness was. The fool answered at once, like someone asked the way to the next town: "Admire yourself and live in the street!" "Stop!" cried the sage. "You ask too much. It is enough to admire yourself!" The fool replied: "But how can one admire constantly without despising constantly?"

214 Faith Makes Blessed. — Virtue gives happiness and a kind of blessedness only to those who have the good faith in their virtue, but not to the finer souls whose virtue consists in deep distrust of themselves and of all virtue. In the end, then, "faith makes blessed" here too! And note: not virtue!

215 Ideal and Material. — You have a noble ideal before your eyes. But are you such a noble stone that a statue of a god could be carved out of you? And without that, is all your labor not a barbarous sculpture? A blasphemy against your ideal?

216 Danger in the Voice. — With a very loud voice in the throat, one is almost unable to think delicate things.

217 Cause and Effect. — Before the effect, one believes in other causes than after the effect.

218 My Antipathy. — I do not like people who, in order to have any effect at all, have to burst like bombs, and near whom one is always in danger of suddenly losing one's hearing, or even more.

219 The Purpose of Punishment. — Punishment has the purpose of improving the one who punishes. That is the last refuge for the defenders of punishment.

220 Sacrifices. — About sacrifice and self-sacrifice the sacrificial animals think differently from the spectators. But they have never been allowed to speak.

221 Sparing. — Fathers and sons spare one another much more than mothers and daughters do.

222 Poet and Liar. — The poet sees in the liar his milk-brother, whose milk he has drunk up. So the other has remained wretched, and has not even managed to attain a good conscience.

223 The Vicariate of the Senses. — "One has eyes in order to hear too," said an old confessor who had gone deaf. "And among the blind, the king is whoever has the longest ears."

224 A Critique of Animals. — I fear that animals regard human beings as creatures of their own kind who have lost, in a most dangerous way, their healthy animal sense. As the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal.

225 The Natural Ones. — "Evil has always had the great effect on its side! And nature is evil! So let us be natural!" That is how the great hunters of effect in humanity secretly conclude, people who have all too often been counted among the great human beings.

226 The Distrustful and Style. — We say the strongest things plainly, provided that there are people around us who believe in our strength. Such surroundings educate toward "simplicity of style." The distrustful speak emphatically. The distrustful make things emphatic.

227 A Faulty Conclusion, a Faulty Shot. — He cannot control himself, and from this that woman concludes it will be easy to control him, and she casts her lines of capture out toward him. The poor woman, who will shortly be his slave.

228 Against Mediators. — Whoever wants to mediate between two resolute thinkers is marked as mediocre. He does not have the eye for seeing the unique. The mania for seeing likeness and for making everything equal is the mark of weak eyes.

229 Defiance and Loyalty. — He holds on to a cause out of defiance, a cause that has become transparent to him. But he calls it "loyalty."

230 Lack of Discretion. — His whole manner does not persuade. This comes from the fact that he has never kept silent about a good deed he has done.

231 The "Thorough." — The slow ones of knowledge think that slowness belongs to knowledge.

232 Dreaming. — One does not dream at all, or dreams in an interesting way. One must learn to be awake in the same way: not at all, or in an interesting way.

233 The Most Dangerous Point of View. — What I now do or leave undone is as important for everything to come as the greatest event of the past. In this immense perspective of effect, all actions are equally great and small.

234 A Musician's Words of Consolation. — "Your life does not ring in people's ears. For them you live a silent life, and all the delicacy of the melody, all the tender resolution in following or going ahead, remains hidden from them. It is true: you do not come down the broad street with regimental music. But these good people therefore have no right to say that your way of life lacks music. Whoever has ears, let him hear."

235 Mind and Character. — Some reach their peak as a character, but their mind is not in proportion to that height. And some the other way round.

236 To Move the Crowd. — Must not whoever wants to move the crowd be an actor of himself? Must he not first translate himself into the grotesquely clear, and present his whole person and cause in this coarsening and simplifying?

237 The Polite One. — "He is so polite!" Yes, he always carries a cake for Cerberus, and he is so timid that he takes everyone for Cerberus, even you and me. That is his "politeness."

238 Without Envy. — He is completely without envy, but there is no merit in it. For he wants to conquer a land that no one has yet possessed and hardly anyone has even seen.

239 The Joyless Man. — A single joyless person is enough to bring lasting ill humor and a gloomy sky to a whole household. And only by a miracle does it happen that this one is missing! Happiness is by no means so contagious a disease. Why is that?

240 By the Sea. — I would not build myself a house (and it is even part of my happiness not to be a homeowner!). But if I had to, I would build it, like many a Roman, right out into the sea. I would like to share a few secrets with this beautiful monster.

241 The Work and the Artist. — This artist is ambitious and nothing more. In the end his work is only a magnifying glass, which he offers to everyone who looks at him.

242 Suum cuique. — However great the greed of my knowledge is, I can take out of things nothing other than what already belongs to me. The property of others remains in the things. How is it possible for a person to be a thief or a robber!

243 The Origin of "Good" and "Bad." — Only someone who knows how to feel "This is not good" invents an improvement.

244 Thoughts and Words. — One cannot even render one's thoughts entirely in words.

245 Praise in the Choice. — The artist chooses his materials. That is his way of praising.

246 Mathematics. — We want to drive the subtlety and rigor of mathematics into all the sciences, as far as this is at all possible. Not in the belief that by this path we will come to know things, but in order to fix our human relation to things. Mathematics is only the means of the general and final knowledge of humanity.

247 Habit. — All habit makes our hand more witty and our wit more clumsy.

248 Books. — What is the point of a book that does not even carry us above all books?

249 The Sigh of the Knower. — "Oh, my greed! No selflessness lives in this soul. Rather, there is an all-desiring self, which would like to see through many individuals as through its eyes, and grasp as with its hands. A self that would even drag the whole past back, a self that wants to lose nothing that could possibly belong to it! Oh, this flame of my greed! Oh, that I might be reborn in a hundred beings!" Whoever does not know this sigh from experience does not know the passion of the knower either.

250 Guilt. — Although the most acute judges of witches, and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchcraft, the guilt was nevertheless not there. So it is with all guilt.

251 Misunderstood Sufferers. — Magnificent natures suffer differently from what their admirers imagine. They suffer most from the ignoble, petty surges of some evil moments, in short, from their doubt about their own magnificence. Not from the sacrifices and martyrdoms their task demands of them. As long as Prometheus has pity on human beings and sacrifices himself for them, he is happy and great within himself. But when he becomes envious of Zeus, and of the homage that mortals pay to him, then he suffers!

252 Better to Remain Guilty. — "Better to remain in debt than to pay with a coin that does not bear our image!" That is what our sovereignty demands.

253 Always at Home. — One day we reach our goal, and then we point with pride to what long journeys we made to get there. In truth we did not notice that we were traveling. But we came so far that at every stop we imagined we were at home.

254 Against Embarrassment. — Whoever is always deeply occupied is beyond all embarrassment.

255 Imitators. — A: "What? You do not want imitators?" B: "I do not want people to imitate something of mine. I want everyone to pretend to himself: to do the same thing I do." A: "So —?"

256 Surface-ness. — All people of depth find their happiness in becoming, for once, like flying fish, and playing on the outermost crests of the waves. They value the best thing about things to be that they have a surface: their surface-ness, sit venia verbo.

257 From Experience. — Some people do not know how rich they are until they learn what rich people still turn into thieves because of them.

258 Deniers of Chance. — No victor believes in chance.

259 From Paradise. — "Good and evil are God's prejudices," said the serpent.

260 Multiplication Table. — One is always wrong. But with two the truth begins. One cannot prove oneself. But two can no longer be refuted.

261 Originality. — What is originality? To see something that has no name yet, that cannot yet be named, though it lies before everyone's eyes. For ordinary people, it is only the name that first makes a thing visible at all. The original ones have mostly also been the namegivers.

262 Sub specie aeterni. — A: "You are moving away from the living ever faster. Soon they will strike you from their lists!" B: "It is the only way to share in the privilege of the dead." A: "Which privilege?" B: "Not to die anymore."

263 Without Vanity. — When we love, we want our flaws to stay hidden, not out of vanity, but because the beloved being should not suffer. Indeed, the lover would like to seem a god, and not out of vanity either.

264 What We Do. — What we do is never understood. It is only ever praised or blamed.

265 The Last Skepticism. — What, after all, are the truths of humanity? They are the irrefutable errors of humanity.

266 Where Cruelty Is Necessary. — Whoever has greatness is cruel toward his virtues and his second-rank considerations.

267 With a Great Goal. — With a great goal one is even superior to justice, not only to one's deeds and one's judges.

268 What Makes One Heroic? — To go at the same time toward one's highest suffering and one's highest hope.

269 What Do You Believe In? — In this: that the weights of all things must be determined anew.

270 What Does Your Conscience Say? — "You shall become the one you are."

271 Where Are Your Greatest Dangers? — In pity.

272 What Do You Love in Others? — My hopes.

273 Whom Do You Call Bad? — Whoever always wants to shame.

274 What Is Most Human to You? — Sparing someone shame.

275 What Is the Seal of Freedom Attained? — No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.

108 New Struggles. — For centuries after Buddha died, people still pointed to his shadow in a cave, a huge and frightening shadow. God is dead. But the way people are, there may be caves for thousands of years yet in which his shadow is shown. And we, we must still defeat his shadow too!

109 Let Us Be Careful! — Let us be careful not to think that the world is a living being. Where would it spread to? What would it feed on? How could it grow and multiply? We have a rough idea of what the organic is. Should we take the extremely derived, late, rare and accidental things we see only on the surface of the earth, and make them into the essential, general and eternal, as those do who call the whole universe an organism? That disgusts me. Let us also be careful about believing that the universe is a machine. It is certainly not built for one goal. Calling it a "machine" honors it far too much. Let us be careful about assuming that something as full of form as the circular motions of our neighboring stars happens everywhere and always. Even a glance at the Milky Way raises doubts about whether there are not much rougher and more contradictory motions there, stars with endless straight-line paths and the like. The star order we live in is an exception. This order, and the fairly long life it makes possible, in turn made possible the exception of exceptions: the formation of living things. The overall character of the world, on the other hand, is chaos for all eternity. I do not mean chaos in the sense of a lack of necessity, but a lack of order, structure, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever else our human words for these things are. Judged by our reason, the failed throws are by far the rule, and the exceptions are not some secret goal. The whole game keeps repeating its one manner forever, a manner that must never be called a melody. Finally, even the phrase "failed throw" is already a human way of seeing things, and it carries a reproach. But how could we blame or praise the whole! Let us be careful about saying that it has heartlessness or unreason, or their opposites. It is not perfect, beautiful or noble, and it does not want to become any of these. It does not strive at all to imitate human beings! None of our aesthetic or moral judgments touches it! It also has no instinct for self-preservation, and no drives at all. It knows no laws either. Let us be careful about saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities. There is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who breaks the rule. If you know there are no purposes, then you also know there is no chance, because the word "chance" only means something beside a world of purposes. Let us be careful about saying that death is the opposite of life. What is alive is only a kind of what is dead, and a very rare kind. Let us be careful about thinking that the world creates something new forever. There are no substances that last forever. Matter is just as much a mistake as the god of the Eleatics. But when will we finally be finished with our caution and our protection? When will all these shadows of God stop darkening us? When will we have fully stripped nature of its divinity? When will we be allowed to begin to make ourselves natural again, with the pure, newly found, newly redeemed nature!

110 Where Knowledge Came From. — For immense stretches of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. Some of these turned out to be useful and to help the species survive. Whoever stumbled on them, or inherited them, fought his battle for himself and his children with better luck. Mistaken beliefs of this kind, passed down ever further until they became almost the basic stock of the human species, are for example these: that there are lasting things, that there are equal things, that there are things, substances and bodies, that a thing is what it looks like, that our willing is free, that what is good for me is also good in itself. Very late did people appear who denied or doubted such claims. Very late did truth appear, as the weakest form of knowledge. It seemed that people could not live with it, because our bodies were built for its opposite. All their higher functions, the perceptions of the senses and every kind of feeling, worked with those ancient, built-in basic errors. More than that, those claims became the very standards within knowledge for measuring "true" and "untrue," right into the most remote areas of pure logic. So the strength of knowledge lies not in how true it is, but in its age, how deeply it is built in, and its character as a condition of life. Where life and knowing seemed to come into conflict, there was never any serious fight. Denial and doubt were then taken for madness. Those exceptional thinkers, like the Eleatics, who nevertheless set up and held on to the opposites of the natural errors, believed it possible to live this opposite too. They invented the sage, a person of unchangeability, impersonality, and a universal view, as one and all at once, with a special ability for that reversed knowledge. They believed their knowledge was at the same time the principle of life. But to be able to claim all this, they had to fool themselves about their own condition. They had to credit themselves with impersonality and lasting without change, misjudge the nature of the knower, deny the force of drives within knowing, and in general understand reason as a completely free activity that arose out of itself. They closed their eyes to the fact that they too had reached their claims by contradicting what was accepted, or from a wish for rest, for sole possession, or for power. The finer growth of honesty and skepticism finally made these people impossible too. Their lives and judgments also turned out to depend on the ancient drives and basic errors of all feeling existence. That finer honesty and skepticism began wherever two opposite claims seemed usable for life, because both fit with the basic errors. There people could argue about how much or how little they were useful to life. It also began where new claims showed themselves to be not useful to life, but at least not harmful: as expressions of a play drive of the intellect, innocent and happy like all play. Gradually the human brain filled up with such judgments and convictions, and in this tangle there arose fermentation, struggle and a hunger for power. Not only usefulness and pleasure, but every kind of drive took sides in the struggle over "truths." The intellectual struggle became an occupation, a stimulus, a calling, a duty, a point of honor. Knowing and the striving for truth finally fit themselves in among the other needs as one more need. From then on, not only belief and conviction, but also testing, denial, distrust and contradiction were a power. All the "evil" instincts were put under knowledge and placed in its service, and they received the shine of the allowed, the respected, the useful, and finally the eye and innocence of the good. So knowledge became a piece of life itself, and as life it became a power that kept growing, until at last knowledge and those ancient basic errors collided, both as life, both as power, both in the same person. The thinker:

That is now the being in whom the drive to truth and those life-preserving errors fight their first battle, now that the drive to truth too has proved itself a life-preserving power. Compared with the importance of this struggle, everything else is unimportant. The last question about the conditions of life is asked here, and the first attempt is made to answer it by experiment. How far can truth take being built into us? That is the question, and that is the experiment.

111 Where Logic Came From. — Where did logic in the human head come from? Surely from the illogical, whose domain must have been enormous at the start. But countless beings that drew conclusions differently from the way we do now died out. It could still have been truer! For example, anyone who did not find the "same" often enough, with regard to food or the animals that threatened him, and who therefore grouped things too slowly and was too careful about grouping, had a smaller chance of surviving than the one who guessed sameness at once in anything similar. But the strong tendency to treat the similar as the same, an illogical tendency, since in itself nothing is the same, first created the whole basis of logic. In the same way, for the concept of substance to arise, which logic cannot do without, though nothing real strictly corresponds to it, the changing in things must for a long time not have been seen or felt. Beings that did not see precisely had an advantage over those that saw everything "in flux." In itself, any high degree of caution in drawing conclusions, any skeptical tendency, is already a great danger to life. No living beings would have survived if the opposite tendency, to affirm rather than hold back judgment, to err and invent rather than wait, to agree rather than deny, to judge rather than be fair, had not been bred to an extraordinary degree. The course of logical thoughts and conclusions in our brains today matches a process and a struggle of drives, each of which is in itself very illogical and unjust. We usually experience only the result of the struggle. This ancient mechanism runs in us so quickly and so hidden.

112 Cause and Effect. — We call it "explanation." But what sets us apart from earlier stages of knowledge and science is "description." We describe better. We explain no better than all earlier people did. We have uncovered a long series of events where the naive person and the researcher of older cultures saw only two things, "cause" and "effect," as the saying went. We have improved the picture of becoming, but we have not gone beyond the picture, or behind it. In every case the series of "causes" stands much more completely before us. We conclude: this and that must happen first, so that the other follows. But with that we have understood nothing. Quality, for example in every chemical change, still appears as a "miracle," and so does every movement. No one has "explained" the impact. How could we explain anything? We work with nothing but things that do not exist: lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible times, divisible spaces. How can explanation even be possible when we first turn everything into a picture, our picture? It is enough to regard science as the most faithful possible humanizing of things. We keep learning to describe ourselves more and more exactly as we describe things and their sequence. Cause and effect: such a pair probably never exists. In truth a continuum stands before us, from which we isolate a few pieces. In the same way we only ever perceive a movement as separate points, so we do not really see it, we infer it. The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us. But it is sudden only for us. In that second of suddenness there is an endless number of processes that escape us. An intellect that saw cause and effect as a continuum, not as we do, as an arbitrary splitting-up and chopping-up, that saw the flow of what happens, would throw out the concept of cause and effect and deny all conditionality.

113 On the Doctrine of Poisons. — So much has to come together for scientific thinking to arise. All these necessary powers had to be invented, practiced and cultivated one at a time! On their own, however, they very often had an effect quite different from the one they have now, when within scientific thinking they limit and discipline one another. They worked like poisons. Take the doubting drive, the denying drive, the waiting drive, the collecting drive, the breaking-down drive. Many hecatombs of people were sacrificed before these drives learned to understand their living side by side, and to feel themselves as functions of one organizing power within a single person! And how far we still are from artistic powers and practical life wisdom joining scientific thinking, from a higher organic system forming, in relation to which the scholar, the doctor, the artist and the lawgiver, as we know them now, would have to look like poor antiques!

114 The Reach of the Moral. — When we build a new picture of what we see, we do it at once with the help of all the old experiences we have had, in proportion to our degree of honesty and justice. There are no experiences at all except moral ones, not even in the area of sense perception.

115 The Four Errors. — People have been educated by their errors. First, they always saw themselves only incompletely. Second, they gave themselves made-up qualities. Third, they felt they had a false rank compared with animals and nature. Fourth, they kept inventing new lists of goods and, for a time, took them as eternal and unconditional, so that now this human drive or condition and now that one stood at the top, and as a result of this valuation it became refined. If you subtract the effect of these four errors, you have also subtracted humanity, human kindness and "human dignity."

116 The Herd Instinct. — Wherever we find a morality, we find an assessment and a ranking of human drives and actions. These assessments and rankings always express the needs of a community and a herd. What first benefits the herd, and then second and third, is also the highest measure for the value of every individual. Through morality the individual is taught to be a function of the herd, and to credit himself with value only as a function. Since the conditions for keeping one community alive have been very different from those for keeping another alive, there have been very different moralities. And with regard to the major changes that herds, communities, states and societies still face, one can predict that there will still be very different moralities. Morality is the herd instinct in the individual.

117 The Herd's Bad Conscience. — In the longest and most distant times of humanity there was a quite different bad conscience from the one we have today. Today we feel responsible only for what we want and do, and we take our pride in ourselves. All our legal teachers start from this feeling of self and pleasure in the individual, as if the source of right had always flowed from here. But for most of human history nothing was more dreadful than feeling alone. Being alone, feeling as an individual, neither obeying nor ruling, meaning something as a single person: that was then not a pleasure but a punishment. People were sentenced "to be an individual." Freedom of thought counted as discomfort itself. While we experience rules and fitting in as constraint and loss, people in earlier times experienced selfishness as a painful thing, a real distress. To be oneself, to measure and weigh oneself by one's own standard: that went against taste back then. Anyone inclined to it would have been seen as mad, because every misery and every fear was linked to being alone. Then "free will" had the bad conscience as its closest neighbor. The less freely a person acted, and the more the herd instinct rather than his personal sense spoke through the action, the more moral he considered himself. Everything that harmed the herd, whether or not the individual had wanted it, then gave the individual a bad conscience, and his neighbor too, and even the whole herd! It is in this that we have most of all unlearned.

118 Goodwill. — Is it virtuous when one cell turns itself into the function of a stronger cell? It has to. And is it wicked when the stronger one absorbs the other? It has to do that too. It is necessary for it, since it strives for an excess of replacement and wants to renew itself. So in goodwill we must distinguish between the drive to take possession and the drive to submit, depending on whether the stronger or the weaker person feels goodwill. In the stronger one, who wants to shape something into his function, joy and desire come together. In the weaker one, who wants to become a function, joy and the wish to be wanted come together. Pity is mainly the first: a pleasant stirring of the drive to take possession, at the sight of the weaker one. In this we must also remember that "strong" and "weak" are relative terms.

119 No Altruism! — In many people I see a surplus of strength and a joy in wanting to be a function. They push toward it and have the keenest sense for all the places where exactly they can be useful. Among them are those women who turn themselves into a function of a man, in the area where he is weakly developed, and in this way become his purse, or his politics, or his social life. Such beings preserve themselves best when they fit into someone else's body. If they do not succeed, they become annoyed, irritated, and they eat themselves up.

120 Health of the Soul. — The popular medical formula for morality, which comes from Ariston of Chios, "virtue is the health of the soul," would at least have to be changed to be useful: "your virtue is the health of your soul." There is no health in general, and every attempt to define something that way has failed miserably. To decide what health means, even for your body, you need to know your goal, your horizon, your strengths, your impulses, your mistakes, and above all the ideals and phantasms of your soul. So there are countless healths of the body. And the more we let the single and unique person raise its head again, the more we unlearn the dogma of the "equality of people," the more our doctors must lose the idea of a normal health, along with a normal diet and a normal course of illness. Only then would it be the right time to think about the health and sickness of the soul, and to put each person's own particular virtue into its health. That health might look, in one person, like the opposite of health in another. Finally, the big question would remain open: could we do without sickness, even for developing our virtue? And does our thirst for knowledge, and for knowing ourselves, not need the sick soul just as much as the healthy one? In short, is the sole will to health not a prejudice, a cowardice, and perhaps a piece of the most refined barbarism and backwardness?

121 Life Is Not an Argument. — We have made ourselves a world we can live in, by accepting bodies, lines, surfaces, causes and effects, movement and rest, shape and content. Without these articles of faith, no one could bear to live now! But that does not make them proven. Life is not an argument. Under the conditions of life, error might be exactly what it needs.

122 Moral Doubt in Christianity. — Christianity also made a major contribution to enlightenment. It taught moral doubt in a very forceful and effective way: accusingly, bitterly, but with tireless patience and subtlety. It destroyed in each person the belief in his own "virtues." It made the great virtuous figures disappear from the earth for good, and antiquity had plenty of them. These were the popular people who walked around, believing in their own perfection, with the dignity of a hero of the bullfight. When we now read the moral books of the ancients, Seneca's and Epictetus's for example, we have been educated in this Christian school of doubt. We feel an amusing superiority, and we are full of secret insights and overviews. It feels as if a child were talking to an old man, or a young, lovely enthusiast were talking to La Rochefoucauld. We understand what virtue is better! But in the end we have used this same doubt on all religious states and events too, such as sin, repentance, grace and holiness. We have let the worm dig so thoroughly that now we have the same feeling of subtle superiority and insight when we read every Christian book. We understand religious feelings better too!

And it is time to understand them well and describe them well, because the devout of the old faith are dying out as well. At least let us save their image and their type for knowledge!

123 Knowledge Is More Than a Means. — Even without this new passion, I mean the passion for knowledge, science would still be promoted. It has grown and become great without it up to now. The good faith in science, the favorable prejudice that now rules our states (in earlier times it was even the church), rests at bottom on the fact that this unconditional urge has shown itself so rarely in science, and that science is treated as a state and an "ethos," not as a passion. Indeed, the pleasure of curiosity is often enough. A habit of it is enough, with the hidden aim of honor and bread. For many people it is enough that they have a surplus of free time and do not know what to do with it except read, collect, sort, observe and then retell. Their "scientific drive" is their boredom. Pope Leo X once sang the praises of science, in a brief to Beroaldus. He called it the finest decoration and the greatest pride of our life, a noble occupation in happiness and in unhappiness. "Without it," he finally says, "all human undertakings would have no firm footing. Even with it, they are changeable and uncertain enough!" But this moderately skeptical pope, like all the other church speakers who praise science, keeps quiet about his final judgment of it. From his words you can pick out something remarkable for such a friend of the arts: he puts science above art. But in the end it is only politeness when he does not speak here of what he also places far above all science: "revealed truth" and "the eternal salvation of the soul." Compared with these, what are decoration, pride, amusement and keeping life secure? "Science is something of second rank, not something final or unconditional, not an object of passion." This judgment stayed in Leo's soul: it is the properly Christian judgment of science! In antiquity its dignity and recognition were reduced, because even among its most eager students the pursuit of virtue came first. People thought they had given knowledge its highest praise when they celebrated it as the best means to virtue. It is something new in history that knowledge wants to be more than a means.

124 On the Horizon of the Infinite. — We have left the land and gone out to sea! We have the bridge behind us, or more than that, we have broken off the land behind us! Now, little ship, be careful! The ocean lies beside you. It is true that it does not always roar, and sometimes it lies there like silk and gold and the daydream of kindness. But there will be hours when you realize that it is infinite, and that nothing is more frightening than infinity. Oh, poor bird, that felt free and now bangs against the walls of this cage! Woe to you when homesickness for land comes over you, as if there had been more freedom there. And there is no "land" anymore!

125 The Madman. — Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning, ran to the marketplace, and kept shouting, "I seek God! I seek God!" Since many of those who did not believe in God were standing around there together, he caused a great deal of laughter. "Has he gotten lost?" said one. "Has he wandered off like a child?" said another. "Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone to sea? Emigrated?" So they shouted and laughed all at once. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Where has God gone?" he cried. "I will tell you! We have killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers! But how did we do it? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving now? Where are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not falling all the time? Backward, sideways, forward, in every direction? Is there still an up and a down? Are we not wandering as if through an endless nothing? Does empty space not breathe on us? Has it not grown colder? Is night not coming on, more and more night?

Do lanterns not have to be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decay? Gods decay too! God is dead! God stays dead! And we have killed him! How shall we comfort ourselves, we murderers of all murderers? The holiest and most powerful thing the world has ever owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water could we use to clean ourselves? What atonement festivals and sacred games will we have to invent? Is the greatness of this deed not too great for us? Must we not become gods ourselves, just to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed, and whoever is born after us, because of this deed, belongs to a higher history than all history has been until now!" Here the madman fell silent and looked at his listeners again. They were silent too, and looked at him in surprise. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, so that it broke into pieces and went out. "I am too early," he said then. "I am not yet the right time. This huge event is still on its way and wandering. It has not yet reached human ears. Lightning and thunder need time. The light of the stars needs time. Deeds need time, even after they have been done, before they are seen and heard. This deed is still farther from them than the farthest stars, and yet they have done it themselves!" It is also said that on the same day the madman went into several churches and sang his Requiem aeternam deo there. When he was taken outside and questioned, he always gave only this answer: "What are these churches still, if they are not the tombs and graves of God?"

126 Mystical Explanations. — Mystical explanations are thought to be deep. The truth is that they are not even shallow.

127 The Lasting Effect of the Oldest Religion. — Every thoughtless person thinks that the will is the only thing that acts. Willing seems to him something simple, simply given, not derived from anything, obviously understood. He is convinced that when he does something, for example strikes a blow, he is the one who strikes, and he struck because he wanted to. He sees no problem in this at all. For him the feeling of the will is enough, not only to accept cause and effect, but also to believe that he understands how they are related. He knows nothing about the mechanism of what happens, or about the hundreds of fine steps that have to be taken before the blow can land. Nor does he know that the will by itself cannot do even the smallest part of that work. For him the will is a magically working force. Belief in the will as the cause of effects is belief in magical forces. Originally, people believed that wherever they saw something happen, a will was the cause, and that personal, willing beings were working behind it. The idea of mechanics was far from them. But because human beings believed for enormous stretches of time only in persons, and not in materials, forces, things and so on, belief in cause and effect became their basic belief. They use it wherever something happens, and they still do so now, by instinct, as a piece of the oldest atavism. The statements "no effect without a cause" and "every effect in turn a cause" look like generalizations of much narrower statements: "where something has an effect, something has been willed," "only willing beings can be affected," "there is never a pure, consequence-free suffering of an effect; all suffering is an arousal of the will (to act, to defend, to take revenge, to pay back)." But in humanity's earliest times, these statements and those were the same. The first were not generalizations of the second. The second were explanations of the first. Schopenhauer, by assuming that everything that exists is only something that wills, lifted an ancient mythology onto the throne. He never seems to have tried to analyze the will, because he believed, like everyone else, in the simplicity and immediacy of all willing. Yet willing is only a mechanism so well rehearsed that it almost escapes the observing eye. Against him I set these statements. First, for a will to arise, a representation of pleasure and displeasure is needed. Second, that a strong stimulus is felt as pleasure or displeasure is the work of the interpreting intellect, which for the most part works unconsciously for us. And one and the same stimulus can be interpreted as pleasure or as displeasure. Third, only among thinking beings are there pleasure, displeasure and will. The vast majority of organisms have none of these.

128 The Value of Prayer. — Prayer was invented for people who, in fact, never have thoughts of their own, and for whom an uplifting of the soul is unknown or passes unnoticed. What should such people do in holy places and in all the important moments of life that call for calm and some dignity? So that they at least do not disturb anyone, the wisdom of all founders of religions, the small ones and the great, has commanded them a prayer formula: a long, mechanical work of the lips, combined with an effort of memory and with a fixed posture of hands, feet and eyes! So let them chew over their "om mane padme hum" countless times, like the Tibetans. Or, as in Benares, let them count off the name of the god Ram-Ram-Ram on their fingers (and so on, with or without grace). Or let them honor Vishnu with his thousand names, or Allah with his ninety-nine names. Or let them use prayer wheels and rosaries. The main thing is that for a while they are kept busy with this work and make a tolerable sight. Their kind of prayer was invented for the benefit of the devout, who have thoughts and elevations of their own. Even these people have their tired hours, when a row of venerable words and sounds and a pious routine does them good. But suppose these rare people (in every religion the religious person is an exception) know how to help themselves. The poor in spirit do not know how to help themselves, and forbidding them the clatter of prayer means taking their religion away from them, as Protestantism more and more makes clear. Religion does not want more from such people than that they keep still, with their eyes, hands, legs and every other organ. In this way they are made temporarily more beautiful, and more human!

129 The Conditions of God. — "God himself cannot exist without wise people," said Luther, and with good reason. But "God can exist even less without unwise people" is something the good Luther did not say!

130 A Dangerous Decision. — The Christian decision to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

131 Christianity and Suicide. — When it began, Christianity turned the enormous longing for suicide into a lever of its power. It left only two forms of suicide, clothed them in the highest dignity and the highest hopes, and forbade all other forms in a terrible way. But martyrdom, and the slow self-destruction of the ascetic, were permitted.

132 Against Christianity. — Now our taste decides against Christianity, no longer our reasons.

133 Principle. — An unavoidable hypothesis, to which humanity must keep returning, is in the long run more powerful than even the most firmly held belief in something untrue (such as the Christian faith). "In the long run" here means a hundred thousand years.

134 The Pessimists as Victims. — Where a deep displeasure with existence gets out of hand, the aftereffects of a great dietary mistake come to light, one that a people has long been guilty of. The spread of Buddhism (not its origin) depends in large part on the Indians' excessive and almost exclusive diet of rice, and on the general weakness that follows from it. Perhaps the European dissatisfaction of modern times should be seen in the same light. Our forebears, the whole Middle Ages, were devoted to drinking, thanks to the influence of Germanic tastes on Europe. The Middle Ages, in other words, were Europe's alcohol poisoning. German displeasure with life is basically a winter sickness, not counting the effects of cellar air and stove fumes in German living rooms.

135 Where Sin Came From. — Sin, as it is now felt everywhere Christianity rules or once ruled, is a Jewish feeling and a Jewish invention. Against that background of all Christian morality, Christianity really set out to "Judaize" the whole world. You can feel most sharply how far it succeeded in Europe by how foreign the ancient Greek world still feels to us. That world had no feelings of sin. Despite all our good will to get closer to it and absorb it, which whole generations and many outstanding individuals did not lack, it still feels strange. "Only if you repent will God be merciful to you." To a Greek this would be ridiculous and offensive. He would say, "That is how slaves might feel." Here a powerful being is assumed, an overpowerful one, yet one who is eager for revenge. His power is so great that no harm can be done to him at all, except in his honor. Every sin is an insult to respect, a crimen laesae majestatis divinae, and nothing more! Contrition, humiliation, rolling in the dust: these are the first and last conditions his mercy depends on. That means restoring his divine honor! Whether sin also does damage to anything else, whether a deep, growing disaster is planted by it, one that takes hold of one person after another like a disease and strangles them: this honor-hungry Oriental in heaven does not care. Sin is a wrong done to him, not to humanity! To whomever he has given his grace, he also gives this indifference to the natural results of sin. God and humanity are thought of here as so separate and opposed that, at bottom, no sin against humanity can even be committed. Every deed is to be looked at only for its supernatural consequences, not its natural ones. That is what the Jewish feeling wants, for which everything natural is unworthy in itself. The Greeks, by contrast, found it more natural to think that even a crime could have dignity: even theft, as in Prometheus, even the slaughter of cattle as an expression of crazed envy, as in Ajax. In their need to invent dignity for a crime and to take it in, they invented tragedy. That is an art and a pleasure which, despite all his poetic gift and his taste for the sublime, has remained at the deepest level foreign to the Jew.

136 The Chosen People. — The Jews feel that they are the chosen people among the peoples. They feel this because they are the moral genius among the peoples, thanks to their ability to have despised humanity within themselves more deeply than any other people. About their divine king and holy one, the Jews feel something like what the French nobility felt about Louis XIV. That nobility had let all its power and self-rule be taken away and had become contemptible. To avoid feeling this, to be able to forget it, they needed royal splendor, royal authority and a plenitude of power without equal, to which only the nobility had access. By this privilege they raised themselves to the height of the court, and from there they looked down on everything beneath them and saw it as contemptible. In this way they rose above all sensitivity of conscience. So they deliberately built the tower of royal power higher and higher into the clouds, and set the last building blocks of their own power on top of it.

137 A Story Told in Parable. — A Jesus Christ was possible only in a Jewish landscape, one over which the dark and sublime storm cloud of the angry Jehovah always hung. Only there was the rare, sudden shining through of a single ray of sun across the dreadful, general, endless day and night felt as a miracle of "love," as a ray of the most undeserved "grace." Only there could Christ dream his rainbow and his ladder, on which God came down to human beings. Everywhere else, sunny weather counted too much as the rule and as everyday fact.

138 Christ's Mistake. — The founder of Christianity believed that people suffered from nothing so much as their sins. That was his mistake, the mistake of someone who felt himself without sin, and who lacked experience in this matter! So his soul filled with that wonderful, fantastic compassion, meant for a distress which, even among his own people, the inventors of sin, was seldom a great distress. But Christians have known how to make things right for their master afterward, and to hold up his mistake as "truth."

139 The Color of the Passions. — Natures like that of the apostle Paul have an evil eye for the passions. From the passions they learn only what is dirty, disfiguring and heartbreaking. So their ideal goal is to destroy the passions, and they see their complete purity in the divine. The Greeks were quite different from Paul and the Jews. They aimed their ideals precisely at the passions. They loved them, raised them up, gilded them and made them divine. Clearly they felt not only happier in passion, but also purer and more divine than at other times. And the Christians? Did they want to become Jews in this? Perhaps they have become Jews.

140 Too Jewish. — If God wanted to become an object of love, he would first have had to give up judging and justice. A judge, even a merciful judge, is not an object of love. The founder of Christianity did not feel this subtly enough, because he was a Jew.

141 Too Oriental. — What? A God who loves people, on the condition that they believe in him, and who hurls terrible looks and threats at anyone who does not believe in this love! What? A love with conditions attached, as the feeling of an almighty God! A love that has not even mastered the feeling of honor and of provoked vengefulness! How Oriental it all is! "If I love you, what is it to you?" is already enough criticism of all of Christianity.

142 Incense. — Buddha says, "Do not flatter your benefactor!" Repeat this saying in a Christian church, and it immediately clears the air of everything Christian.

143 The Greatest Benefit of Polytheism. — Until now it was considered one of the most monstrous human mistakes, and idolatry itself, for an individual to set up his own ideal and to derive from it his own law, his own joys and his own rights. In fact, the few who dared to do it always needed an excuse in front of themselves, and it usually went like this: "Not I! Not I! It is a god, working through me!" The wonderful art and power of creating gods, which is polytheism, was the place where this drive could be let out, where it could purify itself, improve itself and become noble. Originally it was a common, unattractive drive, related to stubbornness, disobedience and envy. Being hostile to this drive toward one's own ideal was once the law of all morality. There was only one standard: "man." And each people believed it had this one and final standard. But above and outside themselves, in a distant other world, people could see many standards. One god was not the denial or blasphemy of another god! Here people first allowed individuals, here they first honored the rights of individuals. The invention of gods, heroes and superhumans of every kind, as well as lesser beings and lower beings such as dwarfs, fairies, centaurs, satyrs, demons and devils, was the priceless preparation for justifying the selfishness and self-rule of the individual. The freedom people granted to their god against the other gods, they finally granted to themselves against laws, customs and neighbors. Monotheism, on the other hand, is the rigid consequence of teaching one normal human being, which means believing in one normal god, beside whom there are only false, lying gods. This was perhaps the greatest danger humanity has faced. It threatened a premature standstill, which most other animal species, as far as we can see, reached long ago. All of them believe in one normal animal, one ideal of their kind, and the morality of custom has finally been translated into flesh and blood. Polytheism already contained the freethinking and many-mindedness of human beings. It had the power to create new and individual eyes, and again new and even more individual ones. So for humans alone, of all animals, there are no eternal horizons and perspectives.

144 Wars of Religion. — The greatest progress the masses have made so far is the war of religion, because it proves that the masses have begun to treat ideas with reverence. Wars of religion arise only when the finer disputes between sects have refined general reason, so that even the common people become subtle and take trifles seriously. They even think it possible that the "eternal salvation of the soul" depends on small differences in ideas.

145 The Danger of Vegetarians. — A huge consumption of rice leads to the use of opium and narcotic things, just as a huge consumption of potatoes leads to brandy. But in a finer aftereffect, it also leads to ways of thinking and feeling that act like narcotics. This fits with the fact that the promoters of narcotic ways of thinking and feeling, like those Indian teachers, want to praise a purely vegetable diet and make it the law for the masses. In this way they want to create and increase the need that they are able to satisfy.

146 German Hopes. — Let us not forget that the names of peoples are usually insults. The Tatars, for example, are "the dogs" by name. The Chinese gave them that name. The "Germans": this originally meant "the heathens." After their conversion, the Goths called the great mass of their unbaptized kinsmen by this name. They did this following their translation of the Septuagint, in which the heathens are named by the word that means "the peoples" in Greek. See Ulfilas. It would still be possible for the Germans to make an honorary name out of their old insult by becoming the first unchristian people of Europe. Schopenhauer counted it to their credit that they were so well suited for this. Then Luther's work would be completed, since he taught them to be un-Roman and to speak: "Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise!"

147 Question and Answer. — What do wild tribes first take from Europeans? Brandy and Christianity, the European narcotics. And what do they die of fastest? The European narcotics.

148 Where Reformations Begin. — At the time of the great corruption of the church, the church was least corrupt in Germany. That is why the Reformation began here. It was a sign that even the early signs of corruption were felt to be unbearable. Compared with other peoples, no people was ever more Christian than the Germans at the time of Luther. Their Christian culture was just about to burst into a hundredfold splendor of bloom. Only one night was missing. But that night brought the storm that put an end to everything.

149 Why Reformations Fail. — It shows the higher culture of the Greeks, even in fairly early times, that several attempts to found new Greek religions failed. It shows that there must already have been a great many different kinds of people in Greece, whose different distress could not be cured with a single recipe of belief and hope. Pythagoras and Plato, perhaps Empedocles too, and long before them the Orphic enthusiasts, all set out to found new religions. The first two had such genuine souls and talents for founding religions that one cannot be astonished enough at their failure. But they only ever produced sects. Every time the reformation of a whole people fails and only sects raise their heads, you may conclude that the people is already very varied inside, and is beginning to free itself from the coarse herd instincts and the morality of custom. This is a meaningful unsettled state, which people are used to slandering as the decline of morals and corruption, but which announces the egg ripening and the eggshell about to crack. That Luther's Reformation succeeded in the North shows that the North had lagged behind the South of Europe and still had fairly uniform, one-colored needs. There would never have been a Christianization of Europe at all if the culture of the old southern world had not gradually been barbarized, and lost its cultural lead, through too much admixture of Germanic barbarian blood. The more widely and unconditionally a single person, or a single person's idea, can have an effect, the more uniform and the lower the masses must be on which it works. Counter-movements, by contrast, reveal inner counter-needs that also want to satisfy themselves and prevail. In reverse, you can always infer a real height of culture when powerful and domineering natures achieve only a small, sectarian effect. This holds for the individual arts too, and for the fields of knowledge. Where there is rule, there are masses. Where there are masses, there is a need for slavery. Where there is slavery, there are only a few individuals, and these have the herd instincts and conscience against them.

150 A Critique of the Saints. — Must one, in order to have a virtue, want it in its most brutal form? That is how the Christian saints wanted it, and needed it. They got through life only with the thought that at the sight of their virtue everyone would be overcome by contempt for himself. I call a virtue with such an effect brutal.

151 Where Religion Comes From. — The metaphysical need is not the origin of religions, as Schopenhauer thinks. It is only a shoot that grows from them. Under the rule of religious thoughts, people got used to the idea of an "other world" (behind, below or above). When religious thoughts are destroyed, people feel an uncomfortable emptiness and a lack. Now from this feeling another "other world" grows back, but now only a metaphysical one, no longer a religious one. What led people in the earliest times to assume an "other world" at all was not a drive or a need. It was an error in interpreting certain natural events, a confusion of the intellect.

152 The Greatest Change. — The light and the colors of all things have changed! We no longer fully understand how the ancient people felt about the nearest and most common things, for example the day and being awake. Because the ancients believed in dreams, waking life had different lights. The same goes for all of life, with the reflection of death and its meaning: our "death" is a completely different death. All experiences shone differently, because a god gleamed out of them. So did all decisions and views of the distant future, because people had oracles and secret signs and believed in prophecy. "Truth" was felt differently, because at one time a madman could pass as its mouthpiece, which makes us shudder or laugh. Every injustice affected feeling differently, because people feared divine punishment, not only civil penalty and disgrace. What was joy in the time when people believed in devils and tempters! What was passion, when you saw demons lurking nearby! What was philosophy, when doubt was felt as a sin of the most dangerous kind, indeed as an offense against eternal love, as mistrust of everything good, high, pure and merciful! We have newly colored things, and we keep painting on them. But what can we set against the splendor of colors of that old mistress for now? I mean the old humanity.

153 Homo poeta. — "I myself, who with the greatest care have made this tragedy of tragedies, as far as it is finished; I, who first tied the knot of morality into existence and pulled it so tight that only a god can loosen it (so Horace demands!), I have now killed all the gods in the fourth act, out of morality! What is to become of the fifth act! Where will I still find the tragic resolution? Must I begin to think about a comic resolution?"

154 Different Dangers of Life. — You have no idea what you are going through. You stagger through life as if you were drunk, and now and then you tumble down a staircase. But thanks to your drunkenness, you do not break your limbs. Your muscles are too limp and your head too dull for you to find the stones of that staircase as hard as we others do! For us, life is a greater danger. We are made of glass. Woe to us if we bump into something! And everything is lost if we fall!

155 What We Lack. — We love great nature and have discovered it. This is because great human beings are missing from our heads. The Greeks were the other way around. Their feeling for nature is different from ours.

156 The Most Influential Person. — When a person resists his whole age, holds it up at the gate and calls it to account, that must have influence! Whether he wants to is beside the point. That he can is what matters.

157 Mentiri. — Pay attention! He thinks it over, and at once he has a lie ready. This is a stage of culture that whole peoples have stood on. Consider what the Romans meant by mentiri!

158 An Uncomfortable Quality. — Finding everything deep is an uncomfortable quality. It makes you constantly strain your eyes, and in the end you always find more than you wanted.

159 Every Virtue Has Its Time. — For someone who is unbending now, his honesty often brings a bad conscience, because unbendingness is the virtue of a different age than honesty is.

160 In Dealings with Virtues. — You can also be undignified and fawning toward a virtue.

161 To the Lovers of the Times. — The runaway priest and the released convict keep making faces. What they want is a face with no past. But have you ever seen people who know that the future is reflected in their face, and who are so polite to you, you lovers of "the times," that they make a face with no future?

162 Egoism. — Egoism is the perspective rule of feeling. By it, what is closest looks big and heavy, while everything gets smaller and lighter as it moves into the distance.

163 After a Great Victory. — The best thing about a great victory is that it takes away the winner's fear of losing. "Why not lose once?" he thinks. "I am rich enough now to afford it."

164 Those Who Want Rest. — I can tell which minds want rest by the many dark objects they set up around themselves. Whoever wants to sleep makes his room dark, or crawls into a cave. A hint for those who do not know what they are really looking for most, and would like to find out!

165 The Happiness of Those Who Give Things Up. — If you deny yourself something thoroughly and for a long time, then when you come across it again by chance, you will almost think you have discovered it. And what happiness every discoverer has! Let us be wiser than the snakes, which lie too long in the same sun.

166 Always in Our Own Company. — Everything of my kind, in nature and in history, speaks to me, praises me, pushes me forward, comforts me. The rest I do not hear, or I forget it right away. We are always only in our own company.

167 Misanthropy and Love. — People talk about being sick of others only when they can no longer digest them and still have their stomach full of them. Misanthropy comes from a love of people that is too greedy, a kind of "people-eating." But who told you, my Prince Hamlet, to swallow people like oysters?

168 About a Sick Man. — "Things are going badly for him!" What is wrong? "He suffers from a craving to be praised, and finds no food for it." That makes no sense! Everyone celebrates him. People carry him not only on their hands but on their lips! "Yes, but he has a poor ear for praise. If a friend praises him, it sounds to him as if the friend is praising himself. If an enemy praises him, it sounds to him as if the enemy wants credit for it. If one of the rest praises him at last (there are not many of the rest left, he is so famous), it insults him that they do not want him as either friend or enemy. He likes to say: 'What do I care about someone who can even play the just man against me!'"

169 Open Enemies. — Courage in front of an enemy is a separate thing. You can still be a coward and an indecisive muddlehead with it. Napoleon judged this way about the "bravest man" he knew, Murat. So it follows that open enemies are necessary for some people, if they are to rise to their virtue, their manliness and their cheerfulness.

170 With the Crowd. — Until now he has run with the crowd and praised it. But one day he will be its opponent! He follows it believing that his laziness will profit from it. He has not yet learned that the crowd is not lazy enough for him! That it always pushes forward! That it lets no one stand still! And he likes so much to stand still!

171 Fame. — When the gratitude of many toward one person throws off all shame, fame comes into being.

172 The Spoiler of Taste. — A: "You are a spoiler of taste, everyone says so!" B: "Certainly! I spoil everyone's taste for their own side. No side forgives me for that."

173 Being Deep and Seeming Deep. — Whoever knows himself to be deep works for clarity. Whoever wants to seem deep to the crowd works for darkness. The crowd thinks everything is deep whose bottom it cannot see. It is so timid, and goes into the water so unwillingly.

174 Off to the Side. — Parliamentarism, that is, the public permission to choose among five basic political opinions, flatters those many people who like to seem independent and individual, and who would like to fight for their opinions. In the end, though, it makes no difference whether the herd has been ordered one opinion or allowed five. Whoever departs from the five public opinions and steps to the side always has the whole herd against him.

175 On Eloquence. — Who has had the most convincing eloquence so far? The drumroll. And as long as kings have control of it, they are still the best speakers and rabble-rousers.

176 Sympathy. — The poor ruling princes! All their rights are suddenly turning into claims, and soon every claim sounds like presumption! When they only say "we" or "my people," the old, spiteful Europe already smiles. Truly, a head master of ceremonies of the modern world would make few ceremonies for them. He might even decree: "Les souverains rangent aux parvenus."

177 On "Education." — In Germany the higher person lacks a great tool of education: the laughter of higher people. They do not laugh in Germany.

178 On Moral Enlightenment. — The Germans have to be talked out of their Mephistopheles, and their Faust along with him. Two moral prejudices are at work against the value of knowledge.

179 Thoughts. — Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings, always darker, emptier and simpler than the feelings themselves.

180 The Good Time of Free Spirits. — Free spirits still take their freedoms with science too, and for now people let them have them, as long as the church still stands! In this way they now have their good time.

181 Following and Leading. — A: "Of the two, one will always follow and the other always lead, wherever fate takes them. And yet the first stands above the other, by his virtue and his spirit!" B: "And yet? And yet? That is said for the others, not for me, not for us! Fit secundum regulam."

182 In Solitude. — When you live alone, you do not speak too loudly, and you do not write too loudly either, because you are afraid of the hollow echo, the criticism of the nymph Echo. And in solitude every voice sounds different!

183 The Music of the Best Future. — For me the first musician would be the one who knew only the sadness of the deepest happiness, and no other sadness. No such musician has existed so far.

184 Justice. — I would rather be robbed than have scarecrows around me. That is my taste. And in every case it is a matter of taste, and nothing more!

185 Poor. — He is poor today, but not because everything was taken from him. He is poor because he threw everything away. What does that matter to him? He is used to finding things. It is the poor who misunderstand his voluntary poverty.

186 Bad Conscience. — Everything he does now is decent and orderly, and yet he has a bad conscience about it. Because the extraordinary is his job.

187 What Offends in the Delivery. — This artist offends me by the way he presents his ideas, his very good ideas: so broadly and emphatically, with such crude tricks of persuasion, as if he were speaking to the mob. After a while, the time we have given to his art, we always feel as if we were "in bad company."

188 Work. — How close work and the worker now stand even to the idlest of us! The royal politeness in the words "we are all workers!" would still have been cynical and indecent under Louis XIV.

189 The Thinker. — He is a thinker, which means he knows how to take things more simply than they are.

190 Against Those Who Praise. — A: "You are only praised by your equals!" B: "Yes! And whoever praises you says to you: you are one of mine!"

191 Against Certain Defenses. — The most treacherous way to harm a cause is to defend it on purpose with faulty reasons.

192 The Good-Natured. — What sets apart those good-natured people, whose faces shine with goodwill, from other people? They feel at ease with a new person, and they fall in love with them quickly. They wish them well for it, and their first judgment is, "I like them." In them the following come one after another: the wish to possess (they have few scruples about the other person's worth), quick possession, pleasure in owning, and acting for the good of what they own.

193 Kant's Joke. — Kant wanted to prove, in a way that shocked "all the world," that "all the world" was right. That was the secret joke of his mind. He wrote against the scholars in support of popular prejudice, but for scholars, not for the people.

194 The "Open-Hearted" Man. — That man probably always acts on reasons he keeps to himself. He always has reasons he can share on his tongue, and almost in his open hand.

195 Laughable! — Look there! Look there! He is running away from people. But they follow him, because he runs ahead of them. That is how much they are a herd!

196 The Limit of Our Hearing. — People hear only the questions they are able to answer.

197 So Be Careful! — We share nothing so gladly with others as the seal of secrecy, along with whatever lies under it.

198 The Proud Man's Annoyance. — The proud man is annoyed even with those who push him forward. He looks angrily at the horses pulling his carriage.

199 Generosity. — Generosity among the rich is often just a kind of shyness.

200 Laughter. — Laughing means taking pleasure in someone else's misfortune, but with a clear conscience.

201 In Applause. — Applause is always a kind of noise, even the applause we give ourselves.

202 A Spendthrift. — He does not yet have the poverty of a rich man who has already counted his whole treasure through once. He wastes his mind with the recklessness of Nature, the spendthrift.

203 Hic niger est. — As a rule he has no thoughts. But for the rare occasion, bad thoughts come to him.

204 Beggars and Politeness. — "One is not rude when one knocks on the door with a stone, if the doorbell is missing." That is how beggars and the needy of every kind think. But nobody agrees with them.

205 Need. — Need is thought to be the cause of things coming into being. In truth it is often only an effect of what has already come into being.

206 In the Rain. — It is raining, and I think of the poor people who are now crowding together with their many worries, and without practice in hiding them. Each one is ready and willing to hurt the other, and even in bad weather to make a wretched kind of comfort for himself. That, only that, is the poverty of the poor!

207 The Envious One. — He is a jealous fellow. You should not wish him children, because he would envy them, since he can no longer be a child himself.

208 Great Man! — From the fact that someone is "a great man" we may not yet conclude that he is a man. Perhaps he is only a boy, or a chameleon of every age, or a bewitched little woman.

209 One Way of Asking for Reasons. — There is a way of asking us for our reasons that makes us not only forget our best reasons, but also feel a stubbornness and dislike for reasons in general rising up in us. It is a very dulling way to ask, and a real trick of tyrannical people!

210 Measure in Work. — You must not try to outdo your father's hard work. It makes you sick.

211 Secret Enemies. — Being able to keep a secret enemy is a luxury, and even high-minded people's morality is usually not rich enough for it.

212 Do Not Be Fooled. — His mind has bad manners. He is hasty and always stammers from impatience, so you can hardly tell what long-winded and broad-chested soul he lives in.

213 The Way to Happiness. — A wise man asked a fool the way to happiness. The fool answered at once, like someone asked the way to the next town: "Admire yourself and live in the street!" "Stop!" cried the wise man. "You are asking too much. It is enough to admire yourself!" The fool replied, "But how can you admire constantly without despising constantly?"

214 Faith Makes You Blessed. — Virtue brings happiness, and a kind of blessedness, only to those who have a good faith in their own virtue. It does not bring them to the finer souls, whose virtue consists in deep distrust of themselves and of all virtue. In the end, then, "faith makes you blessed" here too! And notice: not virtue!

215 Ideal and Material. — You have a noble ideal before your eyes. But are you such a noble stone that a statue of a god could be carved out of you? And without that, is all your work not a barbaric sculpture? A blasphemy against your ideal?

216 Danger in the Voice. — With a very loud voice in your throat, you are almost unable to think delicate thoughts.

217 Cause and Effect. — Before an effect, people believe in different causes than they do after it.

218 My Dislike. — I do not like people who have to burst like bombs in order to have any effect at all, and near whom you are always in danger of suddenly losing your hearing, or even more.

219 The Purpose of Punishment. — Punishment is meant to improve the one who punishes. That is the last refuge of the defenders of punishment.

220 Sacrifices. — The sacrificial animals think differently about sacrifice and self-sacrifice than the spectators do. But they have never been allowed to speak.

221 Sparing. — Fathers and sons spare each other much more than mothers and daughters do.

222 Poet and Liar. — The poet sees in the liar his milk-brother, whose milk he drank up. So the liar has stayed wretched, and has not even managed to get a good conscience.

223 The Senses Standing In for One Another. — "You have eyes in order to hear, too," said an old confessor who had gone deaf. "And among the blind, the king is whoever has the longest ears."

224 A Critique of Animals. — I fear that animals see humans as creatures of their own kind who have lost their healthy animal sense in a very dangerous way: as the mad animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the unhappy animal.

225 The Natural Ones. — "Evil has always had the great effect on its side! And nature is evil! So let us be natural!" That is how the great hunters of effect in humanity secretly reason. They have all too often been counted among the great human beings.

226 The Distrustful and Style. — We say the strongest things plainly, as long as there are people around us who believe in our strength. Such surroundings teach "simplicity of style." The distrustful speak emphatically. The distrustful make everything emphatic.

227 A Faulty Conclusion, a Faulty Shot. — He cannot control himself. From this that woman concludes it will be easy to control him, and she throws her lines of capture out at him. The poor woman, who will soon be his slave.

228 Against Mediators. — Whoever wants to mediate between two resolute thinkers is marked as mediocre. He has no eye for seeing what is unique. The habit of seeing likenesses and making everything equal is a sign of weak eyes.

229 Defiance and Loyalty. — He holds on to a cause out of defiance, a cause that has become transparent to him. But he calls it "loyalty."

230 Lack of Discretion. — His whole manner does not persuade. That is because he has never kept quiet about a good deed he has done.

231 The "Thorough." — The slow people of knowledge think that slowness belongs to knowledge.

232 Dreaming. — People either do not dream at all, or they dream in an interesting way. You have to learn to be awake the same way: either not at all, or in an interesting way.

233 The Most Dangerous Point of View. — What I do or leave undone now is as important for everything to come as the greatest event of the past. In this huge perspective of effect, all actions are equally large and small.

234 A Musician's Words of Comfort. — "Your life does not ring in people's ears. To them you live a silent life, and all the delicacy of the melody, all the gentle decisions in following or leading, stay hidden from them. It is true: you do not come down the wide street with a military band. But these good people have no right to say that your way of life lacks music for that reason. Whoever has ears, let him hear."

235 Mind and Character. — Some people reach their peak as a character, but their mind does not match that height. And some the other way around.

236 To Move the Crowd. — Must not whoever wants to move the crowd be an actor of himself? Must he not first translate himself into something grotesquely clear, and present his whole person and cause in this coarsening and simplifying?

237 The Polite One. — "He is so polite!" Yes, he always carries a cake for Cerberus, and he is so timid that he takes everyone for Cerberus, even you and me. That is his "politeness."

238 Without Envy. — He is completely without envy, but there is no merit in it. He wants to conquer a land that no one has yet owned and hardly anyone has even seen.

239 The Joyless One. — One joyless person is enough to bring lasting bad temper and a gloomy sky to a whole household. And it takes a miracle for this one person to be absent! Happiness is far from being such a contagious disease. Why is that?

240 By the Sea. — I would not build myself a house (and it is even part of my happiness not to own a house!). But if I had to, I would build it, like many a Roman, right out into the sea. I would like to share a few secrets with that beautiful monster.

241 The Work and the Artist. — This artist is ambitious and nothing more. In the end his work is only a magnifying glass, which he offers to anyone who looks at him.

242 Suum cuique. — However greedy my knowledge is, I can take out of things only what already belongs to me. The property of others stays in the things. How can a person be a thief or a robber at all!

243 Where "Good" and "Bad" Come From. — Only someone who can feel "This is not good" invents an improvement.

244 Thoughts and Words. — You cannot put even your thoughts fully into words.

245 Praise Through Choice. — The artist chooses his subjects. That is his way of praising.

246 Mathematics. — We want to push the precision and rigor of mathematics into every science, as far as possible. Not because we believe this path will reveal things to us, but to fix our human relationship to things. Mathematics is only the tool for the general and final knowledge of people.

247 Habit. — All habit makes our hand cleverer and our wit clumsier.

248 Books. — What is the point of a book that does not even carry us beyond all books?

249 The Sigh of the Knower. — "Oh, my greed! There is no selflessness in this soul. Instead there is a self that wants everything, that would like to see through many individuals as if through its eyes and grasp as if with its hands. It is a self that would even drag the whole past back and that wants to lose nothing that could possibly belong to it! Oh, this flame of my greed! Oh, that I could be reborn in a hundred beings!" Whoever does not know this sigh from experience does not know the passion of the knower either.

250 Guilt. — Even though the sharpest judges of witches, and the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchcraft, the guilt was still not there. That is how it is with all guilt.

251 Misunderstood Sufferers. — Great natures suffer differently from what their admirers imagine. They suffer most from the petty, low surges of certain bad moments, in short, from their own doubt about their greatness. They do not suffer most from the sacrifices and martyrdoms their task demands. As long as Prometheus pities human beings and sacrifices himself for them, he is happy and great within himself. But when he becomes jealous of Zeus, and of the homage that mortals pay him, then he suffers!

252 Better to Stay in Debt. — "Better to stay in debt than to pay with a coin that does not carry our picture!" That is what our sovereignty demands.

253 Always at Home. — One day we reach our goal, and then we proudly point to the long journeys we took to get there. In truth we did not notice that we were traveling. But we got so far that at every stop we imagined we were at home.

254 Against Embarrassment. — Whoever is always deeply occupied is beyond all embarrassment.

255 Imitators. — A: "What? You do not want imitators?" B: "I do not want people to copy something of mine. I want everyone to pretend to himself that he does what I do." A: "So —?"

256 Surface-ness. — People of depth all find their happiness in becoming, for once, like flying fish, and playing on the very tips of the waves. They think the best thing about things is that they have a surface: their surface-ness, sit venia verbo.

257 From Experience. — Some people do not know how rich they are until they find out how many rich people still turn into thieves because of them.

258 The Deniers of Chance. — No winner believes in chance.

259 From Paradise. — "Good and evil are God's prejudices," said the serpent.

260 The Multiplication Table. — One is always wrong. But the truth starts with two. One cannot prove oneself. But two can no longer be refuted.

261 Originality. — What is originality? To see something that has no name yet, that cannot be named yet, even though it lies in plain view of everyone. Ordinary people see a thing at all only once it has a name. The original ones have mostly also been the ones who gave the names.

262 Sub specie aeterni. — A: "You are moving away from the living faster and faster. Soon they will strike you off their lists!" B: "It is the only way to share in the privilege of the dead." A: "Which privilege?" B: "Not dying anymore."

263 Without Vanity. — When we love, we want our flaws to stay hidden. Not out of vanity, but because the one we love should not suffer. Indeed, the lover would like to seem like a god, and that too is not out of vanity.

264 What We Do. — What we do is never understood. It is only ever praised or blamed.

265 The Last Skepticism. — What are the truths of humanity, in the end? They are the irrefutable errors of humanity.

266 Where Cruelty Is Needed. — Whoever has greatness is cruel toward his virtues and his second-rank concerns.

267 With a Great Goal. — With a great goal you are even superior to justice, not only to your deeds and your judges.

268 What Makes Someone Heroic? — Walking toward your highest suffering and your highest hope at the same time.

269 What Do You Believe In? — In this: that the weights of all things must be set anew.

270 What Does Your Conscience Say? — "You should become the one you are."

271 Where Are Your Greatest Dangers? — In pity.

272 What Do You Love in Others? — My hopes.

273 Whom Do You Call Bad? — Whoever always wants to shame others.

274 What Is Most Human to You? — Sparing someone from shame.

275 What Is the Sign of Freedom Reached? — No longer being ashamed before yourself.