THE JOYOUS MESSAGE
by Friedrich Nietzsche
Edited by Vin Al Ken.
footnotes omitted from html document version

I am no man, I am dynamite. I am a bringer of glad tidings like no one before me.
I am the philosopher with the hammer.
There are more idols than realities in the world. This little essay is a great declaration of war regarding the sounding out of idols, not just idols of the age, but eternal idols, which are here touched with a hammer like a tuning fork: there are no idols that are older, more assured, more puffed-up - and none more hollow. 
I am the first immoralist.  This calling follows from an insight that I was the first to articulate: that there are no moral facts. Moral and religious judgments are based on realities that do not exist. There is no such thing as moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.
                 
AESTHETHICS
There is only one world, the world of human experience. Everything depends on experience. The banker immediately thinks of "business," the Christian of "sin," and the girl of her love. Rain is one thing to a man, quite another to a tree, something else to a hill or a mountain, and still different to the sky which is being relieved by the downfall.
It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, reciprocity, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we interpret and project this symbol world into things, as if it existed “in itself,” we act once more as we have always acted - mythologically.. This means plainly that from time immemorial we have grown used to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is more of an artist than one knows.
Recognizing untruth as a condition of life - that certainly means resisting traditional ideals in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would thereby place itself beyond good & evil.
No greater power did Zarathustra find on earth than good and evil. Not only the wisdom of centuries - also their madness breaks out in us. Dangerous is it to be an heir.
Fortunately, I learned early to separate theological prejudice from moral prejudice and ceased to look for the origin of evil behind the world. All our philosophers wanted to supply a rational foundation for morality; the morality of their environment, their class, their church, their zeitgeist, their climate and part of the world - just because they were poorly informed and not even very curious about different peoples, times, and past ages - they never laid eyes on the real problems of morality; for these emerge only when we compare many moralities.
                  No people could live without first valuing; if a people will maintain itself, however, it must not value as its neighbor values. Through valuation only is there value; and without valuation the nut of existence would be hollow. All life is a dispute about taste and tasting!
Let us articulate a new demand: we need a critique of moral values: the value of these values is for the first time to be called into question - and for that we need  knowledge of the conditions and circumstances in which they grew, under which they evolved and changed.

YOU ARE SUBJECT
Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posits a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject” - let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason,” “absolute spirituality”, “knowledge in itself” - these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense - “Immaculate Perception.”
There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity,” will be. To eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this - what would that mean but to castrate the intellect?

The most general formula on which every religion and morality is founded is: "Do this and that, refrain from this and that - and then you will be happy! And if you don't . . ."
He who has heard and believed, is from now on like a hen imprisoned by a chalk circle.
The result, expressed in moral-physiological terms - hypnotization - is an attempt to win for man an approximation of what in certain animals is hibernation, in many tropical plants estivation, the minimum metabolism at which life will still subsist without really entering consciousness. Pascal’s principle il faut s’abêtir (One must make oneself stupid.) is applied. An astonishing amount of human energy has been expended to this end - has it been in vain?

The origin of morals may be found in two thoughts: “society is worth more than the individual,” and “enduring advantage is to be preferred to ephemeral advantage” - from which it follows that the enduring advantage of society must be given precedence, unconditionally, over the advantage of the individual, especially over his momentary well-being but also over his enduring advantage and even his continued existence. Everything that elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbor is henceforth called evil; and the obliging, modest, submissive, conforming mentality, the mediocrity of desires attains moral designations and honors.
That lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange: only it gives no ground for reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs. And so the lambs say among themselves: “these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite - a lamb - would not he be good?”
                  What if the symptoms of regression were inherent in the “good” - a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic, through which the present was possibly living at the expense of the future?  Perhaps more comfortably, less dangerously, but at the same time in a meaner style, more basely? So that precisely morality would be to blame if the highest power and splendor actually possible to man was never in fact attained? What if actually morality was the danger of dangers?

“ONE LAW FOR THE LION AND OX IS OPPRESSION”
What was the real etymological significance of the designations for “good” coined in the various languages? I found they all led back to the same conceptual transformation - that everywhere “noble”, “aristocratic” in the social sense, is the basic concept from which “good” in the sense of “with aristocratic soul”, “noble”, “with a soul of a high order”, “with a privileged soul” necessarily developed: a development which always runs parallel with that other in which “common”, “plebian”, “low” are finally transformed into the concept “bad”.
With this first type of morality, master morality, the opposition of “good” and “bad” means approximately the same as “noble” and “contemptible.” (The opposition of “good” and “evil” has a different origin.) One feels contempt for the cowardly, the anxious, the petty, those intent on narrow utility; also for the suspicious with their unfree glances, those who humble themselves, the doglike people who allow themselves to be maltreated, the begging flatterers, above all the liars: it is part of the fundamental faith of all aristocrats that the common people lie. “We truthful ones” - thus the nobility of ancient Greece referred to itself.
It is different with the second type of morality, slave morality. Suppose the violated, oppressed, suffering, unfree, who are uncertain of themselves and weary, moralize: what will their moral valuations have in common? Probably, a pessimistic suspicion about the whole condition of man will find expression, perhaps in a condemnation of man along with his condition.
Conversely, those qualities are brought out and flooded with light which serve to ease existence for those who suffer: here pity, the complaisant and obliging hand, the warm heart, patience, industry, humility, and friendliness are honored - for here these are the most useful qualities and almost the only means for enduring the pressure of existence. Slave morality is essentially a morality of utility.
When stepped on, a worm doubles up. That is clever. In that way he lessens the probability of being stepped on again. In the language of morality: humility.
Every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering, more exactly, an agent; still more specifically, a guilty agent upon whom the venting of his affects represents the greatest attempt on the part of the sufferer to win relief. This alone, I surmise, constitutes the actual physiological cause of ressentiment.
My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on -
“Exploitation” does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will of life.

"Why so hard?" the kitchen coal once said to the diamond. "After all, are we not close kin?"
                  Why so soft? O my brothers, thus I ask you: are you not after all my brothers?

Today the petty people have become master:  they all preach submission and humility and policy and diligence and consideration and the long et cetera of petty virtues. These flocks of sheep - petty, good-wooled, good-willed, grey people teach, “good is only what petty people call good.”
                  Virtue for them is what makes modest and tame:  therewith have they made the wolf a dog, and man himself man's best domestic animal. To call the taming of an animal its "improvement" sounds almost like a joke to our ears. Whoever knows what goes on in kennels doubts that dogs are "improved" there. They are weakened, they are made less harmful, and through the depressive effect of fear, through pain, through wounds, and through hunger, they become sickly beasts. It is no different with the tamed man whom the priest has "improved."
Away with this “inverted world!” Away from this shameful emasculation of feeling! That the sick should not make the healthy sick - and this is what such an emasculation would involve ­- should surely be our supreme concern on earth; but this requires above all that the healthy should be segregated from the sick, guarded even from the sight of the sick, that they may not confound themselves with the sick.

A virtue must be our own invention, our most necessary self-expression and self-defense: any other kind of virtue is merely a danger. As the poet Lucilius, Scipio’s friend, said, Virtue is to be able to render the true value to the things among which we move and in which we live.  Whatever is not a condition of our life harms it: a virtue that is prompted solely by a feeling of respect for the concept of “virtue,” as Kant would have it, is harmful. “Virtue,” “duty,” the “good in itself,” the good which is impersonal and universally valid - chimeras and expressions of decline, of the final exhaustion of life, of the Chinese phase of Königsberg. The fundamental laws of self-preservation and growth demand the opposite - that every one invent his own virtue, his own categorical imperative. A people perishes when it confuses its duty with duty in general.

                  But sure enough there are those to whom virtue means writhing under the lash:  and ye have hearkened too much unto their crying!
                  And others are there who call virtue the slothfulness of their vices; and when once their hatred and jealousy relax the limbs, their "justice" becomes lively and rubs its sleepy eyes.
                  And others are there who go along heavily and creakingly, like carts taking stones downhill:  they talk much of dignity and virtue - their drag they call virtue!
                  And others are there who are like eight-day clocks when wound up; they tick, and want people to call ticking - virtue.
                  And again there are those who regard it as virtue to say:  "Virtue is necessary"; but after all they believe only that policemen are necessary.

How should there be a “common good”! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.
Moral judgments and condemnations constitute the favorite revenge of the spirituality limited against those less limited. "To the clean are all things clean" - thus say the people.  I, however, say unto you:  To the swine all things become swinish! Life is a well of delight, but to him in whom the ruined stomach speaks, that father of affliction, all fountains are poisoned.
 “I have got lost; I am everything that has got lost,” so sighs modern man.  And such is always the nature of weak men:  they lose themselves on their way.  And at last asks their weariness:  "Why did we ever go on the way? All is indifferent!" "Why should one live?  All is vain!  To live - that is to thrash straw; to live - that is to burn oneself and yet not get warm.
                  Children might thus speak:  they shun the fire because it hath burnt them! There is much childishness in the old books of wisdom.  To them it sounds pleasant to have preached in their ears:  "Nothing is worth while!  Ye shall not will!"  That, however, is a sermon for slavery.

It is time for man to fix his goal. It is time for man to plant the germ of his highest hope.
                  Still is his soil rich enough for it. But that soil will one day be poor and exhausted, and no lofty tree will any longer be able to grow thereon.
I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: ye have still chaos in you.
Alas!  There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star.  Alas!  There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.
Lo!  I show you the last man.
"What is love?  What is creation?  What is longing?  What is a star?"- so asks the last man and blinks.
The earth hath then become small, and on it there hops the last man who makes everything small.  His species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the last man lives longest.
"We have discovered happiness" - say the last men, and blink.
No shepherd, and one herd!  Every one wants the same; every one is equal: he who hath other sentiments goes willingly into the madhouse.
"Formerly all the world was insane," - say the subtlest of them, and blink.

HOW THE "TRUE WORLD" FINALLY BECAME A FABLE: The History of an Error
During the longest part of human history - so-called prehistorical times - the value or disvalue of an action was derived from its consequences. The action itself was considered as little as its origins.
The error of “free will” arises from the fact that its interpreters, the priests at the head of ancient communities, wanted to create for themselves the right to punish - or wanted to create this right for their God. No longer the consequences but the origin of an action is what decides its value. Intention as the whole origin and prehistory of an action - almost to the present day this prejudice dominated moral praise, blame, judgment, and philosophy on earth.  Men were considered "free" only so that they might be considered guilty - could be judged and punished: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within the consciousness (and thus the most fundamental psychological deception was made the principle of psychology itself).
I shall never tire of emphasizing a small terse face, which these superstitious minds hate to concede - namely, that a thought comes when “it” wishes, and not when “I” wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks; but that this “it” is precisely the famous old “ego” is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an “immediate certainty.” After all, one has even gone too far with this “it thinks” - even the “it” contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the grammatical habit: “Thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently….”  “Reason” in language - oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.
A quantum of will is equivalent to a quantum of movement, force, deed - it is not anything but these acts, only appearing otherwise through the distortions of language (and the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effect as conditioned by something that causes effect, by a “subject.” For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, from the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the action - the act is everything.
                  To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to master, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength. Yet the weak in fact maintain no belief more ardently than the belief that the strong man is free to be weak and the bird of prey to be a lamb - for thus they gain the right to make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey. This prudence of the lowest order, which even insects posses, has, thanks to the counterfeit and self-deception of impotence, clad itself in the ostentatious garb of the virtue of quiet, calm resignation, just as if the weakness of the weak - that is to say, their essence, their effects, their sole ineluctable, irremovable reality - were a voluntary achievement, willed, chosen, a deed, a meritorious act. They give me to understand that they are better than the mighty, the lords of the earth whose spittle they have to lick - not from fear, not at all from fear! but because God as commanded them to obey the authorities.
Let us not be led astray: they say, "judge not," and yet they condemn to hell whoever stands in their way. In letting God sit in judgment they judge themselves; in glorifying God they glorify themselves; in demanding that every one show the virtues which they themselves happen to be capable of - still more, which they must have in order to remain on top - they assume the grand air of men struggling for virtue, of men engaging in a war that virtue may prevail.
The symbol of this struggle, inscribed in letters legible across all human history, is “Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome.”  Which of them has won for the present, Rome or Judea? But there can be no doubt: consider to whom one bows down in Rome itself today.

GELT
Nothing has been exercised and cultivated better and longer among men so far then obedience - it may be fairly assumed that the need for it is now innate in the average man, as a kind of formal conscience that commands: “thou shalt unconditionally do something, unconditionally not do something else,” in short, “thou shalt.”
Read from a distant star, the majuscule script of our earthly existence would perhaps lead to the conclusion that the earth was a distinctively ascetic planet, a nook of disgruntled, arrogant, and offensive creatures filled with a profound disgust at themselves, at the earth, at all life, who inflict as much pain on themselves as they possibly can out of pleasure in inflicting pain - which is probably their only pleasure.
For consider how regularly and universally these black magicians, masters of inverse alchemy, who change all gold into lead, appear in almost every age. He belongs to no one race; he prospers everywhere, he emerges from every class of society. Nor does he breed and propagate his mode of valuation through heredity: the opposite is the case - broadly speaking, a profound instinct forbids him to propagate. It must be a necessity of the first order that again and again promotes the growth and prosperity of this life-inimical species - it must indeed be in the interest of life itself that such a self-contradictory type does not die out.
When man’s existence on earth contained no goal – when “why man at all?” - was a question without an answer; the will for man and earth was lacking; behind every great human destiny there sounded a refrain, an ever yet greater, “in vain!” This is precisely what the ascetic ideal means: that something is lacking, that man was surrounded by a fearful void - he did not know how to justify, to account for, to affirm himself: he suffered from the problem of his meaning. He also suffered otherwise, he was in the main a sickly animal: but his problem was not suffering itself, but that there was no answer to the crying question, “why do I suffer?” The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far - and the ascetic ideal offered man meaning! It was the only meaning offered so far; and any meaning is better than none at all.
So as to abolish hidden, undetected, unwitnessed suffering from the world and honestly to deny it, one was in the past virtually compelled to invent gods and genii of all the heights and depths, in short something that roams even in secret, hidden places, sees even in the dark, and will not easily let an interesting painful spectacle pass unnoticed. For it was with the aid of such inventions that life then knew how to work the trick which it has always known how to work, that of justifying itself, of justifying its “evil.”
The existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. We have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art.
Nothing could be more opposed to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world which is here taught than the Christian teaching, which is, and wants to be, the only moral and which relegates art, every art, to the realm of lies; with its absolute standards, beginning with the truthfulness of God, it negates, judges, and damns art. Behind this mode of thought and valuation, which must be hostile to art if it is at all genuine, I never failed to sense a hostility to life - a furious, vengeful antipathy to life itself: for all of life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error.
In India, as in Greece, the same mistake was made: “We must once have been at home in a higher world (instead of a very much lower one, which would have been the truth); we must have been divine, for we have reason! What has caused our fall from that state? These senses, which are so immoral in other ways too, deceive us concerning the true world. Moral: let us free ourselves from the deception of the senses, from becoming, from history, from lies; history is nothing but faith in the senses, faith in lies.”
Once the concept of “nature” was positioned in opposition to “God”, “natural” had to mean “abominable”: this whole world of fiction is rooted in hatred of nature (reality!).
With the highest respect, I except the name of Heraclitus. When the rest of the philosophic folk rejected the testimony of the senses because they showed multiplicity and change, he rejected their testimony because they showed things as if they had permanence and unity. Heraclitus too did the senses an injustice. They lie neither in the way the Eleatics believed, nor as he believed - they do not lie at all. What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies; for example, the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence. "Reason" is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The "apparent" world is the only one: the "true" world is merely added by a lie.

BITTER BREWS
The Jews are the most remarkable people in the history of the world, for when they were confronted with the question, to be or not to be, they chose, with perfectly unearthly deliberation, to be at any price. It is with them that the slave-insurrection in morals commences.
It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God) and to hang on to this inversion with their teeth, the teeth of the most abysmal hatred (the hatred of impotence), saying “the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone - and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity; and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, accursed, and damned!” Their prophets fused into one the expressions ‘rich,’ ‘godless,’ ‘wicked,’ ‘violet,’ ‘sensual,’ and for the first time coined the word ‘world’ as a term of reproach. One knows who inherited this Jewish revaluation.
I do not like the “New Testament” that should be plain - people of that sort regurgitating their most private affairs, their stupidities, sorrows, and petty worries, as if the Heart of Being were obliged to concern itself with them; they never grow tired of involving God himself in even the pettiest troubles they have got themselves into.  The Old Testament - that is something else again: all honor to the Old Testament! I find in it great human beings, a heroic landscape, and something of the very rarest quality in the world, the incomparable naïveté of the strong heart; what is more, I find a people.
The Jews were the first people who refused to turn the culture values of the ancients into universal. They were my precursors who insisted on a complete Copernican revolution in the world of thought - the transvaluation of all values!  The Jews are beyond any doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe; they know how to prevail even under the worst conditions (even better than under favorable conditions). But so powerful is the time-spirit, our age of crass commercialism and what Carlyle calls the cash-nexus, that even Jews (not all, I must admit) have confused Jehovah with the All-Mighty Banker, and tame the wild tides of the world’s hatred and contempt by casting the yellow spell of his gold pieces.

XTIAN CANCER
When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! This, for a Jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God's son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed - whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining pretensions - is perhaps the most ancient piece of this heritage. A god who begets children with a mortal woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more courts, but look for the signs of the impending end of the world; a justice that accepts the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone who orders his disciples to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of a beyond to which death is the portal; the form of the cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and ignominy of the cross - how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed?
I shall tell you the authentic history of Christianity. The very word "Christianity" is a misunderstanding - at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. The "evangel" died on the cross. What, from that moment onward, was called the ”evangel”" was the very reverse of what he had lived: "ill tidings," a dysangel.
He died as he lived and taught - not to "save mankind," but to show mankind how to live. It was a way of life that he bequeathed to man: his demeanour before the judges, before the officers, before his accusers - his demeanour on the cross. He does not resist; he does not defend his rights; he makes no effort to ward off the most extreme penalty - more, he invites it. And he prays, suffers and loves with those, in those, who do him evil. Not to defend one's self, not to show anger, not to lay blame. On the contrary, to submit even to the Evil One - to love him.
This holy anarchist, who aroused the people at the bottom, the outcasts and "sinners," the chandala of Judaism, to rise in revolt against the established order of things - and in language which, if the Gospels are to be credited, would get him sent to Siberia today - this man was certainly a political criminal to the extent one can be in such an absurdly unpolitical community.
With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a "free spirit"- he cares nothing for what is established: the world kills, all that is corporeal kills.'The idea of "life" as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. This great symbolist speaks only of inner things, subjective realities: "life" or "truth" or "light" is his word for the innermost - in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, matters only as signs, as allegory.  The concept of "the Son of God" does not connote a concrete person in history, an isolated and definite individual, but an "eternal" fact, a psychological symbol set free from the concept of time.

"If Christ did not rise from the dead, then all our faith is in vain!" From this time forward the type of the Saviour was corrupted, bit by bit, by the doctrine of judgment and of the second coming, the doctrine of death as a sacrifice, the doctrine of the resurrection, by means of which the entire concept of "blessedness," the whole and only reality of the gospels, is juggled away - in favor of a state of existence after death!
Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life.  “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.” Meanwhile, however, they live “in faith,” “in love”, “in hope.”
I remind you of Paul's priceless saying: "And God hath chosen the weak things of the world, the foolish things of the world, the base things of the world, and things which are despised” this was the formula; in hoc signo the decadence triumphed.
Must I add that, in the whole New Testament, there appears but a solitary figure worthy of honour? Pilate, the Roman viceroy. To regard a Jewish imbroglio seriously - that was quite beyond him.  One Jew more or less - what did it matter? The noble scorn of a Roman, before whom the word "truth" was shamelessly mishandled, enriched the New Testament with the only saying that has any value - and that is at once its criticism and its destruction: "What is truth?".

Christianity - the revaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of chandala values, the gospel preached to the poor and base, the general revolt of all the downtrodden, the wretched, the failures, the less favored, against "race": the undying chandala hatred is disguised as a religion of love.
The church fights passion with excision in every sense: its practice, its "cure," is castratism. Christian is hatred of the intellect, of pride, courage, freedom, liberty of the spirit; Christian is all hatred of the senses, of joy in the senses, of joy itself.  To have to fight the instincts - that is the definition of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct. It never asks: "How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify a craving?" It has at all times laid the stress of discipline on extirpation (of sensuality, of pride, of the lust to rule, of avarice, of vengefulness). But an attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life: the practice of the church is hostile to life.
Once one has comprehended the outrage of such a revolt against life as has become almost sacrosanct in Christian morality, one has, fortunately, also comprehended something else: the futility, apparentness, absurdity, and mendaciousness of such a revolt. For, confronted with morality, life must continually and inevitably be in the wrong, because life is something essentially amoral - and eventually, crushed by the weight of contempt and the eternal No, life must then be felt to be unworthy of desire and altogether worthless. The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad. Condemnation of life by the living remains in the end a mere symptom of a certain kind of life, best exemplified by the saying of Matthew: By their fruits shall ye know them.

I cannot, at this place, avoid a sigh. There are days when I am visited by a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy - contempt of man. Let me leave no doubt as to what I despise, whom I despise: it is the man of today, the man with whom I am unhappily contemporaneous. The man of today - I am suffocated by his foul breath! Toward the past, like all who understand, I am full of tolerance, which is to say, generous self-control: with gloomy caution I pass through whole millenniums of this mad house of a world,  I take care not to hold mankind responsible for its lunacies. But my feeling changes and breaks out irresistibly the moment I enter modern times, our times. Our age knows better.
Is it understood at last, will it ever be understood, what the Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian values - an  attempt with all available means, all instincts and all the resources  of genius to bring about a triumph of the opposite values, the  more noble values. 
Does anyone really believe that the defeat of theological astronomy represented a defeat for that ideal? Science and the ascetic ideal, both rest on the same foundation: the metaphysical faith that truth is inestimable and cannot be criticized (Plato versus Homer, the ascetic versus art; that is the genuine antagonism).
                  Has man perhaps become less desirous of a transcendent solution to the riddle of his existence, now that this existence appears more arbitrary, beggarly, and dispensable in the visible order of things? Has the self-belittlement of man, his will to self-belittlement not progressed irresistibly since Copernicus? Alas, the faith in the dignity and uniqueness of man, in his irreplaceability in the great chain of being, is a thing of the past - he has become an animal, literally and without reservation or qualification, he who was, according to his old faith, almost God.

ESTHLOS

The seeds of godlike power are in us still;
Gods are we Bards, Saints, Heroes, if we will!
- Longfellow, Excelsior

Courageous, unconcerned, ironical, coercive - so wisdom wishes us; she is a woman, and ever loves only a warrior.
The free man is a warrior. War educates for freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one's cause, not excluding oneself.
Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong. First principle: one must need to be strong - otherwise one will never become strong.
The strength of those who attack can be measured in a way by the opposition they require: every growth is indicated by the search for a mighty opponent - or problem; for a warlike philosopher challenges problems, too, to single combat. The task is not simply to master what happens to resist, but what requires us to stake all our strength, suppleness, and fighting skill - opponents that are our equals.
What sets a man aside as a rich man, or puts him down as a poor one? His ability or inability to give up almost anything in his possessions without losing the sense of security.

Alongside man, woman is retrogressing. In golden ages women were considered works of art and not candidates for a workshop or a pickle factory. Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit, woman now aspires to the economic and legal self-reliance of a clerk. Should this be the end? The breaking of woman’s magic spell ? The “borification” of woman is slowly dawning?
                  Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman hath one solution - it is called pregnancy. Man is for woman a means:  the purpose is always the child.  But what is woman for man?
                  Two different things the true man wants:  danger and diversion. Therefore he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.
Aspasia is my ideal woman, excelling in both the horizontal and vertical arts, in love and in wisdom.
                  Thus would I have man and woman:  fit for war, the one; fit for maternity, the other; both, however, fit for dancing with head and legs.
                  And lost be the day to us in which a measure hath not been danced.  And false be every truth which hath not had laughter along with it!
Unto my children will I make amends for being the child of my fathers:  and unto all the future - for this present-day!

MONKEYDOM
Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it even becometh rabble. Today, the masses, whom I called manure, are really the triumphant force in history, while the Caesars and Napoleons are merely sparks struck from the iron boots of the People which grind into dust every manifestation of genius and Caesarism that fails to carry out the People’s will.
We no longer have anything left to fear in man; that the maggot “man” is swarming in the foreground; that the “tame man”, the hopelessly mediocre and insipid man, has already learned to feel himself as the goal and zenith, as the measure of history, as “higher man.” Everything among them talks, everything is betrayed.  And what was once called the secret and secrecy of profound souls, belongs today to the street-trumpeters and other butterflies. Out of colours ye seem to be baked, and out of glued scraps. All times and peoples gaze divers-coloured out of your veils; all customs and beliefs speak divers-coloured out of your gestures. He who would strip you of veils and wrappers, and paints and gestures, would just have enough left to scare the crows.

We are overdrawing on our accounts everywhere. Every human sentiment reduced to Iago’s advice: Put money in thy purse. Life is made sick by this dehumanizing and mechanical grinding of greats, the “impersonality” of the laborer, the false economy of the “division of labor.” "What is the task of all higher education?" To turn men into machines. "What are the means?" Man must learn to be bored. The aim is lost, genuine culture - and the means, the modern traffic with science, barbarized,. as the Machine  grinds all men to the same level and makes democracy inevitable.

Many-too-many are born:  for the superfluous ones was the state devised! There, where the state ceases - there only commences the man who is not superfluous:  there commences the song of the necessary ones, the single and irreplaceable melody.

On the rulers turned I my back, when I saw what they now call ruling:  to traffic and bargain for power - with the rabble! Posing as the executors of more ancient or higher commands (of ancestors, the constitution, of right, the laws, or even of God). Or they even borrow herd maxims from the herd’s way of thinking, such as “first servants of their people” or “instruments of the common weal.” Towards the throne they all strive:  it is their madness - as if happiness sat on the throne!  Ofttimes filth sits on the throne - and ofttimes also the throne on filth.

"I, the state, am the people." It is a lie! The state lies in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it says it lies; and whatever it has, it has stolen.

Submission to law: how the consciences of noble tribes all over the earth resisted the abandonment of vendetta and were loath to bow before the power of the law! “Law” was for a long time a venitum, something forbidden, an outrage, an innovation; it was violence to which one submitted, feeling ashamed of oneself. Every small step on earth has been paid for by spiritual and physical torture: this whole point of view, that not only every progressive step, no! every step, movement, and change has required its countless martyrs.
We must not underrate the extent to which the sight of the judicial and executive procedures prevents the criminal from considering his deed, the type of his action as such, reprehensible: for he sees exactly the same kind of actions practiced in the service of justice and approved of and practiced with good conscience: spying, deception, bribery, setting traps, the whole cunning and understanding art of police and prosecution, plus robbery, violence, defamation, imprisonment, torture, murder, practiced as a matter of principle and without even emotion to excuse them, which are pronounced characteristics of the various forms of punishment - all of them therefore actions which his judges in no way condemn and repudiate as such, but only when they are applied and directed to certain particular ends.
                  I counsel you, my friends:  distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

On the other side, the herd man of Europe today gives himself the appearance of being the only permissible kind of man, and glorifies his attributes, which make him tame, easy to get along with, and useful to the herd, as if they were the truly human virtues: namely, public spirit, benevolence, consideration, industriousness, moderation, modesty, indulgence, and pity. In those cases, however, where one considers leaders and bellwhethers indispensable, people today make one attempt after another to add together clever herd men by way of replacing commanders: all parliamentary constitutions, for example, have this origin.  The people can be unwise, said Rousseau, but they can never be wrong. This is the fatal error of democracy - that mere numbers determine the justice or injustice of a cause. Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is rule.
What is right has always been determined by minorities who use clubs, codes or cannon to maintain their rule over the majorities. Of course psychological codes are more effective than cannon, and if the people think they are in control of their own destinies it is because the slave-morality of the Christians binds both the master and slave.

A legal order thought of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle between powercomplexes but as a means of preventing all struggle in general - would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness.
You want, if possible – and there is no more insane “if possible” - to abolish suffering. “We want that some day there should be nothing any more to be afraid of!” Some day - throughout Europe, the will and way to this day is now called “progress.”
                  “Will to Equality” - that itself shall henceforth be the name of virtue; and against all that hath power will we raise an outcry!"
 “Equal to the equal, unequal to the unequal" - that would be the true slogan of justice; and also its corollary: "Never make equal what is unequal."
The order of castes, the highest, the dominating law, is merely the ratification of  an order of nature, of a natural law of the first rank, over which  no arbitrary fiat, no "modern idea," can exert any influence. In every healthy society there are three physiological types, gravitating toward differentiation but mutually conditioning one another, and each of these has its own hygiene, its own sphere of work, its own special mastery and feeling of perfection. It is not Manu but nature that sets off in one class those who are chiefly intellectual, in another those who are marked by muscular strength and temperament, and in a third those who are distinguished in neither one way or the other, but show only mediocrity - the last-named represents the great majority, and the first two the select. The order of rank, simply formulates the supreme law of life itself; the separation of the three types is necessary to the maintenance of society, and to the evolution of higher types, and the highest types - the inequality of rights is essential to the existence of any rights at all. A right is a privilege. Every one enjoys the privileges that accord with his state of existence. Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. Life is always harder as one mounts the heights - the cold increases, responsibility increases.
Brades calls me an aristocratic radical - and that is exactly what I am.

KING/MOB
One must invoke tremendous counter-forces in order to cross this natural, all too natural progressus in simile, the continual development of man toward the similar, ordinary, average, herdlike - common!
                  He who is of the populace, his thoughts go back to his grandfather, with his grandfather, however, doth time cease. Thus is all the past abandoned:  for it might some day happen for the populace to become master, and drown all time in shallow waters.
                  Therefore, O my brethren, a new nobility is needed, which shall be the adversary of all populace and potentate rule, and shall inscribe anew the word "noble" on new tables.
                  “What are you really doing, erecting an ideal or knocking one down?” If a temple is to be erected a temple must be destroyed: that is the law - let anyone who can show me a case in which it is not fulfilled!  He who breaks up their tables of values, the breaker, the law-breaker: he is the creator,  the law-maker.

If I could conjure up the ghost of Diogenes of Sinope, I would be encouraged to spit into the face of respectable idiocy as the great Cynic did.  I resurrect myself by fixing my attention on Diogene’s cry, Remint the coinage, which gave me the clue to my own transvaluation of all values.
                  I walk amongst men as the fragments of the future:  that future which I contemplate. I stood today on a promontory beyond the world; I held a pair of scales, and weighed the world.
                  What is good? Whatever strengthens man’s feeling of power, the will to power, power itself.
                  What is evil? Everything born of weakness.
                  What is happiness? The feeling that power grows - thatresistance is overcome.

                  Lust, passion for power, and selfishness:  these three things have hitherto been best cursed, and have been in worst and falsest repute - these three things will I weigh humanly well.
                  Lust:  to free hearts, a thing innocent and free, the garden-happiness of the earth, all the future's thanks-overflow to the present. The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit. The preaching of chastity amounts to a public incitement to antinature. Every kind of contempt for sex, every impurification of it by means of the concept “impure” is the crime par excellence against life - is the real sin against the holy spirit of life.
                  Passion for power:  the earthquake which breaks and upends all that is rotten and hollow; the rolling, rumbling, punitive demolisher of bleached sepulchers; the flashing interrogative-sign beside premature answers. Wilderness and war: the Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings - they all shared this need.
 Yet, what do the so-called Nietzscheans drag out of the lion’s den of my philosophy? Not Daniel, the Superman, who defies the Monarchs of men and beasts, but the lion himself, the jungle king, seeking to reduce all civilization and culture to his jungle will. My system of thought is reduced to the brute naturalism against which I rebelled. When I praised war I did not mean the butchery of populations towards which modern wars are tending. In such wars only the soldiers of the Bismarks reap any benefits: they coin the blood of men, women and children into gold and silver. By deifying the Caesars, the Borgias and Napoleons, did I not strike out in the path of the ancient Pharaohs who achieved their private freedom at the expense of the rest of humanity? If freedom becomes the exclusive possession of a few bloody tyrants, then life is conquered by death, for without freedom men are mere living corpses, robbed of the privilege of decent burial. Moses knew this, hence his revolt against the bondage of Egypt, making his will the will of Israel.
                  Selfishness: At all kinds of slaves doth it spit,  whether they be servile before Gods and divine spurnings, or before men and stupid human opinions:  this blessed selfishness!
                  Self-interest is worth as much as the person who has it: it can be worth a great deal, and it can be unworthy and contemptible. It was only when aristocratic value judgments declined that the whole antithesis “egoistic” “unegoistic” obtruded itself more and more on the human conscience. No great or more calamitous misunderstanding is possible than for the happy, well-constituted, powerful in soul and in body, to begin to doubt their right to happiness in this fashion. Their right to exist, the privilege of the full-toned bell over the false and cracked, is a thousand times great: they alone are our warrenty for the future, they alone are liable for the future of man. Their fundamental faith simply has to be that society must not exist for society’s sake but only as the foundation and scaffolding on which a choice type of being is able to raise itself to its higher task and to a higher state of being. The only type of men that matters - those who are heroic. A people is a detour of nature to get to six or seven great men. Yes, and then to get around them.

PRINCE 666 vs. LORD 444
The legend of Prometheus is indigenous to the entire community of Aryan races and attests to their prevailing talent for profound and tragic vision. In fact, it is not improbable that this myth has the same characteristic importance for the Aryan mind as the myth of the Fall has for the Semitic, and that the two myths are related as brother and sister.
The presupposition of the Prometheus myth is primitive man's belief in the supreme value of fire as the true palladium of every rising civilization. But for man to dispose of fire freely, and not receive it as a gift from heaven in the kindling thunderbolt and the warming sunlight, seemed a crime to thoughtful primitive man, a despoiling of divine nature, a rebellion.
In the bold words of Goethe’s Prometheus addressing Zeus –

Here l sit, forming men
in my own image,
a race to be like me,
to suffer, to weep,
to delight and to rejoice,
and to defy you,
as I do.

Every artist who steals the creative fires from heaven must appear as either as an Apollinian dream artist or an Dionysian ecstatic artist.
Apollo is at once the god of all plastic powers and the soothsaying god. He who is etymologically the "shining one", the god of light, reigns also over the fair illusion of our inner world of fantasy. Apollo himself may be regarded as the marvelous divine image of the principium individuationis, whose looks and gestures radiate the full delight, wisdom, and beauty of "illusion."
                  Dionysus as a child was dismembered by Titans and in this condition is worshipped as Zagreus. We have here an indication that dismemberment - the truly Dionysian suffering - was like a separation into air, water, earth, and fire, and that individuation should be regarded as the source of all suffering, and rejected.
The essence of Dionysian rapture, the shattering of the principium individuationis, closest analogy is furnished by physical intoxication. Dionysian stirrings arise either through the influence of those narcotic potions of which all primitive races speak in their hymns, or through the powerful approach of spring, which penetrates with joy the whole frame of nature. So stirred, the individual forgets himself completely. It is the same Dionysian power which in medieval Germany drove ever increasing crowds of people singing and dancing from place to place; we recognize in these St. John's and St. Vitus' dancers the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks, who had their precursors in Asia Minor and as far back as Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea. There are people who, either from lack of experience or out of sheer stupidity, turn away from such phenomena, and, strong in the sense of their own sanity, label them either mockingly or pityingly "endemic diseases." These benighted souls have no idea how cadaverous and ghostly their "sanity" appears as the intense throng of Dionysian revelers sweeps past them.
Not only does the bond between man and man come to be forged once more by the magic of the Dionysian rite, but nature itself, long alienated or subjugated, rises again to celebrate the reconciliation with her prodigal son, man. The earth offers its gifts voluntarily, and the savage beasts of mountain and desert approach in peace. The chariot of Dionysus is bedecked with flowers and garlands; panthers and tigers stride beneath his yoke. Now the slave emerges as a freeman; all the rigid, hostile walls which either necessity or despotism has erected between men are shattered. Now that the gospel of universal harmony is sounded, each individual becomes not only reconciled to his fellow but actually at one with him - as though the veil of Maya had been torn apart and there remained only shreds floating before the vision of mystical Oneness. Man now expresses himself through song and dance as the member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk, how to speak, and is on the brink of taking wing as he dances. Each of his gestures betokens enchantment; through him sounds a supernatural power, the same power which makes the animals speak and the earth render up milk and honey.

vs.

A dance-song and satire on mine old devil and arch-enemy, who is said to be " lord of the world." I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn: he was the spirit of gravity - through him all things fall.
Not by wrath, but by laughter, do we slay.  Come, let us slay the spirit of gravity!
                  The old God was seized by mortal terror. Man himself had been his greatest blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men godlike - it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes scientific! Moral: science is the forbidden per se; it alone is forbidden. Science is the first of sins, the germ of all sins, the original sin. This is all there is of morality - "Thou shalt not know" - the rest follows from that. God's mortal terror, however, did not hinder him from being shrewd. How is one to protect one's self against science? For a long while this was the capital problem. Answer: Out of paradise with man!  Happiness, leisure, foster thought - and all thoughts are bad thoughts! - Man must not think - and so the priest invents distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of misery, old age, decrepitude, above all, sickness - nothing but devices for making war on science! The troubles of man don't allow him to think. Nevertheless - how terrible!, the edifice of knowledge begins  to tower aloft, invading heaven, shadowing the gods--what is to be  done? - The old God invents war; he separates the peoples; he makes men destroy one another (the priests have always had need of war).  War - among other things, a great disturber of science ! - Incredible! Knowledge, deliverance from the priests, prospers in spite of war. So the old God comes to his final resolution: "Man has become scientific - there is no help for it: he must be drowned!"

What? Is man merely a mistake of God’s? Or is God merely a mistake of man’s?
The concept of "God" was until now the greatest objection to existence. We deny God, we deny the responsibility that originates from God: and thereby we redeem the world.

                  Do ye upbraid me for teaching that there is no reward-giver, nor paymaster?  Verily, I do not even teach that virtue is its own reward.
                  Ah! this is my sorrow:  into the basis of things have reward and punishment been insinuated - and now even into the basis of your souls, ye virtuous ones!
                  But like the snout of the boar shall my word grub up the basis of your souls; a ploughshare will I be called by you.

NITIMUR IN VETITUM
I am Lucifer-Dionysus. I am the Antichrist. I have more pride than the Romans, more pride than Satan himself, who mourns his exile from heaven and forever plots to place himself on the vacant throne of God.
“Je combats l’universelle araignée!”
What we cannot have by faith we will have by magical means: Therefore I have given myself to magic!  Where I can divine, there do I hate to calculate. With Faustian vehemence I have sought to storm the kingdom of riotous living and hold the naked Helen in my arms, crying out with Faust after his violent rape: Feeling is all in all!
                  If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy. Frenzy must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole machine; else there is no art. All kinds of frenzy, however diversely conditioned, have the strength to accomplish this: above all, the frenzy of sexual excitement, this most ancient and original form of frenzy. Also the frenzy that follows all great cravings, all strong affects; the frenzy of feasts, contests, feats of daring, victory, all extreme movement; the frenzy of cruelty; the frenzy in destruction, the frenzy under certain meteorological influences, as for example the frenzy of spring; or under the influence of narcotics; and finally the frenzy of will, the frenzy of an overcharged and swollen will. What is essential in such frenzy is the feeling of increased strength and fullness. A man in this state transforms things until they mirror his power - until they are reflections of his perfection.

The formula of our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.
                  I am a blesser and a Yea-sayer, if thou be but around me, thou pure, thou luminous heaven!  Thou abyss of light! - into all abysses do I then carry my beneficent Yea-saying. The tremendous, unbounded saying of Yes and Amen - this is the concept of Dionysus once again.
                  Said ye ever Yea to one joy? O my friends, then said ye Yea also unto all woe. All things are enlinked, enlaced and enamoured.
                  Verily, it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach that, "above all things there stands the heaven of chance, the heaven of innocence, the heaven of hazard, the heaven of wantonness."
                  Everything goes, everything returns; eternally rolls the wheel of existence.  Everything dies, everything blossoms forth; eternally revolves the year of existence.
                  Everything breaks, everything is formed anew; eternity builds itself the same house of existence.  All things separate, all things again marry; eternally true to itself remains the ring of existence.
                  Every moment begins existence, around every 'Here' rolls the ball 'There.'  The middle is everywhere.  Crooked is the path of eternity.

"Why?" said Zarathustra.  "Thou ask why?  I do not belong to those who may be asked after their Why.
Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are skeptical.  The strength, the freedom which proceed from intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power, manifest themselves as skepticism. A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. Men of fixed convictions do not count when it comes to determining what is fundamental in values and lack of values.  Men of convictions are prisoners. They do not see far enough, they do not see what is below them: whereas a man who would talk to any purpose about value and non-value must be able to see five hundred convictions beneath him - and behind him. Conviction as a means: one may achieve a good deal by means of a conviction. A grand passion makes use of and uses up convictions; it does not yield to them - it knows itself to be sovereign.

Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit. Truth is primarily of the spirit and unglimpsed by they that are only capable of rationalizing their own pig-worlds of outer sensation, never having entered the Aladdin’s cave of interior dread alive with goblins, fairies, unicorns, centaurs, dragons and all the vital, active denizens of the human soul. All these transcendental creatures of the creative imagination they dismiss as mere pathology. To them the tree of Yggdrasil has its roots not in the sky but in a bourgeois pig’s sty.
“Where the tree of knowledge stands, there is always Paradise”: thus speak the oldest and the youngest serpents.

I live in mine own light, I drink again into myself the flames that break forth from me.  A God dances in me.  I learned to walk; since then have I let myself run.  I learned to fly; since then I do not need pushing in order to move from a spot.
                  Where is beauty?  Where I must will with my whole will; where I will love and perish, that an image may not remain merely an image. In the end one loves one’s desire and not what is desired.  Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil.
                  Loving and perishing:  these have rhymed from eternity.  Will to love:  that is to be ready also for death.  Thus do I speak unto you cowards! Die at the right time. Every one regards dying as a great matter:  but as yet death is not a festival. To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death freely chosen, death at the right time, brightly and cheerfully accomplished amid children and witnesses: then a real farewell is still possible, as the one who is taking leave is still there; also a real estimate of what one has achieved and what one has wished, drawing the sum of one's life.

                  I am a law only for mine own; I am not a law for all.  He, however, who belongs unto me must be strong of bone and light of foot, Joyous in fight and feast, no sulker, no John o' Dreams, ready for the hardest task as for the feast, healthy and hale. To speak the truth and shoot well with arrows, that is  virtue.
                  Mine animals are the hawk and serpent, the proudest animal under the sun and the wisest.
                  The best belongs unto mine and me; and if it be not given us, then do we take it: the best food, the purest sky, the strongest thoughts, the fairest women!"

METAMORPH
I teach you the Superman. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man?
                  All being hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and ye want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man?
                  What is ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame.
                  Ye have made your way from worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once were ye apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any of the apes.
The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth!

Three transformations of the spirit do I tell unto you:
how the spirit becomes a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.

SEED
Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong. And whosoever attempts it even with the best right but without inner constraint proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring to the point of recklessness. He enters into the labyrinth, he multiples a thousandfold the dangers which life brings with it in any case, not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes lonely, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing one like that comes to grief, this happens so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it nor sympathize. And he cannot go back any longer. Nor can he go back to the pity of men.
All these heaviest things the load-bearing spirit taketh upon itself: and like the camel, which, when laden, hastens to the desert, so the spirit seeks the desert. The desert where strong, independent spirits withdraw and become lonely - how different it looks from the way educated people imagine a desert! For in some cases they themselves are this desert, these educated people. And it is certain that no actor of the spirit could possibly endure life in it - for them it is not nearly romantic or Syrian enough, not nearly enough of a stage desert! To be sure, there is no lack of asses in it, but that is where the similarity ends.
A philosopher may be recognized by the fact that he avoids three glittering and loud things: fame, princes, and women - which is not to say they do not come to him.
His “maternal” instinct, the secret love of that which is growing in him, directs him toward situations in which he is relieved of the necessity of thinking of himself; in the same sense in which the instinct of the mother in women has hitherto generally kept women in a dependent situation. Ultimately they ask for little enough, these philosophers: their motto is “he who possesses is possessed” - not, as I must say again and again, from virtue, from a laudable will to contentment and simplicity, but because their supreme lord demands this of them, prudently and inexorably: he is concerned with one thing alone, and assembles and saves up everything - time, energy, love, and interest - only for that one thing.
In all these matters - in the choice of nutrition, of place and climate, of recreation - an instinct of self-preservation issues its commandments, and it gains its most unambiguous expression as an instinct of self-defense. Not to see many things, not to hear many things, not to permit many things to come close - first proof that one is no mere accident but a necessity. The usual word for this instinct of self-defense is taste. It commands us to not only to say No when Yes would be “selfless” but also to say No as rarely as possible. To detach oneself, to separate oneself from anything that would make it necessary to keep saying No. The reason in this is that when defensive expenditures, by they ever so small, become the rule and a habit, they entail an extraordinary and entirely superfluous impoverishment. Our great expenses are composed on the most frequent small ones.
Warding off, not letting this come close, involves an expenditure - let nobody deceive himself about this energy wasted on negative ends. Merely through the constant need to ward off, one can become weak enough to be unable to defend oneself any longer.
Every choice human being strives instinctively for a citadel and a secrecy where he is saved from the crowd, the many, the great majority - where he may forget “men who are the rule,” being their exception.
Another counsel of prudence and self-defense is to react as rarely as possible, and to avoid situations and relationships that would condemn one to suspend, as it were, one’s “freedom” and initiative and to become a mere reagent.

                  Do I counsel you to slay your instincts?  I counsel you to innocence in your instincts.
                  Do I counsel you to chastity?  Chastity is a virtue with some, but with many almost a vice.

                  I am much more interested in a question on which the “salvation of humanity” depends far more than on any theologian’s curio: the question of nutrition.
What is it, fundamentally, that allows us to recognize who has turned out well? That a well-turned-out person pleases our senses, that he is carved from wood that is hard, delicate, and at the same time smells good. He has a taste only for what is good for him; his pleasure, his delight ceases where the measure of what is good for him is transgressed. He guess what remedies avail against what is harmful; he exploits bad accidents to his advantage; what does not kill him makes him stronger. Instinctively, he collects from everything he sees, hears, lives through - his sum: he is a principle of selection, he discards much. He is always in his own company, whether he associates with books, human beings, or landscapes: he honors by choosing, by admitting, by trusting.
Whoever wants to know from the adventures of his own authentic experience how a discoverer and conqueror of the ideal feels, and also an artist, a saint, a legislator, a sage, a scholar, a pious man, and one who stands divinely apart in the old style - needs one thing above everything else: the great health - that one does not merely have but also acquires continually, and it must acquire because one gives it up again and again, and must give it up.

As yet thou art not free; thou still seeks freedom.  Too unslept hath thy seeking made thee, and too wakeful.
No small art is it to sleep:  it is necessary for that purpose to keep awake all day.
Ten times a day must thou overcome thyself:  that causes wholesome weariness, and is poppy to the soul.
Ten times must thou reconcile again with thyself; for overcoming is bitterness, and badly sleep the unreconciled.
Ten truths must thou find during the day; otherwise wilt thou seek truth during the night, and thy soul will have been hungry.
Ten times must thou laugh during the day, and be cheerful; otherwise thy stomach, the father of affliction, will disturb thee in the night.
On the open height wouldst thou be; for the stars thirsts thy soul.  But thy bad impulses also thirst for freedom. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthward, downward, into the dark and deep -into the evil. 
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

What is the greatest thing ye can experience?
 It is the hour of great contempt.
 The hour in which even your happiness becomes loathsome unto you, and so also your reason and virtue.

The hour when ye say:  "What good is my happiness!
 It is poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency. 
But my happiness should justify existence itself!"

The hour when ye say:  "What good is my reason! 
Doth it long for knowledge as the lion for his food?
 It is poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency!"

The hour when ye say:  "What good is my virtue! 
As yet it hath not made me passionate.  How weary I am of my good and my bad! 
It is all poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency!"

The hour when ye say:  "What good is my justice!
 I do not see that I am fervour and fuel. 
The just, however, are fervour and fuel!"

The hour when we say:  "What good is my pity!
 Is not pity the cross on which he is nailed who loves man?
 But my pity is not a crucifixion."

                  A heretic wilt thou be to thyself, and a wizard and a sooth-sayer, and a fool, and a doubter, and a reprobate, and a villain,  as carried away by curiosity, we cheerfully vivisect our souls.
                  Ready must thou be to burn in thine own flame; how couldst thou become new if thou have not first become ashes!
Thy wild dogs want liberty; they bark for joy in their cellar when thy spirit strives to open all prison doors.

PRIME
Here in the loneliest wilderness happens the second metamorphosis:  here the spirit becomes a lion; freedom will it capture, and lordship in its own wilderness. He who is hated by the people, as is the wolf by dogs - is the free spirit, the enemy of fetters, the non-adorer, the dweller in the woods.
                  To hunt him out of his lair - that was always called “sense of right” by the people:  on him do they still hound their sharpest-toothed dogs.
                  Hungry, fierce, lonesome, God-forsaken:  so doth the lion-will wish itself. Like a storm do these suns pursue their courses:  that is their traveling.  Their inexorable will do they follow:  that is their coldness.
                  Free from the happiness of slaves, redeemed from Deities and adorations, fearless and fear-inspiring, grand and lonesome:  so is the will of the conscientious.
Its last Lord it here seeks:  hostile will it be to him, and to its last God; for victory will it struggle with the great dragon.
What is the great dragon the spirit is no longer inclined to call Lord and God?  “Thou-shalt,” is the great dragon called.  But the spirit of the lion says, “I will.” “Nothing is true; everything is permitted.”
                  “To live as I please, or not to live at all”: so do I wish, so wishes also the holiest. Aye, for the game of creating, my brethren, there is needed a holy Yea unto life:  its own will, wills now the spirit; the world's outcast wins his own world.
                  Become what thou art!

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman - a rope over an abyss.
                  A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.
                  What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is a transition and a going-down.
                  I love those that know not how to live except as willing victims, for they will bridge the gulf.
                  I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.
                  I love him who makes his virtue, his inclination and destiny: this, for the sake of his virtue, he is willing to love on, or live no more.
                  I love him who desires not too many virtues. One virtue is more of a virtue than two, because it is more of  a knot for one’s destiny to cling to.
                  I love him whose soul is lavish, who wants no thanks and doth not give back: for he always bestows, and desires not to keep for himself.
                  I love him who justifies the future ones, and redeems the past ones: for he is willing to succumb through the present ones.
                  I love him whose soul so overflows that he forgets himself, and all things are in him: thus all things draw him downwards.
                  Lo, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop out of the cloud: the lightning, however, is the Superman.

Every man is born a prisoner of his own length, breadth and depth of consciousness. How long he lasts depends on how long it takes him to achieve a fourth dimension, or, in the language of the populace, the identity of his own soul. Perhaps the only way to achieve grace is to place oneself in front of a swiftly approaching train. To venture into all sorts of situations in which one may not have any sham virtues, where, like the tightrope walker on his rope, one either stands or falls - or gets away.
How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare? More and more that becomes for me the real measure of value. Error (faith in the ideal) is not blindness, error is cowardice. Every attainment, every step forward in knowledge, follows from courage, from hardness against oneself, from cleanliness in relation to oneself.
                  One should not dodge one’s tests, though they may be the most dangerous game one could play and are tests that are taken in the end before no witness or judge but ourselves. Under peaceful conditions a warlike man sets upon himself.
                  It is the surrender of the greatest to run risk and danger, and play dice for death.

NOVA
Tell me, my brethren, what the child can do, which even the lion could not do?  Why hath the preying lion still to become a child?
A man’s maturity - consists in having found against the seriousness one had as child, at play.  Nothing succeeds if prankishness has no part in it. Excess of strength alone is proof of strength.
                  Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea.  Thou must yet become a child, and be without shame. Consecrate your laughter. Learn to love oneself; of all arts the finest, subtlest, and last.
                  The purest are to be masters of the world, the least known, the strongest, the midnight-souls, who are brighter and deeper than any day. Courage for the forbidden; predestination to the labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New  eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained unheard.  And the will to economize in the grand  manner - keeping our strength, our enthusiasm in harness. Reverence for self; love of self; absolute freedom of self.
                  It be my Alpha and Omega that everything heavy shall become light, every body a dancer, and every spirit a bird:  and verily, that is my Alpha and Omega!
                  Oh, how could I not be ardent for Eternity, and for the marriage-ring of rings - the ring of the return?
                  Never yet have I found the woman by whom I should like to have children, unless it be this woman whom I love:  for I love thee, O Eternity!
                  For I love thee, O Eternity!

ECCE HOMO
I am no man, I am dynamite - yet for all that, there is nothing in me of a founder of a religion - religions are affairs of the rabble; I find it necessary to wash my hands after I have come into contact with religious people - Iwant no “believers”; I think I am too malicious to believe in myself; I never speak to masses - I have a terrible fear that one day I will be pronounced holy: you will guess why I publish this book before; it shall prevent people from doing mischief with me.  I need only the small readership which builds up the world or tears it down.
It is the stillest words which bring the storm.  Thoughts that come with doves' footsteps guide the world. It must seem blessedness to you to impress your hand on millennia as on wax.
Let us look ahead a century, into the many dawns that have not yet glowed.; let us suppose that my attempt to assassinate two millennia of antinature and desecration of man were to succeed. That new party of life which would tackle the greatest of all tasks, the attempt to raise humanity high, including the relentless destruction of everything that was degenerating and parasitical, would again make possible that excess of life on earth from which the Dionysian state, too, would awake again. I promise a tragic age: the highest art in saying Yes to life, tragedy, will be reborn when humanity has weathered the consciousness of the hardest but most necessary wars without suffering from it.
                  We, whose task is wakefulness itself - we do not at all want to enter into the kingdom of heaven: we have become men - so we want the kingdom of earth.
                  Ye lonesome ones of today, ye seceding ones, ye shall one day be a people: out of you who have chosen yourselves, shall a chosen people arise - and out of it the Superman.
He must yet come to us, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit whose compelling strength will not let him rest in any aloofness or any beyond, whose isolation is misunderstood by the people as if it were flight from reality - while it is only his absorption, immersion, penetration into reality, so that, when he one day emerges again into the light, he may bring home the redemption of this reality: its redemption from the curse that the hitherto reigning ideal has laid upon it. This man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichirst and antinihilist; this victor over God and nothingness - he must come one day.

I am only one voice in a chorus of millions of voices, one thought amidst thousands of thousands clamoring ponderously to be heard above me, a heart of flesh in a universe of flying comets and meteors . . .
I called myself the enemy of all churches and priests
remember it to my honor
I have cried out against the democratic trend of my time to jell up humanity into one vast shrinking Chandala
would you have me keep silent about something so scandalous?
I love Man.

Over what unpath’d roads was I to travel with long distance to nowhere with my passport written in vanishing ink and sealed with the blood of a patriarch who lived a whole lifetime on black olives.

                  Amongst men will my sun set; in dying will I give them my choicest gift!
                  From the sun did I learn this, when it goes down, the exuberant one:  gold doth it then pour into the sea, out of inexhaustible riches, so that the poorest fisherman rows with golden oars!  For this did I once see, and did not tire of weeping in beholding it .

A wicked archer I’ve become - the ends of my bow kiss;
Only the strongest bends his bow like this
The world now laughs, rent are the drapes of fright
The wedding is at hand of dark and light -

Sing me a new song: the world is transfigured and all the heavens rejoice.

                  Ariadne, I love thee
                                   I am your labyrinth

Dionysus versus the Crucified

Friedrich Nietzsche

                                                                                          October 15, 1844 - August 25, 1900