One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people.
New ways I go, a new speech comes to me; weary I grow, like all creators, of the old tongues. My spirit no longer wants to walk on worn soles.
The will to incessant creation is vulgar, betraying jealousy, envy, and ambition. Assuming that you are something, there is really nothing that you need to do-and yet you do a great deal. Above the “productive” man there is still a higher type.
Acknowledge your will and speak to us all, “This alone is what I will to be!” Hang your own penal code up above you: we want to be its enforcers!
The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race can no more be exterminated than the flea can be. The last man lives the longest.
Those people have no real interest in a science who only begin to get excited about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.
The inclination to self-depreciation, to freely accepting being robbed, being duped, and being swindled, could be the modesty of a god among men.
Moral sensibilities are nowadays at such cross-purposes that to one man a morality is proved by its utility, while to another its utility refutes it.
Whether we immoralists do any harm to virtue?-Just as little as anarchists do to princes. It is only because they have been shot at that they once again sit securely on their thrones. Moral: we must shoot at morals.
Three metamorphoses of the spirit I relate to you: how the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child.
Posthumous men-myself, for example-are not as well understood as timely ones, but we are listened to better. More precisely: we are never understood-hence our authority.
I love something: and scarcely do I love it completely when the tyrant in me says: “I want that in sacrifice.” This cruelty is in my entrails. Behold! I am evil.
The greatest progress that the human race has made lies in learning how to make correct inferences.
With regard to philosophical metaphysics, I always see increasing numbers who have attained to the negative goal, but as yet few who climb a few rungs backwards; one ought to look out, perhaps, over the last steps of the ladder, but not try to stand upon them.
You implanted your highest goal into the heart of those passions: then they became your virtues and joys.
Yet tell me, my brothers: if a goal for humanity is still lacking, is there not still lacking – humanity itself?
For out of fear and need each religion is born, creeping into existence on the byways or reason.
The destiny of the human race is to widen the gap separating it from the lower races of animals. Any code of morality which retains its permanence and authority after the conditions of existence which gave rise to it have changed, works against this upward progress of man.
When a nation is on the downward path, when it feels its belief in its own future, its hope of freedom slipping from it, when it begins to see submission as a first necessity and the virtues of submission as measures of self-preservation, then it must overhaul its God.
Socrates condemned art because he preferred philosophy and only after much internal struggle did Plato accept this judgment.