It is possible I can make very little of myself; but this little is everything, and better than what I allow to be made out of me by the might of others, by the training of custom, religion, the laws, the State.
Now it is clear, God cares only for what is his, busies himself only with himself, thinks only of himself, and has only himself before his eyes; woe to all that is not well pleasing to him. He serves no higher person, and satisfies only himself. His cause is – a purely egoistic cause.
What else was Diogenes of Sinope seeking for than the true enjoyment of life, which he discovered in having the least possible wants?
Just observe the nation that is defended by devoted patriots. The patriots fall in bloody battle or in the fight with hunger and want; what does the nation care for that? By the manure of their corpses the nation comes to “its bloom”! The individuals have died “for the great cause of the nation,” and the nation sends some words of thanks after them and – has the profit of it. I call that a paying kind of egoism.
Now do you suppose unselfishness is unreal and nowhere extant? On the contrary, nothing is more ordinary! One may even call it an article of fashion in the civilized world, which is considered so indispensable that, if it cost too much in solid material, people adorn themselves with its counterfeit tinsel and feign it.
If religion has set up the proposition that we are sinners altogether, I set over against it the other: we are perfect altogether! For we are, every moment, all that we can be; and we never need be more.
Our athiests are pious people.
Moral spontaneity” corresponds entirely with “religious and orthodox philosophy”, “constitutional monarchy”, “the Christian state”, “freedom with certain limits”, or in a figure, to the hero fetters to a sick bed.
The true human being doesn’t lie in the future, an object of longing, but rather it lies in the present, existing and actual. However and whoever I may be, joyful and sorrowful, a child or an old man, in confidence or doubt, asleep or awake, I am it. I am the true human being.
I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I respect nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property!
Moral influence takes its start where humiliation begins; yes, it is nothing else than this humiliation itself, the breaking and bending of the temper down to humility.
Man, you see, is not a person, but an ideal, a spook.
Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea!
Entitled or unentitled – that does not concern me, if I am only powerful, I am of myself empowered, and need no other empowering and entitling.
I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.
He who has might has – right; if you have not the former, neither have you the latter. Is this wisdom so hard to attain?
To the believer, truths are a settled thing, a fact; to the freethinker, a thing that is still to be settled.
Language or “the word” tyrannizes hardest over us, because it brings up against us a whole army of fixed ideas.
I say: liberate yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part; for it is not given to every one to break through all limits, or, more expressively, not to everyone is that a limit which is a limit for the rest. Consequently, do not tire yourself with toiling at the limits of others; enough if you tear down yours.
In short, the critic is not an owner, because he still struggles with ideas as with powerful strangers, as the Christian is not the owner of his “bad desires” as long as he has to fight them; for the one who battles against vice, vice exists.
Who is this person that you call “All”? – It is “society”! – But is it corporeal, then? – We are its body! – You? Why, you are not a body yourselves; – you, sir, are corporeal to be sure, you too, and you, but you all together are only bodies, not a body. Accordingly the united society may indeed have bodies at its service, but no one body of its own. Like the “nation” of the politicians, it will turn out to be nothing but a “spirit,” its body only semblance.