235

want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati:2 let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation.3 And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

46

You see that I do not want to take leave ungratefully from that time of severe sickness whose profits I have not yet exhausted even today. I am very conscious of the advantages that my fickle health gives me over all robust squares.3 A philosopher who has traversed many kinds of health, and keeps traversing them, has passed through an equal number of philosophies; he simply cannot keep from transposing his states every time into the most spiritual form and distance: this art of transfiguration is philosophy. We philosophers are not free to divide body from soul as the people do; we are even less free to divide soul from spirit. We are not thinking frogs, nor objectifying and registering mechanisms with their innards removed: constantly, we have to give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and, like mothers, endow them with all we have of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and catastrophe. Life —that means for us constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame4 —also everything that wounds us; we simply can do no other. And as for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it?5 Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit, being the teacher of the great suspicion that turns every U into an X, a real, genuine X, that is the letter before the penultimate one.6

47

Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time—on which we are burned, as it were, with green wood—compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and to put aside all trust, everything good-natured, everything that would interpose a veil, that is mild, that is medium—things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such pain makes us “better”; but I know that it makes us more profound.

47

Whether we learn to pit our pride, our scorn, our will power against it, equaling the American Indian who, however tortured, repays his torturer with the malice of his tongue; or whether we withdraw from pain into that Oriental Nothing—called Nirvana—into mute, rigid, deaf resignation, self-forgetting, self-extinction: out of such long and dangerous exercises of self-mastery one emerges as a different person, with a few more question marks—above all with the will henceforth to question further, more deeply, severely, harshly, evilly and quietly than one had questioned heretofore. The trust in life is gone: life itself has become a problem. Yet one should not jump to the conclusion that this necessarily makes one gloomy. Even love of life is still possible, only one loves differently. It is the love for a woman that causes doubts in us.

47

The attraction of everything problematic, the delight in an x, however, is so great in such more spiritual, more spiritualized men that this delight flares up again and again like a bright blaze over all the distress of what is problematic, over all the danger of uncertainty, and even over the jealousy of the lover. We know a new happiness.

89

Evil.— Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence do not belong among the favorable conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is scarcely possible. The poison of which weaker natures perish strengthens the strong15

—nor do they call it poison.

287

If you, who adhere to this religion, have the same attitude toward yourselves that you have toward your fellow men; if you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you even for an hour and if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible distress way ahead of time; if you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that besides your religion of pity you also harbor another religion in your heart that is perhaps the mother of the religion of pity; the religion of comfortableness. How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable and benevolent people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together. But now back to the first question!

48

In the end, lest what is most important remain unsaid: from such abysses, from such severe sickness, also from the sickness of severe suspicion, one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin, more ticklish and malicious, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a tenderer tongue for all good things, with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before.

49

And as for our future, one will hardly find us again on the paths of those Egyptian youths who endanger temples by night, embrace statues, and want by all means to unveil, uncover, and put into a bright light whatever is kept concealed for good reasons.7 No, this bad taste, this will to truth, to “truth at any price,” this youthful madness in the love of truth, have lost their charm for us: for that we are too experienced, too serious, too merry, too burned, too profound. We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn; we have lived too much to believe this. Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and “know” everything.

49

“Is it true that God is present everywhere?” a little girl asked her mother; “I think that’s indecent”—a hint for philosophers! One should have more respect for the bashfulness with which nature has hidden behind riddles and iridescent uncertainties. Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not letting us see her reasons? Perhaps her name is—to speak Greek—Baubo?8

111

Knowledge of misery.— Perhaps there is nothing that separates men or ages more profoundly than a difference in their knowledge of misery: misery of the soul as well as the body. Regarding the latter we moderns may well be, all of us, in spite of our frailties and infirmities, tyros who rely on fantasies, for lack of any ample firsthand experience—compared to the age of fear, the longest of all ages, in which individuals had to protect themselves. In those days, one received ample training in bodily torments and deprivations and one understood even a certain cruelty against oneself and a voluntary habituation to pain as a necessary means of self-preservation. In those days, one educated those close to one to endure pain; in those days, one enjoyed inflicting pain and saw the worst things of this kind happen to others without feeling anything but—one’s own safety. But regarding misery of the soul, I now look at every person to see whether he knows this from experience or only from descriptions; whether he still considers it necessary to simulate this knowledge, say, as a sign of refinement, or whether at the bottom of his soul he no longer believes in great pains of the soul and has much the same experience when they are mentioned that he has at the mention of great physical sufferings, which make him think of his own toothaches and stomachaches. But that is how matters seem to me to stand with most people today.

111

The general lack of experience of pain of both kinds and the relative rarity of the sight of anyone who is suffering have an important consequence: pain is now hated much more than was the case formerly; one speaks much worse of it; indeed, one considers the existence of the mere thought of pain scarcely endurable and turns it into a reproach against the whole of existence.

112

The emergence of pessimistic philosophies39 is by no means a sign of great and terrible misery. No, these question marks about the value of all life are put up in ages in which the refinement and alleviation of existence make even the inevitable mosquito bites of the soul and the body seem much too bloody and malignant and one is so poor in real experiences of pain that one would like to consider painful general ideas40 as suffering of the first order.

112

There is a recipe against pessimistic philosophers and the excessive sensitivity that seems to me the real “misery of the present age”—but this recipe may sound too cruel and might itself be counted among the signs that lead people to judge that “existence is something evil.” Well, the recipe against this “misery” is: misery.41

113

The argument of growing solitude.— The reproaches of conscience are weak even in the most conscientious people compared to the feeling: “This or that is against the morals of your society.” A cold look or a sneer on the face of those among whom and for whom one has been educated is feared even by the strongest. What is it that they are really afraid of? Growing solitude! This is the argument that rebuts even the best arguments for a person or cause. —Thus the herd instinct speaks up in us.

114

Where the good begins.—Where the poor power of the eye can no longer see the evil impulse as such because it has become too subtle, man posits the realm of goodness; and the feeling that we have now entered the realm of goodness excites all those impulses which had been threatened and limited by the evil impulses, like the feeling of security, of comfort, of benevolence. Hence, the duller the eye, the more extensive the good. Hence the eternal cheerfulness of the common people and of children. Hence the gloominess and grief—akin to a bad conscience—of the great thinkers.43

“Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer of reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling. And being restrain’d it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire”

110

On the suppression of the passions.—If one continually forbids oneself the expression of the passions as if that were something to be left to “common,” coarser, bourgeois or peasant types—desiring to suppress not the passions themselves but only their language and gestures—the result is nevertheless precisely what is not desired: the suppression of the passions themselves or at least their weakening and alteration. The most instructive example is furnished by the court of Louis XIV and all the circles that were dependent on the court. The period that followed, having been educated to suppress their expression, lacked the passions themselves and had in their place graceful, shallow, playful manners. It was an age marked by the incapacity for bad manners: even an insult was accepted and returned with obliging words. Perhaps our present age furnishes the most remarkable counterpart: everywhere, in life and on the stage, and not least of all in everything that is written, I see the delight in all the coarser eruptions and gestures of passion. What is demanded nowadays is a certain convention of passionateness—anything but genuine passion! Nevertheless, eventually passion itself will be reached this way, and our descendants will not only indulge in savage and unruly forms, but will be really savage.

103

Heresy and witchcraft.— Thinking in a way that is not customary is much less the result of a superior intellect than it is the result of strong, evil inclinations that detach and isolate one, and that are defiant, nasty, and malicious. Heresy is the pendant of witchcraft and surely no more harmless and least of all anything essentially venerable. Heretics and witches are two species of evil human beings; what they have in common is that they also feel that they are evil but are impelled by an unconquerable lust to harm what is dominant (whether people or opinions). The Reformation, which was in a way a redoubled intensification of the medieval spirit, at a time when that was no longer accompanied by a good conscience, produced both in the greatest abundance.

99

The man of renunciation.23— What does the man of renunciation do? He strives for a higher world, he wants to fly further and higher than all men of affirmation—he throws away much that would encumber his flight, including not a little that he esteems and likes; he sacrifices it to his desire for the heights. This sacrificing, this throwing way, however, is precisely what alone becomes visible and leads people to call him the man of renunciation: it is as such that he confronts us, shrouded in his hood, as if he were the soul of a hairshirt. But he is quite satisfied with the impression he makes on us: he wants to conceal from us his desire, his pride, his intention to soar beyond us. —Yes, he is cleverer than we thought and so polite to us—this man of affirmation. For that is what he is, no less than we, even in his renunciation.

100

To be harmful with what is best in us.— At times, our strengths propel us so far forward that we can no longer endure our weaknesses and perish from them. We may even foresee this outcome without wishing to have it otherwise. Thus we become hard against everything in us that desires consideration, and our greatness is also our lack of compassion.

100

Such an experience, for which we must pay in the end with our lives, is a parable for the whole effect of great human beings on others and on their age: precisely with what is best in them, with what only they can do, they destroy many who are weak, unsure, still in the process of becoming, of striving; and thus they are harmful. It can even happen that, everything considered, they are only harmful because what is best in them is accepted and absorbed by those alone whom it affects like a drink that is too strong: they lose their understanding and their selfishness and become so intoxicated that they are bound to break their limbs on all the false paths on which their intoxication leads them astray.

99

Not predestined for knowledge.— There is a stupid humility that is not at all rare, and those afflicted with it are altogether unfit to become devotees of knowledge. As soon as a person of this type perceives something striking, he turns on his heel, as it were, and says to himself: “You have made a mistake. What is the matter with your senses? This cannot, may not, be the truth.” And then, instead of looking and listening again, more carefully, he runs away from the striking thing, as if he had been intimidated, and tries to remove it from his mind as fast as he can. For his inner canon says: “I do not want to see anything that contradicts the prevalent opinion. Am I called to discover new truths? There are too many old ones, as it is.”

82

On the aim of science.— What? The aim of science should be to give men as much pleasure and as little displeasure as possible? But what if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other—that whoever wanted to learn to “jubilate up to the heavens” would also have to be prepared for “depression unto death”?9 And that is how things may well be. At least the Stoics believed that this was how things were, and they were consistent when they also desired as little pleasure as possible, in order to get as little displeasure as possible out of life. (When they kept saying “The virtuous man is the happiest man,” this was both the school’s eye-catching sign for the great mass and a casuistic subtlety for the subtle.)

83

To this day you have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief—and in the last analysis socialists and politicians of all parties have no right to promise their people more than that—or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet. If you decide for the former and desire to diminish and lower the level of human pain, you also have to diminish and lower the level of their capacity for joy. Actually, science can promote either goal. So far it may still be better known for its power of depriving man of his joys and making him colder, more like a statue, more stoic. But it might yet be found to be the great dispenser of pain. And then its counterforce might be found at the same time: its immense capacity for making new galaxies of joy flare up.

286

The will to suffer and those who feel pity.— Is it good for you yourselves to be above all full of pity? And is it good for those who suffer? But let us leave the first question unanswered for a moment.

286

Our personal and profoundest suffering is incomprehensible and inaccessible to almost everyone; here we remain hidden from our neighbor, even if we eat from one pot. But whenever people notice that we suffer, they interpret our suffering superficially. It is the very essence of the emotion of pity that it strips away from the suffering of others whatever is distinctively personal. Our “benefactors” are, more than our enemies, people who make our worth and will smaller. When people try to benefit someone in distress, the intellectual frivolity with which those moved by pity assume the role of fate is for the most part outrageous; one simply knows nothing of the whole inner sequence and intricacies that are distress for me or for you. The whole economy of my soul and the balance effected by “distress,” the way new springs and needs break open, the way in which old wounds are healing, the way whole periods of the past are shed—all such things that may be involved in distress are of no concern to our dear pitying friends; they wish to help and have no thought of the personal necessity of distress, although terrors, deprivations, impoverishments, midnights, adventures, risks, and blunders are as necessary for me and for you as are their opposites. It never occurs to them that, to put it mystically, the path to one’s own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one’s own hell. No, the “religion of pity” (or “the heart”) commands them to help, and they believe that they have helped most when they have helped most quickly.

288

How is it at all possible to keep to one’s own way? Constantly, some clamor or other calls us aside; rarely does our eye behold anything that does not require us to drop our own preoccupation instantly to help. I know, there are a hundred decent and praiseworthy ways of losing my own way, and they are truly highly “moral”! Indeed, those who now preach the morality of pity even take the view that precisely this and only this is moral—to lose one’s own way in order to come to the assistance of a neighbor. I know just as certainly that I only need to expose myself to the sight of some genuine distress and I am lost. And if a suffering friend said to me, “Look, I am about to die; please promise me to die with me,” I should promise it; and the sight of a small mountain tribe fighting for its liberty would persuade me to offer it my hand and my life— if for good reasons I may choose for once two bad examples. All such arousing of pity and calling for help is secretly seductive, for our “own way” is too hard and demanding and too remote from the love and gratitude of others, and we do not really mind escaping from it—and from our very own conscience—to flee into the conscience of the others and into the lovely temple of the “religion of pity.”

289

As soon as any war breaks out anywhere, there also breaks out precisely among the noblest people a pleasure that, to be sure, is kept secret: Rapturously, they throw themselves into the new danger of death because the sacrifice for the fatherland seems to them to offer the long desired permission—to dodge their goal; war offers them a detour to suicide, but a detour with a good conscience. And while I shall keep silent about some points, I do not want to remain silent about my morality which says to me: Live in seclusion so that you can live for yourself. Live in ignorance about what seems most important to your age. Between yourself and today lay the skin of at least three centuries. And the clamor of today, the noise of wars and revolutions should be a mere murmur for you. You will also wish to help—but only those whose distress you understand entirely because they share with you one suffering and one hope —your friends—and only in the manner in which you help yourself.

289

I want to make them bolder, more persevering, simpler, gayer. I want to teach them what is understood by so few today, least of all by these preachers of pity: to share not suffering but joy.68

Note: quite compassionate of you Nietzsche 

188

Herd instinct.— Wherever we encounter a morality, we also encounter valuations and an order of rank of human impulses and actions. These valuations and orders of rank are always expressions of the needs of a community and herd: whatever benefits it most—and second most, and third most—that is also considered the first standard for the value of all individuals. Morality trains the individual to be a function of the herd and to ascribe value to himself only as a function. The conditions for the preservation of different communities were very different; hence there were very different moralities. Considering essential changes in the forms of future herds and communities, states and societies, we can prophesy that there will yet be very divergent moralities. Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

189

Herd remorse.— During the longest and most remote periods of the human past, the sting of conscience was not at all what it is now. Today one feels responsible only for one’s will and actions, and one finds one’s pride in oneself. All our teachers of law start from this sense of self and pleasure in the individual as if this had always been the fount of law. But during the longest period of the human past nothing was more terrible than to feel that one stood by oneself. To be alone, to experience things by oneself, neither to obey nor to rule, to be an individual—that was not a pleasure but a punishment; one was sentenced “to individuality.”10 Freedom of thought was considered discomfort itself. While we experience law and submission as compulsion and loss, it was egoism that was formerly experienced as something painful and as real misery. To be a self and to esteem oneself according to one’s own weight and measure—that offended taste in those days. An inclination to do this would have been considered madness; for being alone was associated with every misery and fear. In those days, “free will” was very closely associated with a bad conscience; and the more unfree one’s actions were and the more the herd instinct rather than any personal sense found expression in an action, the more moral one felt. Whatever harmed the herd, whether the individual had wanted it or not wanted it, prompted the sting of conscience in the individual—and in his neighbor, too, and even in the whole herd. —There is no point on which we have learned to think and feel more differently.

190

Benevolence.— Is it virtuous when a cell transforms itself into a function of a stronger cell? It has no alternative. And is it evil when the stronger cell assimilates the weaker? It also has no alternative; it follows necessity, for it strives for superabundant substitutes and wants to regenerate itself. Hence we should make a distinction in benevolence between the impulse to appropriate and the impulse to submit, and ask whether it is the stronger or the weaker that feels benevolent. Joy and desire appear together in the stronger that wants to transform something into a function; joy and the wish to be desired appear together in the weaker that wants to become a function.

Pity is essentially of the former type: an agreeable impulse of the instinct for appropriation at the sight of what is weaker. But it should be kept in mind that “strong” and “weak” are relative concepts.

194

In the horizon of the infinite.— We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us—indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity.19 Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom—and there is no longer any “land.”

199

Pessimists as victims— Wherever a deep discontent with existence becomes prevalent, it is the aftereffects of some great dietary mistake made by a whole people over a long period of time that are coming to light. Thus the spread of Buddhism (not its origin) depended heavily on the excessive and almost exclusive reliance of the Indians on rice which led to a general loss of vigor. Perhaps the modern European discontent is due to the fact that our forefathers were given to drinking through the entire Middle Ages, thanks to the effects on Europe of the Teutonic taste. The Middle Ages meant the alcohol poisoning of Europe. —The German discontent with life is essentially a winter sickness that is worsened by the effects of stuffy cellar air and the poison of stove fumes in German living rooms.23

180

New struggles.— After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead;1 but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. —And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.

222

1 This is the first occurrence of this famous formulation in Nietzsche’s books We encounter it again in section 125 below, which has been anthologized again and again after it was quoted in the chapter on “The Death of God and the Revaluation” in the first edition of Kaufmann (1950), and then included in The Portable Nietzsche. It even brought into being a predictably stillborn movement in Christian theology that created a short-lived sensation in the United States But most of those who have made so much of Nietzsche’s pronouncement that “God is dead” have failed to take note of its other occurrences in his works which obviously furnish the best clues to his meaning. The most important passages include section 343 below and seven passages in Zarathustra (VPN, pp 124f., 191, 202, 294, 371-79, 398f., and 426) This list includes only places in which death or dying are mentioned expressly No less important are sections 109-56.

194

The madman.— Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!” —As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter.

195

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers.

195

“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?

195

What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.”

196

“I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.”

311

The meaning of our cheerfulness.1— The greatest recent event—that “God is dead,”2 that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable3—is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. For the few at least, whose eyes—the suspicion in whose eyes is strong and subtle enough for this spectacle, some sun seems to have set4 and some ancient and profound trust has been turned into doubt; to them our old world must appear daily more like evening, more mistrustful, stranger, “older.” But in the main one may say: The event itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude’s capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet. Much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event really means —and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it; for example, the whole of our European morality. This long plenitude and sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm5 that is now impending—who could guess enough of it today to be compelled to play the teacher and advance proclaimer of this monstrous logic of terror, the prophet of a gloom and an eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth?

312

Even we born guessers of riddles who are, as it were, waiting on the mountains,6 posted between today and tomorrow, stretched in the contradiction between today and tomorrow, we firstlings and premature births of the coming century, to whom the shadows that must soon envelop Europe really should have appeared by now—why is it that even we look forward to the approaching gloom without any real sense of involvement and above all without any worry and fear for ourselves?7 Are we perhaps still too much under the impression of the initial consequences of this event—and these initial consequences, the consequences for ourselves, are quite the opposite of what one might perhaps expect: They are not at all sad and gloomy but rather like a new and scarcely describable kind of light, happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement, dawn.

312

Indeed, we philosophers and “free spirits” feel, when we hear the news that “the old god is dead,” as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an “open sea.”—8