New domestic animals. I want to have my lion and my eagle about me, that I may always have hints and premonitions concerning the amount of my strength or weakness. Must I look down on them today, and be afraid of them? And will the hour come once more when they will look up to me, and tremble?
One is not converted to christianity; one must be morbid enough for it.
Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves.
In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.
"Faith" means the will to avoid knowing what is true.
As long as a man knows very well the strength and weaknesses of his teaching, his art, his religion, its power is still slight. The pupil and apostle who, blinded by the authority of the master and by the piety he feels toward him, pays no attention to the weaknesses of a teaching, a religion, and soon usually has for that reason more power than the master. The influence of a man has never yet grown great without his blind pupils. To help a perception to achieve victory often means merely to unite it with stupidity so intimately that the weight of the latter also enforces the victory of the former.
Aesthetic Socratism, the chief law of which is, more or less: "to be beautiful everything must first be intelligible", a parallel to the Socratic dictum: "only the one who knows is virtuous."
This secret spoke life herself unto me: behold, said she, I am that which must ever surpass itself.
The homogenizing of European man requires a justification: it lies in serving a higher sovereign species that stands upon the former which can raise itself to its task only by doing this. Not merely a master race whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength, strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative.
Do you believe then that the sciences would have arisen and grown up if the sorcerers, alchemists, astrologers and witches had not been their forerunners; those who, with their promisings and foreshadowings, had first to create a thirst, a hunger, and a taste for hidden and forbidden powers?