Link: http://www.lexido.com/EBOOK_TEXTS/BEYOND_GOOD_AND_EVIL.aspx

Quotes:

  • Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.

  • Independence is an issue that concerns very few people—it is a prerogative of the strong. And even when somebody has every right to be independent, if he attempts such a thing without having to do so, he proves that he is probably not only strong, but brave to the point of madness.

  • Mature manhood: that means to have rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play.

  • Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.

  • Is life not a hundred times too short to be bored in it?

  • In man, creature and creator are united. In man, there is not only matter, shred, excess, clay, mire, folly, chaos; but there is also the creator, the sculptor, the hardness of the hammer, the divinity of the spectator, and the seventh day. Do you understand this contrast?

  • If we must have virtues, we shall have only those which have come to agreement with our most secret and heartfelt inclinations, with our most ardent requirements.

  • The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness—was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

  • The great epochs of our life are at the points when we gain courage to rebaptize our badness as the best in us.

  • Let us acknowledge, without prejudice, how every higher civilization hitherto has originated! Men with a still natural nature, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey, still in possession of unbroken strength of will and desire for power, threw themselves upon weaker, more moral, more peaceful races (perhaps trading or cattle-rearing communities), or upon old mellow civilizations in which the final vital force was flickering out in brilliant fireworks of wit and depravity. At the beginning, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their superiority did not consist first of all in their physical, but in their psychical power—they were more complete men (which at every point also implies the same as “more complete beasts”).