War to the death against depravity - depravity is Christianity |
We advance our race by creating truth and imposing it on the world. |
We are franker towards others than towards ourselves |
We artists! We moon-struck and God-struck ones! We death-silent, untiring wanderers on heights which we do not see as heights, but as our plains, as our places of safety! |
We create truth, we don't discover it. |
We do not belong to those who only get their thought from books, or at the prompting of books, -- it is our custom to think in the open air, walking, leaping, climbing, or dancing on lonesome mountains by preference, or close to the sea, where even the paths become thoughtful. |
We do not place especial value on the possession of a virtue until we notice its total absence in our opponent. |
We find nothing easier than being wise, patient, superior. We drip with the oil of forbearance and sympathy, we are absurdly just, we forgive everything. For that very reason we ought to discipline ourselves a little; for that very reason we ought to cultivate a little emotion, a little emotional vice, from time to time. It may be hard for us; and among ourselves we may perhaps laugh at the appearance we thus present. But what of that! We no longer have any other mode of self-overcoming available to us: this is our asceticism, our penance. |
We have art in order not to die of the truth. |
We have art to save ourselves from the truth. |
We have no organ at all for knowledge, for ''truth'': we ''know'' (or believe or imagine) precisely as much as may be useful in the interest of the human herd, the species: and even what is here called ''usefulness'' is in the end only a belief, something imagined and perhaps precisely that most fatal piece of stupidity by which we shall one day perish. |
We must be physicists in order to be creative since so far codes of values and ideals have been constructed in ignorance of physics or even in contradiction to physics. |
We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us. |
We operate with nothing but things which do not exist, with lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time, divisible space -- how should explanation even be possible when we first make everything into an image, into our own image! |
We praise or blame as one or the other affords more opportunity for exhibiting our power of judgment. |