Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain? The ability to suffer is a small matter: in that line, weak women and even slaves often attain masterliness. But not to perish from internal distress and doubt when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of it that is great, that belongs to greatness.
Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys! They clamber over one another and thus drag one another into the mud and the depth. They all want to get to the throne: that is their madness — as if happiness sat on the throne. Often, mud sits on the throne — and often the throne also on mud. Mad they all appear to me, clambering monkeys and overardent. Foul smells their idol, the cold monster: foul, they smell to me altogether, these idolators.
God is a too palpably clumsy answer; an answer which shows a lack of delicacy towards us thinkers-fundamentally, even a crude prohibition to us: you shall not think!
This is one of the stout-hearted old warriors: he is angry with civilization because he supposes that its aim is to make all goodthings--honors, treasures, beautiful women--accessible even to cowards.
The refinement of morality increases together with the refinement of fear. Today the fear of disagreeable feelings in other people is almost the strongest of our own disagreeable feelings.
Their usual mistaken premise is that they affirm some consensus among people, at least among tame peoples, concerning certain moral principles, and then conclude that these principles must be unconditionally binding also for you and me-or conversely, they see that among different peoples moral valuations are necessarily different and infer from this that no morality is binding-both of which are equally childish.
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman-a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting