The Will to Power Quotes

“The states in which we infuse a transfiguration and a fullness into things and poetize about them until they reflect back our fullness and joy in life...three elements principally: sexuality, intoxication and cruelty - all belonging to the oldest festal joys.”

“The stronger becomes master of the weaker, in so far as the latter cannot assert its degree of independence - here there is no mercy, no forbearance, even less a respect for ‘laws.’ ”

“If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.”

“There is only nobility of birth, only nobility of blood. When one speaks of “aristocrats of the spirit,” reasons are usually not lacking for concealing something.”

“A declaration of war on the masses by Higher Men is needed!... Everything that makes soft and effeminate, that serves the end of the People or the Feminine, works in favor of Universal Suffrage, i.e. the domination of the Inferior Men. But we should take reprisal and bring this whole affair to light and the bar of judgment.”

“Morality is: the mediocre are worth more than the exceptions... I abhore Christianity with a deadly hatred.”

“For spirit alone does not make noble. Rather, there must be something to ennoble the spirit. What then is required? Blood.”

“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.”

“The will to power is not a being, not a becoming, but a pathos --the most elemental fact from which a becoming and effecting first emerge-”

“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities - I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished.”

“It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.”

“My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (--its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement (“union”) with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on.”

“The possibility has been established for the production of...a Master Race, the future “masters of the earth”...made to endure for millennia - a higher kind of men who... employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth.”

“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.”

“A man as he ought to be: that sounds to us as insipid as ‘a tree as it ought to be.’ ”

“The Beautiful exists just as little as the True. In every case it is a question of the conditions of preservation of a certain type of man: thus the herd-man will experience the value feeling of the True in different things than will the Overman.”

“The rights a man arrogates to himself are related to the duties he imposes on himself, to the tasks to which he feels equal. The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men.”

“Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness--that means cynically and with innocence.”

“The mechanistic world is imagined only as sight and touch imagine a world (as “moved”) --so as to be calculable-- thus causal unities are invented, “things” (atoms) whose effect remains constant (--transference of the false concept of subject to the concept of the atom).”

“In order to sustain the theory of a mechanistic world, therefore, we always have to stipulate to what extent we are employing two fictions: the concept of motion (taken from our sense language) and the concept of the atom (=unity, deriving from our psychical “experience”): the mechanistic theory presupposes a sense prejudice and a psychological prejudice.”