Quotes About Humanity

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

Good and evil, and joy and pain, and I and you- colored vapors did they seem to me before creative eyes. The creator wished to look away from himself,- and so he created the world.

Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will—that the values of décadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names. 7. Christianity is called the religion of pity.—Pity stands in

Our way is upward, from the species across to the super-species. But the degenerate mind which says 'All for me' is a horror to us.

What really arouses indignation against suffering is not suffering as such but the senselessness of suffering...

That the other suffers has to be learned; and it can never be learned fully.

Man has been reared by his errors: first he never saw himself other than imperfectly, second he attributed to himself imaginary qualities, third he felt himself in a false order of rank with animal and nature, fourth he continually invented new tables of values and for a time took each of them to be eternal and unconditional...If one deducts the effect of these four errors, one has also deducted away humanity, humaneness, and 'human dignity'.

It is only great pain--that slow, sustained pain that takes its time, in which we are, as it were, burned with smoldering green firewood--that forces us philosophers to sink to our ultimate profundity and to do away with all the trust, everything good-natured, veil-imposing, mild and middling, on which we may have previously based our humanity. I doubt that such a pain makes us 'better'--but I know that it makes us deeper.

Yet tell me, my brothers: if a goal for humanity is still lacking, is there not still lacking--humanity itself?

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.—Nietzsche.

My task: the dehumanization of Nature, and then the naturalization of humanity, after it has attained the pure concept of 'Nature'. Human beings and philosophers have in the past projected the human into nature — let us dehumanize nature.

I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves. Do you want to be the ebb of that great tide, and revert back to the beast rather than surpass mankind? What is the ape to a man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just so shall a man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame. You have evolved from worm to man, but much within you is still worm. Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm.

Each individual represents the whole course of Evolution and he is not, as morals teach, something that begins at his birth.

Verily, a polluted stream is man. One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.

It is a comfort to me to know that above the steam and filth of human lowlands there is a higher, brighter humanity, very small in number (for everything outstanding is by its nature rare): one belongs to it, not because one is more talented or more virtuous or more heroic or more loving than the men below, but—because one is colder, brighter, more far-seeing, more solitary; because one endures, prefers, demands solitude as happiness.

The lie of the ideal has till now been the curse on reality; on its account humanity itself has become fake and false right down to its deepest instincts - to the point of worshipping values opposite to the only ones which would guarantee it a flourishing, a future, the exaled right to a future.

Man, the bravest of animals, and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far — and the ascetic ideal offered man meaning!

Every means hitherto employed with the intention of making mankind moral has been thoroughly immoral.

It is true we love life; not because we are wont to live, but because we are wont to love.

The strongest and most evil spirits have so far done the most to advance humanity: again and again they relumed the passions that were going to sleep—all ordered society puts the passions to sleep—and they reawakened again and again the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of the pleasure in what is new, daring, untried; they compelled men to pit opinion against opinion, model against model.

O Voltaire! O humanity! O idiocy! There is something ticklish in the truth, and in the SEARCH for the truth; and if man goes about it too humanely—il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien—I wager he finds nothing!

Yo necesito compañeros, pero compañeros vivos; no muertos y cadáveres que tenga que llevar a cuestas por donde vaya.