Quotes About Morality

Our loathing of dirt may be so great as to prevent our cleaning ourselves—justifying ourselves.

To recognize untruth as a condition of life: that, to be sure, means to resist customary value-sentiments in a dangerous fashion; and a philosophy which ventures to do so places itself, by that act alone, beyond good and evil.

The Church and morality say: 'A race, a people perishes through vice and luxury'. My restored reason says: when a people is perishing, degenerating physiologically, vice and luxury (that is to say the necessity for stronger and stronger and more and more frequent stimulants, such as every exhausted nature is acquainted with) follow therefrom.

The root of all evil: the slavish morality of meekness, chastity, selflessness, absolute obedience, has triumphed — ruling natures were thus condemned, to hypocrisy, to torments of conscience. The best things have been slandered because the weak or the immoderate swine have cast a bad light on them — and the best men have remained hidden — and have often misunderstood themselves.

We uproot the foundation of morality when we uproot boundary-stones.

Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

Christianity is a hangman's metaphysics…

we immoralists especially are trying with all our might to remove the concept of guilt and the concept of punishment from the world and to purge psychology, history, nature, the social institutions and sanctions of them

I am by far the most terrible human being that has existed so far; this does not preclude the possibility that I shall be the most beneficial.

Morality is a fiction used by a herd of inferior human beings to hold back the few superior ones..!!

This the Church understood: it corrupted the human being, it weakened him – but it claimed to have 'improved' him…

We new philosophers, however, not only do we begin by presenting the actual gradations in rank and variations in value among us but we also desire the very opposite of an assimilation, an equalizing: we teach estrangement in every sense, we tear open gaps as never were, we want man to become more wicked than he ever was.

In all ages one has wanted to 'improve' men: this above all is what morality has meant. But one word can conceal the most divergent tendencies. Both the taming of the beast man and the breeding of a certain species of man has been called 'improvement':

Enemy you shall say but not villain, sick you shall say but not wretch, fool you shall say but not sinner.

O my friends! Thus speaketh the discerning one: shame, shame, shame—that is the history of man!

Morality is no longer the expression of the conditions of life and growth, no longer the most fundamental instinct of life, but it has become abstract, it has become the opposite of life

For, why is the triumph of Nihilism inevitable now? Because the very values current amongst us to-day will arrive at their logical conclusion in Nihilism,—because Nihilism is the only possible outcome of our greatest values and ideals,—because we must first experience Nihilism before we can realise what the actual worth of these "values" was....

Aside from a few philosophers, men have always placed pity rather low in the hierarchy of moral feelings—and rightly so.

What does your conscience say? — 'You shall become the person you are.

For the highest man shall also be the highest lord on earth. There is no sorer misfortune in all human destiny, than when the mighty of the earth are not also the first men. Then everything becomes false and distorted and monstrous. And when they are even the last men, and more beast than man, then rises and rises the populace in honour, and at last says even the populace-virtue: 'Behold, I alone am virtue!

If one goes through the individual moral statements of the documents of Christianity, one will find everywhere that the demands have been exaggerated so that man cannot satisfy them; the intention is not that the become moral, but rather than he feel as sinful as possible.

The morality that would un-self man is the morality of decline par excellence—the fact, I am declining, transposed into the imperative, all of you ought to decline—and not only into the imperative... This only morality that has been taught so far, that of un-selfing, reveals a will to the end; fundamentally, it negates life.

Shame, shame, shame—that is the history of the human!

When law is no longer a tradition, as in our case, it can only be commanded, or forced; none of us has a traditional sense of justice any longer; therefore we must content ourselves with arbitrary laws, which express the necessity of having to have a law.