Quotes About Values

WE LIVE IN A CULTURAL CLIMATE QUICK TO ACCEPT THE WORST, DENY the best. And we often have difficulty, unlike Dickens, in being sure about how to define moral indicators, especially in complicated human matters. To Dickens, that came easily. He unhesitatingly believed in absolute truths, both moral and cosmological, though, paradoxically, opposite absolutes often co-exist, as in "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Merchant and pirate were for a long period one and the same person. Even today mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality.

We try to fend off this world we yearn for where men live together as brothers because there is something in each of us that wants to live not for his brother but for himself. We fend it off because we know in our terrible wisdom that the price we must pay for it is death, the death of self and all the values of self, the death that must take place before the life can come.

the American people are disposed often to be generous rather than just.

nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals—because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these values really had.'— We require, sometime, new values.

The deepest and most sublime hatred is a hatred which creates ideals and transforms values—something whose like has never been seen on earth

The corruption of morals is a consequence of decadence (weakness of the will, need for strong stimuli).

There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do

There can be no happiness if the things we believe are different than the things we do.

Only sick music makes money today.

There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena

A man far oftener appears to have a decided character from persistently following his temperament than from persistently following his principles.

Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks -- those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.

I do not refute ideals, I merely put on gloves when I deal with them...

People have always wanted to 'improve' human beings; for the most part, this has been called morality.

Brave and creative men never consider pleasure and pain as ultimate values—they are epiphenomena: one must desire both if one is to achieve anything.

Morality negates life.

The greatest events- they are not noisiest but our stillest hours. The world revolves, not around the inventors of new noises, but around the inventors of new values; it revolves inaudibly.

The noble man wants to create something new and a new virtue. The good want the old, and that old should be preserved.

The creator seeks companions, not corpses- and not herds or believers either. The creator seeks fellow-creators - those who grave new values on new law-tablets.

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

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'.

Behold the good and just! Whom do they hate most? The man who breaks their tables of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker:- yet he is the creator.

They have something of which they are proud. What do they call it, that which makes them proud? Culture, they call it; it distinguishes them from the goatherds.