Beyond Good and Evil

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.

He who fights with mon­sters should be care­ful lest he thereby be­come a mon­ster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.

Dreadful experiences raise the question whether he who experiences them is not something dreadful also.

Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.

It seems that in or­der to in­scribe them­selves upon the heart of hu­man­ity with ever­last­ing claims, all great things have first to wander about the earth as enorm­ous and awe-in­spir­ing ca­ri­ca­tures:

any­one were to say to them, “A lofty spir­itu­al­ity is bey­ond all com­par­ison with the hon­esty and re­spect­ab­il­ity of a merely moral man”—it would make them furi­ous,

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.

They all pose as though their real opin­ions had been dis­covered and at­tained through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, di­vinely in­dif­fer­ent dia­lectic (in con­trast to all sorts of mys­tics, who, fairer and fool­isher, talk of “in­spir­a­tion”),

Such gen­esis is im­possible; who­ever dreams of it is a fool, nay, worse than a fool; things of the highest value must have a dif­fer­ent ori­gin, an ori­gin of their own—in this trans­it­ory, se­duct­ive, il­lus­ory, paltry world, in this tur­moil of de­lu­sion and cu­pid­ity, they can­not have their source. But rather in the lap of Be­ing, in the in­trans­it­ory, in the con­cealed God, in the ‘Th­ing-in-it­self’—there must be their source, and nowhere else!”

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