Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

Actions can be promised, but not feelings, for these are involuntary.

And in fact, I myself do not believe that anybody ever looked into the world with a distrust as deep as mine,

he wishes himself to gather the fruit from the tree that he plants and consequently he no longer plants those trees which require centuries of constant cultivation and are destined to afford shade to generation after generation in the future.

Such "free spirits" do not really exist and never did exist. But I stood in need of them,

but am I not beginning to do all over again what I have always done, I, the old immoralist, and bird snarer—talk unmorally, ultramorally, "beyond good and evil"?

and with justice urged against me, what does it signify, what can it signify in regard to how much of the self-sustaining capacity, how much of reason and higher protection are embraced in such self-deception?

And in fact, I myself do not believe that anybody ever looked into the world with a distrust as deep as mine, seeming, as I do,

My writings have been termed a school of distrust,

organic beings are primordially interested by nothing whatever in any thing (Ding) except its relation to ourselves with reference to pleasure and pain.

through the medium of profound feelings one can penetrate deep into the soul of things (Innre), draw close to the heart of nature