(?)
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. (Learn more)
Friedrich Nietzsche

“At that time it may finally happen that, under the sudden illumination of a still stressful, still changeable health, the free, ever freer spirit begins to unveil the riddle of that great liberation which had until then waited dark, questionable, almost untouchable in his memory. If he has for long hardly dared to ask himself: 'why so apart? so alone? renouncing everything I once reverenced? renouncing reverence itself? why this hardness, this suspiciousness, this hatred for your own virtues?'—now he dares to ask it aloud and hears in reply something like an answer. 'You shall become master over yourself, master also over your virtues. Formerly they were your masters; but they must be only your instruments beside other instruments. You shall get control over your For and Against and learn how to display first one and then the other in accordance with your higher goal. You shall learn to grasp the sense of perspective in every value judgement—the displacement, distortion and merely apparent tel- eology of horizons and whatever else pertains to perspectivism; also the quantum of stupidity that resides in antitheses of values and the whole intellectual loss which every For, every Against costs us. You shall learn to grasp the necessary injustice in every For and Against, injustice as inseparable from life, life itself as conditioned by the sense of perspective and its injustice. You shall above all see with your own eyes where injustice is always at its greatest: where life has developed at its smallest, narrowest, neediest, most incipient and yet cannot avoid taking itself as the goal and measure of things and for the sake of its own preservation secretly and meanly and ceaselessly crumbling away and calling into question the higher, greater, richer—you shall see with your own eyes the problem of order of rank, and how power and right and spaciousness of perspective grow into the heights together. You shall' – enough: from now on the free spirit knows what 'you shall' he has obeyed, and he also knows what he now can, what only now he may do...”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
Read more quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche


Share this quote:
Share on Twitter

Friends Who Liked This Quote

To see what your friends thought of this quote, please sign up!

0 likes
All Members Who Liked This Quote

None yet!


This Quote Is From

Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits by Friedrich Nietzsche
12,950 ratings, average rating, 583 reviews
Open Preview

Browse By Tag