All goals have been annihilated, mankind must give themselves a fresh goal. It is an error to suppose that they had one: they gave themselves all the goals they ever had. But the prerequisites of all previous goals have been annihilated.
Science traces the course of things but points to no goal: what it does give consists of the fundamental facts upon which the new goal must be based.
4
The profound sterility of the nineteenth century. I have not encountered a single man who really had a new ideal to bring forward. The character of German music kept me hoping longest, but in vain. A stronger type in which all our powers are synthetically correlated—this constitutes my faith.
Apparently everything is decadence. We should so direct this movement of decline that it may provide the strongest with a new form of existence.
5
The dissolution of morality, in its practical consequences, leads to the atomistic individual, and further to the subdivision of the individual into a quantity of parts—absolute liquefaction.
That is why a goal is now more than ever necessary; and love, but a new love.
6
I say: “As long as your morality hung over me I breathed like one asphyxiated. That is why I throttled this snake. I wished to live, consequently it had to die.”