I teach people to say Yea in the face of all that makes for strength, that preserves strength, and justifies the feeling of strength.
Up to the present, neither the one nor the other has been taught; but rather virtue, disinterestedness, pity, and even the negation of life. All these are values proceeding from exhausted people.
After having pondered over the physiology of exhaustion for some time, I was led to the question: to what extent the judgments of exhausted people had percolated into the world of values.
The result at which I arrived was as startling as it could possibly be—even for one like myself who was already at home in many a strange world: I found that all prevailing values—that is to say, all those which had gained ascendancy over humanity, or at least over its tamer portions, could be traced back to the judgment of exhausted people.
Under the cover of the holiest names, I found the most destructive tendencies; people had actually given the name "God" to all that renders weak, teaches weakness, and infects with weakness.... I found that the "good man" was a form of self-affirmation on the part of decadence.
That virtue which Schopenhauer still proclaimed as superior to all, and as the most fundamental of all virtues; even that same pity I recognised as more dangerous than any vice. Deliberately to thwart the law of selection among species, and their natural means of purging their stock of degenerate members—this, up to my time, had been the greatest of all virtues....
One should do honour to the fatality which says to the feeble: "perish!"
The opposing of this fatality, the botching of mankind and the allowing of it to putrefy, was given the name "God" One shall not take the name of the Lord one's God in vain....
The race is corrupted—not by its vices, but by its ignorance: it is corrupted because it has not recognised exhaustion as exhaustion: physiological misunderstandings are the cause of all evil.
Virtue is our greatest misunderstanding.