The domestication (culture) of man does not sink very deep. When it does sink far below the skin it immediately becomes degeneration (type: the Christian). The "wild" man (or, in moral terminology, the evil man) is a reversion to Nature—and, in a certain sense, he represents a recovery, a cure from the effects of "culture."... 158
The strong always have to be upheld against the weak; and the well-constituted against the ill-constituted, the healthy against the sick and physiologically botched. If we drew our morals from reality, they would read thus: the mediocre are more valuable than the exceptional creatures, and the decadent than the mediocre; the will to nonentity prevails over the will to life.... 159
That species show an ascending tendency, is the most nonsensical assertion that has ever been made: until now they have only manifested a dead level. There is nothing whatever to prove that the higher organisms have developed from the lower. 160
Man as he has appeared up to the present is the embryo of the man of the future; all the formative powers which are to produce the latter, already lie in the former: and owing to the fact that they are enormous, the more promising for the future the modern individual happens to be, the more suffering falls to his lot. 161
The will to power is the primitive motive force out of which all other motives have been derived. 162
From a psychological point of view the idea of "cause" is our feeling of power in the act which is called willing—our concept "effect" is the superstition that this feeling of power is itself the force which moves things.... 163
Life as an individual case (a hypothesis which may be applied to existence in general) strives after the maximum feeling of power; life is essentially a striving after more power; striving itself is only a straining after more power; the most fundamental and innermost thing of all is this will. 165
Man does not seek happiness and does not avoid unhappiness. Everybody knows the famous prejudices I here contradict. Pleasure and pain are mere results, mere accompanying phenomena—that which every man, which every tiny particle of a living organism will have, is an increase of power. In striving after this, pleasure and pain are encountered; it is owing to that will that the organism seeks opposition and requires that which stands in its way.... Pain as the hindrance of its will to power is therefore a normal feature, a natural ingredient of every organic phenomenon; man does not avoid it; on the contrary, he is constantly in need of it; every triumph, every feeling of pleasure, every event presupposes an obstacle overcome. 172
Man is now master of the forces of nature, and master too of his own wild and unbridled feelings (the passions have followed suit, and have learned to become useful)—in comparison with primeval man, the man of to-day represents an enormous quantum of power, but not an increase in happiness. How can one maintain, then, that he has striven after happiness? 174
"God" is the culminating moment: life is an eternal process of deifying and undeifying. But withal there is no zenith of values, but only a zenith of power. 181