That delightful animal, man, seems to lose his good-humour whenever he thinks well; he becomes "serious"! And "where there is laughing and gaiety, thinking cannot be worth anything:"--so speaks the prejudice of this serious animal against all "Joyful Wisdom." 252-253
If you had thought more acutely, observed more accurately, and had learned more, you would no longer under all circumstances call this and that your "duty" and your "conscience": the knowledge _how moral judgments have in general always originated,_ would make you tired of these pathetic words.... 261
We _would seek to become what we are,_--the new, the unique, the incomparable, making laws for ourselves and creating ourselves! And for this purpose we must become the best students and discoverers of all the laws and necessities in the world. We must be _physicists_ in order to be _creators_ in that sense,--whereas hitherto all appreciations and ideals have been based on _ignorance_ of physics, or in _contradiction_ to it. 203
Our "benefactors" lower our value and volition more than our enemies. 265
It is always a _metaphysical belief_ on which our belief in science rests,--and that even we knowing ones of to-day, the godless and anti-metaphysical, still take _our_ fire from the conflagration kindled by a belief a millennium old, the Christian belief, which was also the belief of Plato, that God is truth, that the truth is divine. 279
Belief is always most desired, most pressingly needed where there is a lack of will: for the will, as emotion of command, is the distinguishing characteristic of sovereignty and power. That is to say, the less a person knows how to command, the more urgent is his desire for one who commands, who commands sternly,--a God, a prince, a caste, a physician, a confessor, a dogma, a party conscience. 286
To seek self-preservation merely, is the expression of a state of distress, or of limitation of the true, fundamental instinct of life, which aims at the _extension of power,_ and with this in view often enough calls in question self-preservation and sacrifices it. 289
The subtlety and strength of consciousness are always in proportion to the _capacity for communication_ of a man (or an animal), the capacity for communication in its turn being in proportion to the _necessity for_ communication. ... _Consciousness generally has only been developed under the pressure of the necessity for communication,_ --that from the first it has been necessary and useful only between man and man (especially between those commanding and those obeying), and has only developed in proportion to its utility. 296-297