Ethics and Morality

[The] self overcoming of justice: one knows the beautiful name it has given itself--mercy...

Well-meaning, helpful, good-natured attitudes of mind have not come to be honored on account of their usefulness, but because they are states of richer souls that are capable of bestowing and have their value in the feeling of the plenitude of life.

A man far oftener appears to have a decided character from persistently following his temperament than from persistently following his principles.

This workshop where ideals are manufactured--it seems to me it stinks of so many lies

The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offense.

The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.

When, however, you have an enemy, then do not requite him good for evil: for that would shame him. Instead, prove that he did some good for you. And rather be angry than put to shame! And when you are cursed, I do not like it that you want to bless. Rather curse a little also! And if you are done a great injustice, then quickly add five small ones. Hideous to behold is he who is obsessed with an injustice.

Yet the same thing happens to the notions of morality. They are devised, at the start, as measures of expediency, and then given divine sanction in order to lend them authority.

[Anything which] is a living thing and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power... 'Exploitation'... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will of life.

Morality is just a fiction used by the herd of inferior human beings to hold back the few superior men.

Every means hitherto employed with the intention of making mankind moral has been thoroughly immoral.

All history is the experimental refutation of the theory of the so-called moral order of things.

Morality is the idiosyncrasy of decadents having the hidden desire to revenge themselves upon life – and being successful.

The rule: when energy, 'negative' as it may be, moves without resistance, it easily sublimates and becomes raw energy of power and presence; resistance to it makes it freeze in its current state. For this reason, morality not only does not help our sexuality develop but also forces it to stay as it is.

There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena

Morality negates life.

Morality is neither rational nor absolute nor natural. World has known many moral systems, each of which advances claims universality; all moral systems are therefore particular, serving a specific purpose for their propagators or creators, and enforcing a certain regime that disciplines human beings for social life by narrowing our perspectives and limiting our horizons.

I deny morality as I deny alchemy.

A moral system valid for all is basically immoral.

The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we have 'improved.

A well-constituted human being, a ‘happy one’, must perform certain actions and instinctively shrinks from other actions, he transports the order of which he is the physiological representative into his relations with other human beings and with things. In a formula: his virtue is the consequence of his happiness…Everything good is instinct—and consequently easy, necessary, free. Effort is an objection.

But one thing is the thought, another thing is the deed, and another thing is the idea of the deed. The wheel of causality doth not roll between them.

The bite of conscience is indecent.

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.