Beyond Good and Evil

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.

He who fights with mon­sters should be care­ful lest he thereby be­come a mon­ster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.

Dreadful experiences raise the question whether he who experiences them is not something dreadful also.

Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.

It seems that in or­der to in­scribe them­selves upon the heart of hu­man­ity with ever­last­ing claims, all great things have first to wander about the earth as enorm­ous and awe-in­spir­ing ca­ri­ca­tures:

any­one were to say to them, “A lofty spir­itu­al­ity is bey­ond all com­par­ison with the hon­esty and re­spect­ab­il­ity of a merely moral man”—it would make them furi­ous,

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.

In­san­ity in in­di­vidu­als is some­thing rare—but in groups, parties, na­tions, and epochs it is the rule.

It might even be pos­sible that what con­sti­tutes the value of those good and re­spec­ted things, con­sists pre­cisely in their be­ing in­si­di­ously re­lated, knot­ted, and cro­cheted to these evil and ap­par­ently op­posed things—per­haps even in be­ing es­sen­tially identical with them.

Indeed, to un­der­stand how the ab­strusest meta­phys­ical as­ser­tions of a philo­sopher have been ar­rived at, it is al­ways well (and wise) to first ask one­self: “What mor­al­ity do they (or does he) aim at?”