At present ... when throughout Europe the herding animal alone attains to honours, and dispenses honours, when "equality of right" can too readily be transformed into equality in wrong: I mean to say into general war against everything rare, strange, and privileged, against the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, the creative plenipotence and lordliness--at present it belongs to the conception of "greatness" to be noble, to wish to be apart, to be capable of being different, to stand alone, to have to live by personal initiative; and the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal when he asserts: "He shall be the greatest who can be the most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent, the man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, and of superabundance of will; precisely this shall be called _greatness:_ as diversified as can be entire, as ample as can be full." 154-155 Morality as attitude is opposed to our taste nowadays. This is _also_ an advance, as it was an advance in our fathers that religion as an attitude finally became opposed to their taste.... 161 The practice of judging and condemning morally is the favourite revenge of the intellectually shallow on those who are less so.... 162 Whoever has really offered sacrifice knows that he wanted and obtained something for it--perhaps something from himself for something from himself; that he relinquished here in order to have more there, perhaps in general to be more, or even feel himself "more." 164 Wherever sympathy (fellow-suffering) is preached nowadays ... let the psychologist have his ears open: through all the vanity, through all the noise which is natural to these preachers (as to all preachers), he will hear a hoarse, groaning, genuine note of _self-contempt._ 65 We are prepared as no other age has ever been for a carnival in the grand style, for the most spiritual festival-laughter and arrogance, for the transcendental height of supreme folly and Aristophanic ridicule of the world. Perhaps we are still discovering the domain of our _invention_ just here, the domain where even we can still be original, probably as parodists of the world's history and as God's Merry-Andrews,--perhaps, though nothing else of the present have a future, our _laughter_ itself may have a future! 168 The discipline of suffering, of _great_ suffering--know ye not that it is only _this_ discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto? 171 It is desirable that as few people as possible should reflect upon morals, and consequently it is _very_ desirable that morals should not some day become interesting! 174