One form of honesty has always been lacking among founders of religions and their kin:--they have never made their experiences a matter of the intellectual conscience. ... But we who are different, who are thirsty for reason, want to look as carefully into our experiences, as in the case of a scientific experiment, hour by hour, day by day! We ourselves want to be our own experiments, and our own subjects of experiment. 248 Let us no longer think so much about punishing, blaming, improving! We shall seldom be able to alter an individual, and if we should succeed in doing so, something else may also succeed, perhaps unawares: _we_ may have been altered by him! Let us rather see to it that our own influence on _all that is to come_ outweighs and overweighs his influence! Let us not struggle in direct conflict!--all blaming, punishing, and desire to improve comes under this category. 249 Who could know how to laugh well and live well, who did not first understand the full meaning of war and victory? 250 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