10 Beyond Good and Evillike an agreeable vice, let us remain HARD, we latest Stoics,
and let us send to its help whatever devilry we have in us:—
our disgust at the clumsy and undefined, our ‘NITIMUR
IN VETITUM,’ our love of adventure, our sharpened and
fastidious curiosity, our most subtle, disguised, intellectual
Will to Power and universal conquest, which rambles and
roves avidiously around all the realms of the future—let us
go with all our ‘devils’ to the help of our ‘God’! It is prob-
able that people will misunderstand and mistake us on that
account: what does it matter! They will say: ‘Their ‘hon-
esty’—that is their devilry, and nothing else!’ What does
it matter! And even if they were right—have not all Gods
hitherto been such sanctified, re-baptized devils? And after
all, what do we know of ourselves? And what the spirit that
leads us wants TO BE CALLED? (It is a question of names.)
And how many spirits we harbour? Our honesty, we free
spirits—let us be careful lest it become our vanity, our orna-
ment and ostentation, our limitation, our stupidity! Every
virtue inclines to stupidity, every stupidity to virtue; ‘stu-
pid to the point of sanctity,’ they say in Russia,— let us be
careful lest out of pure honesty we eventually become saints
and bores! Is not life a hundred times too short for us— to
bore ourselves? One would have to believe in eternal life in
order to ...
- I hope to be forgiven for discovering that all moral phi-
losophy hitherto has been tedious and has belonged to the
soporific appliances—and that ‘virtue,’ in my opinion, has
been MORE injured by the TEDIOUSNESS of its advocates