1,985 definitions
The book's index
The Will to Power
730 concepts · 1,985 definitions
- abuse1
- act1
- action5
- activity1
- adoration1
- aesthetic1
- aesthetic judgment1
- aesthetic state2
- aesthetics1
- affect3
- affirmation4
- afterlife2
- altruism14
- amateur1
- ambition1
- amor fati1
- ancestor1
- ancient greek philosophy1
- anger1
- animal1
- antiquity1
- antisemite1
- antithesis1
- aphorism1
- Apollinian1
- Apollo1
- apotheosis1
- appearance5
- aristocracy4
- art12
- art for art's sake3
- Arthur Schopenhauer1
- artist11
- ascetic ideal2
- asceticism4
- aspiration1
- atheism2
- atom2
- attraction1
- attribute2
- author1
- authority4
- bad conscience3
- barbarian2
- barbarism1
- beautiful1
- beautiful soul2
- beauty9
- becoming7
- beginning1
- Being7
- belief5
- belief in god1
- benevolence1
- biography1
- blame1
- Blessedness3
- bliss1
- body6
- boredom1
- bourgeois1
- breeding1
- Buddhism8
Morality (n.) is the instinct to deny life: every force by which life grows lies under its ban, so one must destroy morality to liberate life.
Morality (n.) is the instinct of decadence: the exhausted and disinherited taking their revenge and playing the master.
Morality (n.) of the idealist says "God beholds the heart" and would exterminate the aggressive disposition itself — a voice heard only where a community no longer needs war to exist.
Morality (n.) is the Circe of philosophers, bewitching them into eternal slanderers: believing in moral truths, they had to deny existence more firmly the more they knew it — for existence is immoral.
Virtue (n.) does not bring happiness; rather the more powerful man first designates his happy state as virtue.
Virtue (n.) of obedience, consideration, and sympathy are praised by herd and rulers alike — the herd from direct egoism, the rulers from indirect egoism.
Virtue (n.) is our greatest misunderstanding.
Virtue (n.) regains its charm only as something forbidden: the fairest of falsehoods, the haughtiest, dearest and rarest form of vice.
Christianity's (n.) one essential psychological achievement was to raise the temperature of the soul — the discovery that the most wretched life can become rich and inestimable through a rise in temperature.
Christianity (n.) is a romantic hypochondria of those whose legs are shaky.
Christianity (n.) dies at the hands of its own morality: the truthfulness it bred becomes nauseated by the lies of every Christian interpretation.
Christianity (n.) is ressentiment's masterstroke: an insurrection that can win only as a party of peace and innocence, so it condemns the very drive whose expression it is.
Truth (n.) would be an unconscionable falsification of the false if existence itself is false — the false raised to a higher power.
Truth (n.) is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live.
Truth (n.) is not what life requires: what life needs is that something be held true, not that something be true.
Truth (n.) is not something there to be found but something to be created — a name for a process, a will to overcome without end; it is a word for the will to power.
Nihilism (n.) is an intermediary period, before there is strength to reverse values and to deify becoming and the apparent world as the only world.
Nihilism (n.) is the underprivileged with no comfort left: they destroy in order to be destroyed, and want power by compelling the powerful to become their hangmen.
Nihilism (n.) in its most extreme form is the nothing, the meaningless, eternally — the most scientific of all hypotheses.
Nihilism (n.) can be a symptom of increasing strength — the will to create no longer needs total interpretations — or of increasing weakness, when even the strength to create meaning has declined.
God (n.) is one's own type projected into things, behind things, behind the fate of things, as the measure of all value.
God (n.) is far too extreme a hypothesis now that life is no longer so uncertain and absurd as to need such an antidote.
God (n.) can keep a meaning only as a maximal state, an epoch in the evolution of the will to power — not as the driving force.
God (n.) would be demonstrable from the world we know only as something not humanitarian — so believers hold fast to their God and devise for him a world we do not know.
Man (n.) has cultivated, unlike the animals, an abundance of contrary drives within himself — and thanks to this synthesis he is master of the earth.
Man (n.) has grown most vigorously, as a plant, under the reverse conditions: danger in the street and in the heart, oppression, inequality, devilry — everything the herd thinks undesirable.
Man (n.) must be a liar by nature, above all an artist: metaphysics, religion, morality and science are all products of his will to art, to lie, to flight from truth.
Man (n.) is, unfortunately, no longer evil enough: his curse is not corruption but how tender and moralized he has become.
Knowledge (n.) is a referring back, in essence a regressus in infinitum; whatever comes to a standstill at a first cause is laziness, weariness.
Knowledge (n.) is shut out as soon as one becomes interested in one's own case, or worse, the salvation of one's soul.
Knowledge (n.) and wisdom have no value in themselves: there could be a goal in whose light great knowledge is a great disvalue — if, say, deception were a prerequisite for the enhancement of life.
Knowledge (n.) works as a tool of power, and so it increases with every increase of power.
Pessimism (n.) of indignation invents responsibility to give itself a pleasant feeling — revenge, "sweeter than honey."
Pessimism (n.) of the philosophical kind belongs among comical things: the total value of the world cannot be evaluated, since there is nothing to measure it against.
Pessimism (n.) can also be the darkness before a storm — the pressure of plenitude, forces that do not yet know how to discharge themselves.
Pessimism (n.) is not a problem but a symptom: asking whether not-to-be is better than to be is itself a disease.
Value (n.) is the highest quantum of power a man is able to incorporate — a man, not mankind; mankind is merely the experimental material, a field of ruins.
Value (n.) words are banners raised where a new bliss has been found — a new feeling.
Value (n.) of a man does not reside in his utility: it would remain if there were no one he could be useful to — and the man with the most disastrous effects might be the pinnacle of the species.
Value (n.) that are false cannot be eradicated by reasons any more than astigmatism can: refuting a judgment does not remove the need for it.