Quotes - The Antichrist by Friedrich Neitzsche

Read from 8/30/08 to 9/3/08

"What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and power itself in man. What is bad? - All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? - The feeling that power is increasing - that resistance has been overcome."
-Page 4, The Antichrist

"The pathos which grows out of this state, is called Faith: that is to say, to shut one's eyes once and for all, in order not to suffer at the sight of incredible falsity. People convert this faulty view of all things into a moral, a virtue, a thing of holiness. They endow their distorted vision with a good conscience - they claim that no other point of view is any longer of value, once theirs has been sacrosanct with the names, 'God,' 'Salvation,' and 'Eternity.'"
-Page 10-11, The Antichrist

"What is there that destroys a man more speedily than to work, think, feel, as an automaton of 'duty,' without internal promptings, without a profound personal predilection, without joy?"
-Page 13, The Antichrist

"[Man] is by no means the crown of creation, beside him, every other creature stands at the same stage of perfection...And even in asserting this we go a little too far; for, relatively speaking, man is the most botched and diseased of animals, and he has wandered furthest from his instincts."
-Page 16, The Antichrist

"...the Great Cosmopolitan..."
-Page 21, The Antichrist, speaking of God

"With God, war is declared on life, nature, and the will to life! God is the formula for every calumny of this world and for every lie concerning a beyond! In God, nonentity is deified, and the will to nonentity is declared holy!"
-Page 22, The Antichrist

"Truth and the belief that something is true: two totally separate worlds of interest, almost opposite worlds, the road to the one and the road to the other lie absolutely apart."
-Page 28, The Antichrist

"Not 'repentance,' not 'prayer and forgiveness' are the roads to God: the evangelical mode of life alone leads to God, it is 'God.'"
-Page 48, The Antichrist

"The 'Kingdom of God' is not something that is expected; it has no yesterday nor any day after to-morrow, it is not going to come in a 'thousand years' - it is an experience of a human heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere..."
-Page 49, The Antichrist

"I take care not to hold mankind responsible for its mental disorders. But my feeling suddenly changes, and vents itself the moment I enter the modern age, our age. Our age knows..."
-Page 52, The Antichrist

"Buddhism promises little but fulfils more, Christianity promises everything but fulfils nothing."
-Page 60, The Antichrist

"When the centre of gravity of life is laid, not in life, but in a beyond - in nonentity - life is utterly robbed of its balance. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all nature in the instincts, - everything in the instincts that as beneficient, that promotes life and that is a guarantee of the future, henceforward aroused suspicion. The very meaning of life is now construed as the effort to live in such a way that life no longer has any point..."
-Page 61-62, The Antichrist

"Inasmuch as they let God do the judging, they themselves judge; inasmuch as they glorify God, they glorify themselves; inasmuch as they exact those virtues of which they themselves happen to be capable - nay more, of which they are in need in order to be able to remain on top at all; - they assume the grand airs of struggling for virtue, of struggling for the dominion of virtue."
-Page 65, The Antichrist

"We should feel just as little inclined to hobnob with 'the first Christians' as with Polish Jews: not that we need to explain our objections...They simply smell bad."
-Page 70, The Antichrist

"The whole labour of the ancient world in vain: I am at a loss for a word which could express my feelings at something so atrocious..." "...Everything essential had been discovered to make it possible for work to be begun..." "...And buried in a night, not by a neutral catastrophe! Not stamped to death by Teutons and other heavy-footed vandals! But destroyed by crafty, stealthy, invisible anaemic vampires! Not conquered, - but only drained of blood!"
-Page 100-101, The Antichrist, includes from beginning to end and everything in between

"I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are too venomous, too underhand, too underground, and too petty, - I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind..."
-Page 107, The Antichrist

All quotes from The Antichrist, by Friedrich Neitzsche, published 2000 by Prometheus Books, 1-57392-832-1