The Dawn of Day · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
534.
SMALL DOSES.—If we wish a change to be as deep and radical as possible, we must apply the remedy in minute doses, but unremittingly for long periods. What great action can be performed all at once? Let us therefore be careful not to exchange violently and precipitately the moral conditions with which we are familiar for a new valuation of things,—nay, we may even wish to continue living in the old way for a long time to come, until probably at some very remote period we become aware of the fact that the new valuation has made itself the predominating power within us, and that its minute doses to which we must henceforth become accustomed have set up a new nature within us.—We now also begin to understand that the last attempt at a great change of valuations—that which concerned itself with political affairs (the “great revolution”)—was nothing more than a pathetic and sanguinary piece of quackery which, by means of sudden crises, was able to inspire a credulous Europe with the hope of a sudden recovery, and has therefore made all political invalids impatient and dangerous up to this very moment. TRUTH REQUIRES POWER.—Truth in itself is no power at all, in spite of all that flattering rationalists are in the habit of saying to the contrary. Truth must either attract power to its side, or else side with power, for otherwise it will perish again and again. This has already been sufficiently demonstrated, and more than sufficiently!
THE THUMBSCREW.—It is disgusting to observe with what cruelty every one charges his two or three private virtues to the account of others who may perhaps not possess them, and whom he torments and worries with them. Let us therefore deal humanely with the “sense of honesty,” although we may possess in it a thumbscrew with which we can worry to death all these presumptuous egoists who even yet wish to impose their own beliefs upon the whole world—we have tried this thumbscrew on ourselves! MASTERY.—We have reached mastery when we neither mistake nor hesitate in the achievement.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.