The Twilight of the Idols · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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Let us look each other in the face. We are hyperboreans,—we know well enough how far outside the crowd we stand. “Thou wilt find the way to the Hyperboreans neither by land nor by water”: Pindar already knew this much about us. Beyond the north, the ice, and death—_our life, our happiness...._ We discovered happiness; we know the way; we found the way out of thousands of years of labyrinth. Who _else_ would have found it?—Not the modern man, surely?—“I do not know where I am or what I am to do; I am everything that knows not where it is or what to do,”—sighs the modern man. We were made quite ill by _this_ modernity,—with its indolent peace, its cowardly compromise, and the whole of the virtuous filth of its Yea and Nay. This tolerance and _largeur de cœur_ which “forgives” everything because it “understands” everything, is a Sirocco for us. We prefer to live amid ice than to be breathed upon by modern virtues and other southerly winds!... We were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor others: but we were very far from knowing whither to direct our bravery. We were becoming gloomy; people called us fatalists. _Our_ fate—it was the abundance, the tension and the storing up of power. We thirsted for thunderbolts and great deeds; we kept at the most respectful distance from the joy of the weakling, from “resignation.” ... Thunder was in our air, that part of nature which we are, became overcast—_for we had no direction._ The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal.
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. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency[1] (virtue in the Renaissance sense, _virtu,_ free from all moralic acid). The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our humanity. And they ought even to be helped to perish. What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy with all the botched and the weak—Christianity.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.