The Twilight of the Idols · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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The psychology of orgiasm conceived as the feeling of a superabundance of vitality and strength, within the scope of which even pain _acts as a stimulus,_ gave me the key to the concept _tragic_ feeling, which has been misunderstood not only by Aristotle, but also even more by our pessimists. Tragedy is so far from proving anything in regard to the pessimism of the Greeks, as Schopenhauer maintains, that it ought rather to be considered as the categorical repudiation and _condemnation_ thereof. The saying of Yea to life, including even its most strange and most terrible problems, the will to life rejoicing over its own inexhaustibleness in the _sacrifice_ of its highest types—this is what I called Dionysian, this is what I divined as the bridge leading to the psychology of the _tragic_ poet. Not in order to escape from terror and pity, not to purify one’s self of a dangerous passion by discharging it with vehemence—this is how Aristotle understood it—but to be far beyond terror and pity and to be the eternal lust of Becoming itself—that lust which also involves the _lust of destruction._ And with this I once more come into touch with the spot from which I once set out—-the “Birth of Tragedy” was my first transvaluation of all values: with this I again take my stand upon the soil from out of which my will and my capacity spring—I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus,—I, the prophet of eternal recurrence.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.