The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
669.
"Pain" and "pleasure" are the most absurd _means of expressing_ judgments, which of course does not mean that the judgments which are enunciated in this way must necessarily be absurd. The elimination of all substantiation and logic, a yes or no in the reduction to a passionate desire to have or to reject, an imperative abbreviation, the utility of which is irrefutable: that is pain and pleasure. Its origin is in the central sphere of the intellect; its prerequisite is an infinitely accelerated process of perceiving, ordering, co-ordinating, calculating, concluding: pleasure and pain are always final phenomena, they are never causes. As to deciding what provokes pain and pleasure, that is a question which depends upon the _degree of power:_ the same thing, when confronted with a small quantity of power, may seem a danger and may suggest the need of speedy defence, and when confronted with the consciousness of greater power, may be a voluptuous stimulus and may be followed by a feeling of pleasure. All feelings of pleasure and pain presuppose a _measuring of collective utility_ and _collective harmfulness_: consequently a sphere where there is the willing of an object (of a condition) and the selection of the means thereto. Pleasure and pain are never "original facts." The feelings of pleasure and pain are _reactions of the will_ (emotions) in which the intellectual centre fixes the value of certain supervening changes as a collective value, and also as an introduction of contrary actions.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.