The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
775.
_Praise and gratitude as forms of will to power.--_Praise and gratitude for harvests, for good weather, victories, marriages, and peace--all festivals need a subject on which feeling can be outpoured. The desire is to make all good things that happen to one appear as though they had been done to one: people will have a donor. The same holds good of the work of art: people are not satisfied with it alone, they must praise the artist.--What, then, is praise? It is a sort of compensation for benefits received, a sort of giving back, a manifestation of _our_ power--for the man who praises assents to, blesses, values, _judges_. he arrogates to himself the right to give his consent to a thing, to be able to confer honours. An increased feeling of happiness or of liveliness is also an increased feeling of power, and it is as a result of this feeling that a man _praises_ (it is as the outcome of this feeling that he invents a donor, a "subject"). Gratitude is thus revenge of a lofty kind: it is most severely exercised and demanded where equality and pride both require to be upheld--that is to say, where revenge is practised to its fullest extent.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.