The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
850.
_The Nihilism of artists._--Nature is cruel in her cheerfulness; cynical in her sunrises. We are hostile to emotions. We flee thither where Nature moves our senses and our imagination, where we have nothing to love, where we are not reminded of the moral semblances and delicacies of this northern nature; and the same applies to the arts. We prefer that which no longer reminds us of good and evil. Our moral sensibility and tenderness seem to be relieved in the heart of terrible and happy Nature, in the fatalism of the senses and forces. Life without goodness. Great well-being arises from contemplating Nature's indifference to good and evil. No justice in history, no goodness in Nature. That is why the pessimist when he is an artist prefers those historical subjects where the absence of justice reveals itself with magnificent simplicity, where perfection actually comes to expression--and likewise he prefers that in Nature, where her callous evil character is not hypocritically concealed, where that character is seen in perfection.... The Nihilistic artist betrays himself in willing and preferring cynical history and cynical Nature.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.