The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
909.
_The typical forms of self-development, or the eight principal questions:_-- 1. Do we want to be more multifarious or more simple than we are? 2. Do we want to be happier than we are, or more indifferent to both happiness and unhappiness? 3. Do we want to be more satisfied with ourselves, or more exacting and more inexorable? 4. Do we want to be softer, more yielding, and more human than we are, or more inhuman? 5. Do we want to be more prudent than we are, or more daring? 6. Do we want to attain a goal, or do we want to avoid all goals (like the philosopher, for instance, who scents a boundary, a _cul-de-sac,_ a prison, a piece of foolishness in every goal)? 7. Do we want to become more respected, or more feared, or more _despised_? 8. Do we want to become tyrants, and seducers, or do we want to become shepherds and gregarious animals? _The type of my disciples._--To such men as _concern vie in any way_ I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities of all kinds. I wish them to be acquainted with profound self-contempt, with the martyrdom of self-distrust, with the misery of the defeated: I have no pity for them; because I wish them to have the only thing which to-day proves whether a man has any value or not, namely, _the capacity of sticking to his guns._
The happiness and self-contentedness of the lazzaroni, or the blessedness of "beautiful souls," or the consumptive love of Puritan pietists, proves nothing in regard to _the order of rank_ among men. As a great educator one ought inexorably to thrash a race of such blissful creatures into unhappiness. The danger of belittlement and of a slackening of powers follows immediately I am _opposed_ to happiness _à la_ Spinoza or _à la_ Epicurus, and to all the relaxation of contemplative states. But when virtue is the means to such happiness, well then, _one must master even virtue._
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.