215

Morality of sacrificial beasts.  'Enthusiastic devotion', 'sacrifice of oneself  these are the catchwords of your morality, and I can readily believe that you are, as you say, 'in earnest about it': but I know you better than you know yourselves when your 'earnestness' is able to walk arm in arm with such a morality. From the heights of this morality you look clown on that other sober morality which demands self-control, severity, obedience, and even call it egoistic. And, to be sure  you are being in earnest with yourselves when you find it disagreeable  you must find it disagreeable! for by devoting yourselves with enthusiasm and making a sacrifice of yourselves you enjoy the ecstatic thought of henceforth being at one with the powerful being, whether a god or a man, to whom you dedicate yourselves: you revel in the feeling of his power, to which your very sacrifice is an additional witness. The truth of the matter is that you only seem to sacrifice yourselves: in reality you transform yourselves in thought into gods and enjoy yourselves as such. From the point of view of this enjoyment  how poor and weak seems to you that 'egoistic' morality of obedience, duty, rationality: it is disagreeable to you because in this case real sacrifice and devotion are demanded without the sacrificer supposing himself transformed into a god. In short, it is you who want intoxication and excess, and that morality you despise raises its finger against intoxication and excess  I can well believe you find it disagreeable!

Friedrich Nietzsche - Daybreak
Book IV - Aphorism # 215

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