Friedrich Nietzsche

Actions can be promised, but not feelings, for these are involuntary.

It seems that in or­der to in­scribe them­selves upon the heart of hu­man­ity with ever­last­ing claims, all great things have first to wander about the earth as enorm­ous and awe-in­spir­ing ca­ri­ca­tures:

And in fact, I myself do not believe that anybody ever looked into the world with a distrust as deep as mine,

some play upon words

the Ved­anta doc­trine in Asia, and Platon­ism in Europe

Sup­pos­ing, in ef­fect, that man is not just the “meas­ure of things.”

To re­cog­nise un­truth as a con­di­tion of life;

above all to dis­charge its strength—life it­self is Will to Power;

That which is termed “free­dom of the will” is es­sen­tially the emo­tion of su­prem­acy in re­spect to him who must obey: “I am free, ‘he’ must obey”—this con­scious­ness is in­her­ent in every will; and equally so the strain­ing of the at­ten­tion, the straight look which fixes it­self ex­clus­ively on one thing,

t is the busi­ness of the very few to be in­de­pend­ent; it is a priv­ilege of the strong