I know that I can't love anyone, and I don't believe that anybody else ever does, either—that's more sentiment and hypocrisy. People use each other as masturbating machines and crying towels, and they call it love. But there's a deeper meaning. What is it?

• love
• meaning
• hypocrisy
• other

Nature is force; and it is slavish to suffer force, to abdicate before it—to abdicate, that is, inwardly. And there too you have the humanistic position which runs not the slightest risk of involving itself in contradictions, or of relapsing into churchly hypocrisy, when it sees in the body the antagonist, the representative of the evil principle. The contradiction you imagine you see is at bottom always the same. ‘What have you against analysis?’ Nothing—when it serves the cause of enlightenment, freedom, progress. Everything when it is pervaded by the horrible haut goût of the grave. And thus too with the body. We are to honour and uphold the body when it is a question of emancipation, of beauty, of freedom of thought, of joy, of desire. We must despise it in so far as it sets itself up as the principle of gravity and inertia, when it obstructs the movement toward light;

• beauty
• desire
• freedom
• nature
• force
• thought
• light
• evil
• hypocrisy
• contradictions
• progress
• joy
• analysis
• body
• gravity

Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.

• children
• hypocrisy

I fear greatly that modern man is simply too comfortable for some vices, so that they die out by default. All evil that is a function of a strong will - and perhaps there is no evil without strength of will - degenerates into virtue in our tepid air. The few hypocrites whom I have met imitated hypocrisy: like almost every tenth person today, they were actors.

• evil
• hypocrisy
• virtue
• will
• strength
• fear