Jay

“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?” the last man asks, and he blinks.

"Formerly all the world was insane," say the subtlest of them, and they blink.

“We have invented happiness,” say the last men, and they blink.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“We are all so extremely concerned in knowing what the world thinks of us that, sooner or later, considerations analogous to those the moralists speak of do pass through our mind; as a result of this the moralists have been able to imagine that they have really made an appeal to experience for the purpose of finding out what exists at the bottom of creative conscience, when, as a matter of fact, all they have done is to consider already accomplished acts from the point of view of its social effects.”
― Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence

“The meaning of religious worship is to direct nature, and cast a spell on her to human advantage, that is, to impose a lawfulness on her, which she does not have at the start; whereas in present times, man wishes to understand the lawfulness of nature in order to submit to it. In short, religious worship is based on ideas of magic between man and man; and the magician is older than the priest. But it is likewise based on other and more noble ideas; it presumes a sympathetic relationship of man to man, the existence of goodwill, gratitude, hearing supplicants, of contracts between enemies, of bestowal of pledges, of demand for protection of property.
Even in very primitive stages of culture, man does not confront nature as a powerless slave, he is not necessarily her involuntary servant: in the Greek stage of religion, especially in the relationship to the Olympian gods, there is the thought of a coexistence of two castes, one nobler and more powerful, the other less noble; but according to their origin both belong together somehow and are of one kind; they need not be ashamed before one another. That is the noble element in Greek religiosity.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“As serfs, these people built cathedrals; emancipated, they build only horrors.”
― Emil M. Cioran