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Pleasing by Displeasing.—People who prefer to attract attention, and thereby to displease, desire the same thing as those who neither wish to please nor to attract attention, only they seek it more ardently and indirectly by means of a step by which they apparently move away from their goal. They desire influence and power, and therefore show their superiority, even to such an extent that it becomes disagreeable; for they know that he who has finally attained power, pleases in almost all he says and does, and that even when he displeases he still seems to please. The free spirit also, and in like manner the believer, desire power, in order some day to please thereby; when, on account of their doctrine, evil fate, persecution, dungeon, or execution threaten them, they rejoice in the thought that their teaching will thus be engraved and branded on the heart of mankind; though its effect is remote they accept their fate as a painful but powerful means of still attaining to power.
Pleasing by Displeasing.—People who prefer to attract attention, and thereby to displease, desire the same thing as those who neither wish to please nor to attract attention, only they seek it more ardently and indirectly by means of a step by which they apparently move away from their goal. They desire influence and power, and therefore show their superiority, even to such an extent that it becomes disagreeable; for they know that he who has finally attained power, pleases in almost all he says and does, and that even when he displeases he still seems to please. The free spirit also, and in like manner the believer, desire power, in order some day to please thereby; when, on account of their doctrine, evil fate, persecution, dungeon, or execution threaten them, they rejoice in the thought that their teaching will thus be engraved and branded on the heart of mankind; though its effect is remote they accept their fate as a painful but powerful means of still attaining to power.
Approximate author period: c. 1872 AD · industrial
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- Author or tradition
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Attribution: attributed - Country attributed
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- Approximate author period: c. 1872 AD · industrial
author lifetime midpoint (1844–1900); not quotation composition date
An author lifetime, approximate period or collection date is not necessarily the date when these words were first written or spoken. - Recorded source
- Human, All-Too-Human, Part 1 (1909 English edition) (1909 AD)
Part1, complete printed aphorism 595; Helen Zimmern translation; Edinburgh and London: T.N. Foulis,1909
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Author of Human, All-Too-Human, here represented by complete numbered passages in Helen Zimmern’s 1909 and Paul V. Cohn’s 1913 English editions. Catalogue lifetime 1844–1900; historical philosophical arguments and dated viewpoints require context, rather than treating every sentence as general advice.
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