-Sils-Maria, Oberengadin
August 1886  

“What, under the lens of life is the meaning of morality? [...] From the start Christianity was, essentially and fundamentally, the embodiment of disgust and antipathy for life, merely disguised, concealed, got up as the belief in an ‘other’ or a ‘better’ life. Hatred of the ‘world’, the condemnation of the emotions, the fear of beauty and sensuality, a transcendental world invented the better to slander this one, basically a yearning for non-existence, for repose until the ‘sabbath of sabbaths’ – all of this, along with Christianity’s unconditional resolve to acknowledge only moral values, struck me as the most dangerous and sinister of all possible manifestations of a ‘will to decline’, at the very least a sign of the most profound affliction, fatigue, sullenness, exhaustion, impoverishment of life. For in the face of morality (particularly Christian, unconditional morality), life must  constantly and inevitably be in the wrong, because life is something essentially amoral – in the end, crushed beneath the weight of contempt and eternal denial, life must be felt to be undesirable, valueless in itself. [...] So then, with this questionable book, my instinct,  an affirmative instinct for life, turned against morality and invented a fundamentally opposite doctrine and valuation of life, purely artistic and anti-Christian [...] I call it the Dionysiac.”

-All of the above taken from The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche