The Suppression of the Passions Friedrich Nietzsche

When one continually prohibits the expression of the passions as something to be left to the "vulgar," to coarser, bourgeois, and peasant natures that is, when one does not want to suppress the passions themselves, but only their language and demeanour, one never theless realises therewith just what one does not want: the suppression of the passions themselves, or at least their weakening and alteration, as the court of Louis XIV. (to cite the most instructive instance), and all that was dependent on it, experienced. The generation that followed, trained in suppressing their expression, no longer possessed the passions themselves, but had a pleasant, superficial, playful disposition in their place, a generation which was so permeated with the incapacity to be ill-mannered, that even an injury was not taken and retaliated, except with courteous words. Perhaps our own time furnishes the most remarkable counterpare to this period: I see everywhere (in life, in the theatre, and not least in all that is written) satisfaction at all the coarser outbursts and gestures of passion; a certain convention of passionateness is now desired, only not the passion itself! Nevertheless it will thereby be at last reached, and our posterity will have a genuine savagery and not merely a formal savagery and unmannerliness.