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even now the ordinary man still always waits for an opinion about himself and then instinctively submits to that—but by no means only a “good” opinion;
see social media. people politic views after a major event will shift days after the event to fit political event.
The vain person is delighted by every good opinion he hears of himself (quite apart from all considerations of its utility, and also apart from truth or falsehood), just as every bad opinion of him pains him: for he submits to both, he feels subjected to them in accordance with that oldest instinct of submission that breaks out in him.
a slave
vanity is an atavism.
A species10 comes to be, a type becomes fixed and strong, through the long fight with essentially constant unfavorable conditions.
Manifold experience teaches them to which qualities above all they owe the fact that, despite all gods and men, they are still there, that they have always triumphed: these qualities they call virtues, these virtues alone they cultivate.14 They do this with hardness,
conditions become more fortunate and the tremendous tension decreases; perhaps there are no longer any enemies among one’s neighbors, and the means of life, even for the enjoyment of life, are superabundant. At one stroke the bond and constraint of the old discipline15 are torn: it no longer seems necessary,
as degeneration and monstrosity, suddenly appears on the scene in the greatest abundance and magnificence; the individual dares to be individual and different.
one type of man, the incurably mediocre. The mediocre alone have a chance of continuing their type and propagating—they are the men of the future, the only survivors: “Be like them! Become mediocre!” is now the only morality that still makes sense,
There is an instinct for rank which, more than anything else, is a sign of a high rank;
ultimate significance require some external tyranny of authority for their protection in order to gain those millennia of persistence which are necessary to exhaust them and figure them out.
It is simply not possible that a human being should not have the qualities and preferences of his parents and ancestors in his body, whatever appearances may suggest to the contrary. This is the problem of race.
In our very popularity-minded—that is, plebeian—age, “education” and “culture” have to be essentially the art of deceiving—about one’s origins, the inherited plebs in one’s body and soul. An educator who today preached truthfulness above all and constantly challenged his students, “be true! be natural! do not pretend!”—even such a virtuous and guileless ass would learn after a while to reach for that furca of Horace to naturam expellere: with what success?
At the risk of displeasing innocent ears I propose: egoism belongs to the nature of a noble soul—I
The concept “grace”20 has no meaning or good odor inter pares;21 there may be a sublime way of letting presents from above happen to one, as it were, and to drink them up thirstily like drops—but for this art and gesture the noble soul has no aptitude. Its egoism hinders it: quite generally it does not like to look “up”—but either ahead, horizon-tally and slowly, or down: it knows itself to be at a height.
“Truly high respect one can have only for those who do not seek themselves.”—Goethe to Rat Schlosser.
I do not doubt that an ancient Greek would recognize in us Europeans of today, too, such self-diminution; this alone would suffice for us to “offend his taste.”—
To understand one another, it is not enough that one use the same words; one also has to use the same words for the same species of inner experiences; in the end one has to have one’s experience in common.
human beings of one people understand one another better than those belonging to different peoples even if they employ the same language; or rather when human beings have long lived together under similar conditions
The human beings who are more similar, more ordinary, have had, and always have, an advantage; those more select, subtle, strange, and difficult to understand, easily remain alone, succumb to accidents, being isolated, and rarely propagate,
inevitable psychologist and unriddler of souls—applies himself to the more exquisite cases and human beings, the greater becomes the danger that he might suffocate from pity.25 He needs hardness and cheerfulness more than anyone else.
he always requires a cure, that he needs a kind of escape and forgetting, away from all that with which his insights, his incisions, his “craft” have burdened his conscience.
men like Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol (I do not dare mention greater names, but I mean them)26—are and perhaps must be men of fleeting moments, enthusiastic, sensual, childish, frivolous and sudden in mistrust and trust; with souls in which they usually try to conceal some fracture; often taking revenge with their works for some inner contamination,
what torture are these great artists and all the so-called higher men for anyone who has once guessed their true nature!
woman would like to believe that love can achieve anything—
Profound suffering makes noble; it separates.
that it is characteristic of more refined humanity to respect “the mask” and not to indulge in psychology and curiosity in the wrong place.
The highest instinct of cleanliness places those possessed of it in the oddest and most dangerous lonesomeness, as saints: for precisely this is saintliness—the
distinguishes—it is a noble propensity—it also separates.
The saint’s pity is pity with the dirt of what is human, all too human. And there are degrees and heights where he experiences even pity itself as a pollution, as dirty—
Signs of nobility: never thinking of degrading our duties into duties for everybody; not wanting to delegate, to share, one’s own responsibility; counting one’s privileges and their exercise among one’s duties.
Impatience and his consciousness that until then he is always condemned to comedy—for even war is a comedy and conceals, just as every means conceals the end—spoil all of his relations to others: this type of man knows solitude and what is most poisonous in it.
The problem of those who are waiting.—It requires strokes of luck and much that is incalculable if a higher man in whom the solution of a problem lies dormant is to get around to action in time—to “eruption,” one might say.
Genius is perhaps not so rare after all—but the five hundred hands it requires to tyrannize the kairos, “the right time,” seizing chance by its forelock.
In all kinds of injury and loss the lower and coarser soul is better off than the nobler one:
In a lizard a lost finger is replaced again; not so in man.
When one has finished building ones’ house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way—before one began.
story of everyone's life. story of this book?
Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a way of embracing happiness as if they wanted to crush and suffocate it, from jealousy: alas, they know only too well that it will flee.
To be in a position to afford this real luxury of taste and morality, one must not live among dolts of the spirit but rather among people whose misunderstandings and blunders are still amusing owing to their subtlety—or
to remain master of one’s four virtues: of courage, insight, sympathy, and solitude.
it is the faith that is decisive here, that determines the order of rank—to take up again an ancient religious formula in a new and more profound sense: some fundamental certainty that a noble soul has about itself, something that cannot be sought, nor found, nor perhaps lost
The noble soul has reverence for itself.35
they have something they conceal, namely spirit. One of the subtlest means for keeping up the deception at least as long as possible and of successfully appearing more stupid than one is—which
For as Galiani, who should know, says: vertu est enthousiasme.
what does this mean?
When a man has been sitting alone with his soul in confidential discord and discourse, year in and year out, day and night; when in his cave—it may be a labyrinth or a gold mine—he has become a cave bear or a treasure digger or a treasure guard and dragon;
The hermit does not believe that any philosopher—assuming that every philosopher was first of all a hermit—ever expressed his real and ultimate opinions in books:
same with niet!
Every profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood. The latter may hurt his vanity, but the former his heart,
much more may belong in the concept of “art” than is generally believed.
A philosopher—is a human being who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, and dreams extraordinary things;
master—when such a man has pity, well, this pity has value. But what good is the pity of those who suffer. Or those who, worse, preach pity.
there is a veritable cult of suffering. The unmanliness of what is baptized as “pity” in the circles of such enthusiasts is, I should think, what always meets the eye first.
