[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
grasps: who art thou? what hast thou done? Rest thee
here: this place has hospitality for every one refresh
thyself! And whoever thou art, what is it that now pleases
thee? What will serve to refresh thee? Only name it,
whatever I have I offer thee! To refresh me? To refresh
me? Oh, thou prying one, what sayest thou! But give me,
I pray thee - What? what? Speak out! Another mask! A
second mask!
283 of 301
Beyond Good and Evil
279. Men of profound sadness betray themselves when
they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon
happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out
of jealousy ah, they know only too well that it will flee
from them!
280. Bad! Bad! What? Does he not go back? Yes!
But you misunderstand him when you complain about it.
He goes back like every one who is about to make a great
spring.
281. Will people believe it of me? But I insist that
they believe it of me: I have always thought very
unsatisfactorily of myself and about myself, only in very
rare cases, only compulsorily, always without delight in
the subject, ready to digress from myself, and always
without faith in the result, owing to an unconquerable
distrust of the POSSIBILITY of self- knowledge, which
has led me so far as to feel a CONTRADICTIO IN
ADJECTO even in the idea of direct knowledge which
theorists allow themselves: this matter of fact is almost
the most certain thing I know about myself. There must
be a sort of repugnance in me to BELIEVE anything
definite about myself. Is there perhaps some enigma
therein? Probably; but fortunately nothing for my own
284 of 301
Beyond Good and Evil
teeth. Perhaps it betrays the species to which I belong?
but not to myself, as is sufficiently agreeable to me.
282. But what has happened to you? I do not
know, he said, hesitatingly; perhaps the Harpies have
flown over my table. It sometimes happens nowadays
that a gentle, sober, retiring man becomes suddenly mad,
breaks the plates, upsets the table, shrieks, raves, and
shocks everybody and finally withdraws, ashamed, and
raging at himself whither? for what purpose? To famish
apart? To suffocate with his memories? To him who has
the desires of a lofty and dainty soul, and only seldom finds
his table laid and his food prepared, the danger will always
be great nowadays, however, it is extraordinarily so.
Thrown into the midst of a noisy and plebeian age, with
which he does not like to eat out of the same dish, he may
readily perish of hunger and thirst or, should he
nevertheless finally fall to, of sudden nausea. We have
probably all sat at tables to which we did not belong; and
precisely the most spiritual of us, who are most difficult to
nourish, know the dangerous DYSPEPSIA which
originates from a sudden insight and disillusionment about
our food and our messmates the AFTER-DINNER
NAUSEA.
285 of 301
Beyond Good and Evil
283. If one wishes to praise at all, it is a delicate and at
the same time a noble self-control, to praise only where
one DOES NOT agree otherwise in fact one would
praise oneself, which is contrary to good taste: a self-
control, to be sure, which offers excellent opportunity and
provocation to constant MISUNDERSTANDING. To
be able to allow oneself this veritable luxury of taste and
morality, one must not live among intellectual imbeciles,
but rather among men whose misunderstandings and
mistakes amuse by their refinement or one will have to
pay dearly for it! He praises me, THEREFORE he
acknowledges me to be right this asinine method of
inference spoils half of the life of us recluses, for it brings
the asses into our neighbourhood and friendship.
284. To live in a vast and proud tranquility; always
beyond & To have, or not to have, one s emotions, one s
For and Against, according to choice; to lower oneself to
them for hours; to SEAT oneself on them as upon horses,
and often as upon asses: for one must know how to
make use of their stupidity as well as of their fire. To
conserve one s three hundred foregrounds; also one s black
spectacles: for there are circumstances when nobody must
look into our eyes, still less into our motives. And to
choose for company that roguish and cheerful vice,
286 of 301
Beyond Good and Evil
politeness. And to remain master of one s four virtues,
courage, insight, sympathy, and solitude. For solitude is a
virtue with us, as a sublime bent and bias to purity, which
divines that in the contact of man and man in society
it must be unavoidably impure. All society makes one
somehow, somewhere, or sometime commonplace.
285. The greatest events and thoughts the greatest
thoughts, however, are the greatest events are longest in
being comprehended: the generations which are
contemporary with them do not EXPERIENCE such
events they live past them. Something happens there as
in the realm of stars. The light of the furthest stars is
longest in reaching man; and before it has arrived man
DENIES that there are stars there. How many centuries
does a mind require to be understood? that is also a
standard, one also makes a gradation of rank and an
etiquette therewith, such as is necessary for mind and for
star.
286. Here is the prospect free, the mind exalted.
[FOOTNOTE: Goethe s Faust, Part II, Act V. The
words of Dr. Marianus.] But there is a reverse kind of
man, who is also upon a height, and has also a free
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]