The Dawn of Day

280

Childlike. – Those who live like children – those who have not to struggle for their daily bread, and do not think that their actions have any ultimate signification – remain childlike.

281

Our Ego desires Everything. – It would seem as if men in general were only inspired by the desire to possess: languages at least would permit of this supposition, for they view past actions from the standpoint that we have been put in possession of something – “I have spoken, struggled, conquered” – as if to say, I am now in possession of my word, my struggle, my victory. How greedy man appears in this light! he cannot even let the past escape him: he even wishes to have it still!

282

Danger in Beauty. – This woman is beautiful and intelligent: alas, how much more intelligent she would have become if she had not been beautiful!

283

Domestic and Mental Peace. – Our habitual mood depends upon the mood in which we maintain our habitual entourage.

284

New Things as Old Ones. – Many people seem irritated when something new is told them: they feel the ascendancy which the news has given to the person who has learnt it first.

285

What are the Limits of the Ego. – The majority of people take under their protection, as it were, something that they know, as if the fact of knowing it was sufficient in itself to make it their property. The acquisitiveness of the egoistic feeling has no limits: Great men speak as if they had behind them the whole of time, and had placed themselves at the head of this enormous host; and good women boast of the beauty of their children, their clothes, their dog, their physician, or their native town, but the only thing they dare not say is, “I am all that.” Chi non ha non è– as they say in Italy.

286

Domestic Animals, Pets and the Like. – Could there be anything more repugnant than the sentimentality which is shown to plants and animals – and this on the part of a creature who from the very beginning has made such ravages among them as their most ferocious enemy, – and who ends by even claiming affectionate feelings from his weakened and mutilated victims! Before this kind of “nature” man must above all be serious, if he is any sort of a thinking being.

287

Two Friends. – They were friends once, but now they have ceased to be so, and both of them broke off the friendship at the same time, the one because he believed himself to be too greatly misunderstood, and the other because he thought he was known too intimately – and both were wrong! For neither of them knew himself well enough.

288

The Comedy of the Noble Souls. – Those who cannot succeed in exhibiting a noble and cordial familiarity endeavour to let the nobleness of their nature be seen by their exercise of reserve and strictness, and a certain contempt for familiarity, as if their strong sense of confidence were ashamed to show itself.

289

Where we may say Nothing against Virtue. – Among cowards it is thought bad form to say anything against bravery, for any expression of this kind would give rise to some contempt; and unfeeling people are irritated when anything is said against pity.[9 - The fiercest protests against Nietzsche's teaching even now come from the “unfeeling people.” Hence the difficulty – now happily past – of introducing him into Anglo-Saxon countries. – Tr.]

290

A Waste. – We find that with irritable and abrupt people their first words and actions generally afford no indication of their actual character – they are prompted by circumstances, and are to some extent simply reproductions of the spirit of these circumstances. Because, however, as the words have been uttered and the deeds done, the subsequent words and deeds, indicating the real nature of such people, have often to be used to reconcile, amend, or extinguish the former.

291

Arrogance. – Arrogance is an artificial and simulated pride; but it is precisely the essential nature of pride to be incapable of artifice, simulation, or hypocrisy – and thus arrogance is the hypocrisy of the incapacity for hypocrisy, a very difficult thing, and one which is a failure in most cases. But if we suppose that, as most frequently happens, the presumptuous person betrays himself, then a treble annoyance falls to his lot: people are angry with him because he has endeavoured to deceive them, and because he wished to show himself superior to them, and finally they laugh at him because he failed in both these endeavours. How earnestly, therefore, should we dissuade our fellow-men from arrogance!

292

A Species of Misconception. – When we hear somebody speak it is often sufficient for his pronunciation of a single consonant (the letter r, for example) to fill us with doubts as to the honesty of his feelings: we are not accustomed to this particular pronunciation, and should have to make it ourselves as it were arbitrarily – it sounds “forced” to us. This is the domain of the greatest possible misconception: and it is the same with the style of a writer who has certain habits which are not the habits of everybody. His “artlessness” is felt as such only by himself, and precisely in regard to that which he himself feels to be “forced” (because he has yielded in this matter to the prevailing fashion and to so called “good taste”), he may perhaps give pleasure and inspire confidence.

293

Thankful. – One superfluous grain of gratitude and piety makes one suffer as from a vice – in spite of all one's independence and honesty one begins to have a bad conscience.

294

Saints. – It is the most sensual men who find it necessary to avoid women and to torture their bodies.

295

The Subtlety of Serving. – One of the most subtle tasks in the great art of serving is that of serving a more than usually ambitious man, who, indeed, is excessively egoistic in all things, but is entirely adverse to being thought so (this is part of his ambition). He requires that everything shall be according to his own will and humour, yet in such a way as to give him the appearance of always having sacrificed himself, and of rarely desiring anything for himself alone.

296

Duelling. – I think it a great advantage, said some one, to be able to fight a duel – if, of course, it is absolutely necessary; for I have at all times brave companions about me. The duel is the last means of thoroughly honourable suicide left to us; but it is unfortunately a circuitous means, and not even a certain one.

297

Pernicious. – A young man can be most surely corrupted when he is taught to value the like-minded more highly than the differently minded.

298

Hero-Worship and its Fanatics. – The fanatic of an ideal that possesses flesh and blood is right as a rule so long as he assumes a negative attitude, and he is terrible in his negation: he knows what he denies as well as he knows himself, for the simple reason that he comes thence, that he feels at home there, and that he has always the secret fear of being forced to return there some day. He therefore wishes to make his return impossible by the manner of his negation. As soon as he begins to affirm, however, he partly shuts his eyes and begins to idealise (frequently merely for the sake of annoying those who have stayed at home). We might say that there was something artistic about this – agreed, but there is also something dishonest about it.

The idealist of a person imagines this person to be so far from him that he can no longer see him distinctly, and then he travesties that which he can just perceive into something “beautiful” – that is to say, symmetrical, vaguely outlined, uncertain. Since he wishes to worship from afar that ideal which floats on high in the distance, he finds it essential to build a temple for the object of his worship as a protection from the profanum vulgus. He brings into this temple for the object of his worship all the venerable and sanctified objects which he still possesses, so that his ideal may benefit by their charm, and that, nourished in this way, it may grow more and more divine. In the end he really succeeds in forming his God, but, alas for him! there is some one who knows how all this has been done, viz. his intellectual conscience; and there is also some one who, quite unconsciously, begins to protest against these things, viz. the deified one himself, who, in consequence of all this worship, praise, and incense, now becomes completely unbearable and shows himself in the most obvious and dreadful manner to be non-divine, and only too human.

In a case like this there is only one means of escape left for such a fanatic; he patiently suffers himself and his fellows to be maltreated, and interprets all this misery in maiorem dei gloriam by a new kind of self-deceit and noble falsehood. He takes up a stand against himself, and in doing so experiences, as an interpreter and ill-treated person, something like martyrdom – and in this way he climbs to the height of his conceit. Men of this kind to be found, for example, in the entourage of Napoleon: indeed, perhaps it may have been he who inspired the soul of his century with that romantic prostration in the presence of the “genius” and the “hero,” which was so foreign to the spirit of rationalism of the nineteenth century – a man about whom even Byron was not ashamed to say that he was a “worm compared with such a being.” (The formulæ of this prostration have been discovered by Thomas Carlyle, that arrogant old muddle-head and grumbler, who spent his long life in trying to romanticise the common sense of his Englishmen: but in vain!)

299

The Appearance of Heroism. – Throwing ourselves in the midst of our enemies may be a sign of cowardice.

300

Condescending towards the Flatterer. – It is the ultimate prudence of insatiably ambitious men not only to conceal their contempt for man which the sight of flatterers causes them: but also to appear even condescending to them, like a God who can be nothing if not condescending.

301

“Strength of Character.” – “What I have said once I will do” – This manner of thinking is believed to indicate great strength of character. How many actions are accomplished, not because they have been selected as being the most rational, but because at the moment when we thought of them they influenced our ambition and vanity by some means or another, so that we do not stop until we have blindly carried them out. Thus they strengthen in us our belief in our character and our good conscience, in short our strength; whilst the choice of the most rational acts possible brings about a certain amount of scepticism towards ourselves, and thus encourages a sense of weakness in us.

302

Once, Twice, and Thrice True. – Men lie unspeakably and often, but they do not think about it afterwards, and generally do not believe in it.

303

The Pastime of the Psychologist. – He thinks he knows me, and fancies himself to be subtle and important when he has any kind of relations with me; and I take care not to undeceive him. For in such a case I should suffer for it, while now he wishes me well because I arouse in him a feeling of conscious superiority. – There is another, who fears that I think I know him, and feels a sense of inferiority at this. As a result he behaves in a timid and vacillating manner, in my presence, and endeavours to mislead me in regard to himself so that he may regain an ascendancy over me.