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  • Become who you are.

  • A weakened, thin, extinguished personality that denies itself is no longer fit for anything good—least of all for philosophy.

  • What is the seal of liberation? To be no longer ashamed of oneself.

  • Either we have no dreams or our dreams are interesting. One must learn to be awake in the same fashion: either not at all, or in an interesting manner.

  • What is it that constitutes the history of each day for you? Look at your habits of which it consists: are they the product of numberless little acts of cowardice and laziness, or of your bravery and inventive reason?

  • One thing is needful: to “give style” to one’s character that is a grand and a rare art! He who surveys all that his nature presents in its strength and in its weakness, and then fashions it into an ingenious plan, until everything appears artistic and rational, and even the weaknesses enchant the eye exercises that admirable art. Here, there has been a great amount of second nature added, there a portion of first nature has been taken away: in both cases with long exercise and daily labour at the task. Here, the ugly, which does not permit of being taken away, has been concealed, there it has been re-interpreted into the sublime. Much of the vague, which refuses to take form, has been reserved and utilised for the perspectives: it is meant to give a hint of the remote and immeasurable. In the end, when the work has been completed, it is revealed how it was the constraint of the same taste that organised and fashioned it in whole and in part: whether the taste was good or bad is of less importance than one thinks, it is sufficient that it was a taste! It will be the strong imperious natures which experience their most refined joy in such constraint, in such confinement and perfection under their own law; the passion of their violent volition lessens at the sight of all disciplined nature, all conquered and ministering nature: even when they have palaces to build and gardens to lay out, it is not to their taste to allow nature to be free. It is the reverse with weak characters who have not power over themselves, and hate the restriction of style: they feel that if this repugnant constraint were laid upon them, they would necessarily become vulgarised under it: they become slaves as soon as they serve, they hate service. Such intellects, they may be intellects of the first rank, are always concerned with fashioning and interpreting themselves and their surroundings as free nature, wild, arbitrary, fantastic, confused, and surprising: and it is well for them to do so, because only in this manner can they please themselves! For one thing is needful: namely, that man should attain to satisfaction with himself be it but through this or that fable and artifice: it is only then that man’s aspect is at all endurable!

  • We are always in our own company.

  • Such is man: a dogma might be refuted to him a thousand times, provided, however, that he had need of it, he would again and again accept it as ‘true’.

  • What if a demon crept after you into your loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to you: “This life, as you live it at present, and have lived it, you must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must come to you again, and all in the same series and sequence — and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and you with it, you speck of dust!” — Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth, and curse the demon that so spoke? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment in which you would answer him: “You are a God, and never did I hear anything so divine!” If that thought acquired power over you as you are, it would transform you, and perhaps crush you; the question with regard to all and everything: “Do you want this once more, and also for innumerable times?” would lie as the heaviest burden upon your activity! Or, how would you have to become favourably inclined to yourself and to life, so as to long for nothing more ardently than for this last eternal sanctioning and sealing?

  • Ask yourselves whether a tree which is to grow proudly skywards can dispense with bad weather and storms.

  • It is great pain only, the long slow pain which takes time, by which we are burned as it were with green wood, that compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths, and divest ourselves of all trust, all good-nature, veiling, gentleness, and averageness, wherein we have perhaps formerly installed our humanity. I doubt whether such pain ‘improves’ us; but I know that it deepens us.

  • One comes back out of such abysses, out of such severe sickness, and out of the sickness of strong suspicion: new-born, with the skin cast, more sensitive, more wicked, with a finer taste for joy, with a more delicate tongue for all good things, with a merrier disposition, with a second and more dangerous innocence in joy, more childish at the same time, and a hundred times more refined than ever before.