Have you experienced history within yourselves, commotions,
earthquakes, long and profound sadness, and sudden flashes of
happiness? Have you acted foolishly with great and little fools? Have
you really undergone the delusions and woe of the good people? and also
the woe and the peculiar happiness of the most evil? Then you may speak
to me of morality, but not otherwise! 376
"What do I matter?" is written over the door of the thinker of the
future. 379
The great man ever remains invisible in the greatest thing that claims
worship, like some distant star: his victory over power remains without
witnesses, and hence also without songs and singers. The hierarchy of
the great men in all the past history of the human race has not yet
been determined. 380
Whether what we are looking forward to is a thought or a deed, our
relationship to every essential achievement is none other than that
of pregnancy, and all our vainglorious boasting about "willing" and
"creating" should be cast to the winds! True and ideal selfishness
consists in always watching over and restraining the soul, so that our
productiveness may come to a beautiful termination. ... Still, these
pregnant ones are funny people! Let us therefore dare to be funny also,
and not reproach others if they must be the same. 384-385
Honest towards ourselves, and to all and everything friendly to us;
brave in the face of our enemy; generous towards the vanquished; polite
at all times: such do the four cardinal virtues wish us to be. 387
There is no "eternal justice" which requires that every fault shall
be atoned and paid for,--the belief that such a justice existed was a
terrible delusion, and useful only to a limited extent; just as it is
also a delusion that everything is guilt which is felt as such. It is
not the things themselves, but the opinions about things that do not
exist, which have been such a source of trouble to mankind. 391