Daybreak

557

Off to fight an enemy.  How fine bad music and bad reasons sound when one marches off to fight an enemy!

Friedrich NietzscheDaybreak: Book V - Aphorism #55713113 years, 1 month ago 

558

But do not hide your virtues either.  I love those who are transparent water and who, as Pope153 puts it, 'do not hide from view the turbid bottom of their stream'. But for them too there is a species of vanity, if a very rare and sublimated species: some of them desire tO display precisely this turbidity and count as nothing the transparency of the water that makes this possible. No less a person than Gautama Buddha invented this rare kind of vanity in the formula: 'let your sins be seen before the people and hide your virtues!' But to do this means to present the world with an ill spectacle  it is a sin against taste.

153. Pope, Alexander (1688-1744): English poet, author of Pastorals (1709) and the mock-heroic poem The Rape of the Lock (1712), among other works.
Friedrich NietzscheDaybreak: Book V - Aphorism #55813213 years, 1 month ago 

559

'Nothing too much!'  How often the individual is advised to set himself a goal that he cannot reach and is beyond his strength, so that he will at least reach that which his strength is capable of when put to the farthest stretch! But is this really so desirable? Must even the best performers who live according to this teaching, and their best performances, not acquire something exaggerated and distorted precisely because there is too much tension in them? And when as a result one sees nothing but struggling athletes, tremendous efforts, and nowhere a laurel-crowned and triumphant victor, does that not envelop the world in a grey veil of failure?

Friedrich NietzscheDaybreak: Book V - Aphorism #55912813 years, 1 month ago 

560

What we are at liberty to do.  One can dispose of one's drives like a gardener and, though few know it, cultivate the shoots of anger, pity, curiosity, vanity as productively and profitably as a beautiful fruit tree on a trellis; one can do it with the good or bad taste of a gardener and, as it were, in the French or English or Dutch or Chinese fashion; one can also let nature rule and only attend to a little embellishment and tidying-up here and there; one can, finally, without paying any attention to them at all, let the plants grow up and fight their fight out among themselves  indeed, one can take delight in such a wilderness, and desire precisely this delight, though it gives one some trouble, too. All this we are at liberty to do: but how many know we are at liberty to do it? Do the majority not believe in themselves as in complete fully-developed facts? Have the great philosophers not put their seal on this prejudice with the doctrine of the unchangeability of character?

Friedrich NietzscheDaybreak: Book V - Aphorism #56018713 years, 1 month ago 

561

Let your happiness too shine out.  As painters, being quite unable to reproduce the radiant colour of the real sky, are obliged to employ in their landscapes all the colours they need a couple of tones deeper than they are in nature: as by means of this artifice they do then attain a similarity of texture and harmony of tones corresponding to those in nature: so poets and philosophers too have to resort to a similar expedient when they are unable to reproduce the radiance of real happiness; by painting all things a couple of degrees darker than they are, they can make their lighter touches seem almost sunny and, by contrast, similar to actual happiness.  The pessimist, who gives to all things the blackest and gloomiest colours, employs only flames and flashes of lightning, celestial radiance, and anything whose light is glaring and confuses the eyes; with him the function of brightness is only to enhance terror and to make us feel there is more horror in things than there really is.

Friedrich NietzscheDaybreak: Book V - Aphorism #56114513 years, 1 month ago