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If we assume that honesty is a virtue of ours from which we cannot escape, we free spirits - well, we'll want to work on it with all our malice and love and not grow tired of "making ourselves perfect" in our virtue, the only one which remains ours: may its brilliance one day remain lying like a gilded, blue, mocking evening light over this aging culture and its dull and dark seriousness! And if nonetheless our honesty one day grows tired and sighs and stretches its limbs and finds us too hard and would like to have things better, lighter, more loving, like a pleasing vice, let us remain hard, we final Stoics! And let us send her by way of help only what we have in us of devilry - our disgust with what is crude and approximate, our "nitimur in vetitum" [we seek what is forbidden], our courage as adventurers, our shrewd and discriminating curiosity, our most refined, most disguised, and most spiritual will to power and overcoming of the world which roams and swarms greedily around all future realms - let us come to the aid of our "God" with all our "devils"! It is likely that because of this people fail to recognize us and get us confused with others. What does that matter? People will say "Your ‘honesty'- that's your devilry, nothing more than that." What does that matter? Even if they were right! Haven't all gods up to now been like that, devils who became holy by being re-christened? And what finally do we know about ourselves? And that spirit which guides us, what does it want to be called? (It is a matter of names). And how many spirits are we hiding? Our honesty, we free spirits - let's take care that it does not become our vanity, our finery and splendour, our boundary, our stupidity! Every virtue tends towards stupidity; every stupidity tends towards virtue: "stupid all the way to holiness" people say in Russia - let's take care that we don't end up becoming saints and bores through honesty! Isn't life a hundred times too short to get bored with it? We'd already have to believe in eternal life, in order to. . . .
