271

What most profoundly divides two men is a different sense and degree of cleanliness. What help is all honesty and mutual utility, what help is all the good will for each other: in the end the fact remains - they "can't stand each other's smell!" The highest instinct for cleanliness puts the person marked by it in the strangest and most dangerous isolation, as a saint: for that's simply what saintliness is - the highest spiritualization of the instinct in question. Any awareness of an indescribable abundance of pleasure in the bath, any lust and thirst which constantly drives the soul out of the night into the morning and out of cloudiness, the "affliction," into what is bright, gleaming, profound, fine; just as such a tendencysingles out - it is a noble tendency - so it also separates . The pity of the saint is pity for the dirt of those who are human, all-too-human. And there are degrees and heights where the saint feels pity itself as contamination, as dirt . . .

Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil
Part IX - Aphorism # 271

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