284

To live with an immense and proud composure: always beyond. - To have and not have one's feelings, one's for and against, voluntarily, to condescend to them for hours, to sit on them, as if on a horse, often as if on a donkey: - for one needs to know how to use their stupidity as well as their fire. To preserve one's three hundred foregrounds, as well as one's dark glasses: for there are occasions when no one should be allowed to look into our eyes, even less into our "reasons." And to select for company that mischievous and cheerful vice, courtesy. And to remain master of one's four virtues: courage, insight, sympathy, and loneliness. For solitude is a virtue with us, as a sublime tendency and impulse for cleanliness, which senses how contact between one person and another - "in society" - must inevitably bring impurity with it. Every community somehow, somewhere, sometime makes people - "common."

Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil
Part IX - Aphorism # 284

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