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Our loftiest insights must - and should!- ring out like foolishness, under some circumstances like crimes, when in some forbidden way they come to the ears of those for whom they are not suitable and who are not predestined to hear them. The exoteric and the esoteric views, as people earlier differentiated them among philosophers, with Indians as with Greeks, Persians, and Muslims, in short, wherever people believed in a hierarchy and not in equality and equal rights - this differentiation does not arise so much from the fact that the exoteric view stands outside and looks, assesses, measures, and judges from the outside, not from the inside: the more essential point is that the exoteric view sees the matter looking up from underneath, but the esoteric sees it looking down from above! There are heights of the soul viewed from which even tragedy ceases to work its tragic effect, and if we gathered all the sorrow of the world into one sorrow, who could dare to decide if a glance at it would necessarily seduce and compel us to pity and thus to a doubling of that sorrow? . . . What serves the higher kind of men as nourishment or refreshment must be almost poison to a very different and lower kind of man. The virtues of the common man would perhaps amount to vices and weaknesses in a philosopher; it could be possible that a higher kind of person, if he is degenerating and nearing his end, only then acquires characteristics for whose sake people in the lower world, into which he has sunk, would find it necessary to honour him as a saint from now on. There are books which have an opposite value for the soul and for health, depending on whether the lower soul, the lower vitality, or the higher and more powerful soul makes use of them: with the first group, the books are dangerous, shattering, disintegrating; with the second group, they are a herald’s summons which provokes the bravest to show their courage. Books for the whole world always smell foul: the stink of small people clings to them. Where the folk eat and drink, even where they worship, the place usually stinks. One should not go into churches if one wants to breathe clean air.