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 Nietzsche - Daybreak
Book V - Aphorism # 561

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