566

Living cheaply.  The cheapest and most inoffensive way of living is that of the thinker: for, to get at once to the main point, the things he needs most are precisely those which others despise and throw away . Then: he is easily pleased and has no expensive pleasures; his work is not hard but as it were southerly; his days and nights are not spoiled by pangs of conscience; he moves about, eats, drinks and sleeps in proportion as his mind grows ever calmer, stronger and brighter; he rejoices in his body and has no reason to be afraid of it; he has no need of company, except now and then so as afterwards to embrace his solitude the more tenderly; as a substitute for the living he has the dead, and even for friends he has a substitute: namely the best who have ever lived.  Consider whether it is not the opposite desires and habits that make the life of men expensive and consequently arduous and often insupportable.  In another sense, to be sure, the life of the thinker is the most expensive  nothing is too good for him; and to be deprived of the best would here be an unendurable deprivation.

Friedrich Nietzsche - Daybreak
Book V - Aphorism # 566

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