283. If one wishes to praise at all, it is a delicate and at the same time a noble selfcontrol, to praise only where one DOES NOT agreeotherwise in fact one would praise oneself, which is contrary to good taste:a selfcontrol, to be sure, which offers excellent opportunity and provocation to constant MISUNDERSTANDING. To be able to allow oneself this veritable luxury of taste and morality, one must not live among intellectual imbeciles, but rather among men whose misunderstandings and mistakes amuse by their refinementor one will have to pay dearly for it!"He praises me, THEREFORE he acknowledges me to be right"this asinine method of inference spoils half of the life of us recluses, for it brings the asses into our neighbourhood and friendship.
284. To live in a vast and proud tranquility; always beyondTo have, or not to have, one's emotions, one's For and Against, according to choice; to lower oneself to them for hours; to SEAT oneself on them as upon horses, and often as upon asses:for one must know how to make use of their stupidity as well as of their fire. To conserve one's three hundred foregrounds; also one's black spectacles: for there are circumstances when nobody must look into our eyes, still less into our "motives." And to choose for company that roguish and cheerful vice, politeness. And to remain master of one's four virtues, courage, insight, sympathy, and solitude. For solitude is a virtue with us, as a sublime bent and bias to purity, which divines that in the contact of man and man"in society"it must be unavoidably impure. All society makes one somehow, somewhere, or sometime"commonplace."
285. The greatest events and thoughtsthe greatest thoughts, however, are the greatest eventsare longest in being comprehended: the generations which are contemporary with them do not EXPERIENCE such eventsthey live past them. Something happens there as in the realm of stars. The light of the furthest stars is longest in reaching man; and before it has arrived man DENIESthat there are stars there. "How many centuries does a mind require to be understood?"that is also a standard, one also makes a gradation of rank and an etiquette therewith, such as is necessary for mind and for star.
286. "Here is the prospect free, the mind exalted." [Footnote: Goethe's "Faust," Part II, Act V. The words of Dr. Marianus.]But there is a reverse kind of man, who is also upon a height, and has also a free prospectbut looks DOWNWARDS.
287. What is noble? What does the word "noble" still mean for us nowadays? How does the noble man betray himself, how is he recognized under this heavy overcast sky of the commencing plebeianism, by which everything is rendered opaque and leaden?It is not his actions which establish his claimactions are always ambiguous, always inscrutable; neither is it his "works." One finds nowadays among artists and scholars plenty of those who betray by their works that a profound longing for nobleness impels them; but this very NEED of nobleness is radically different from the needs of the noble soul itself, and is in fact the eloquent and dangerous sign of the lack thereof. It is not the works, but the BELIEF which is here decisive and determines the order of rankto employ once more an old religious formula with a new and deeper meaningit is some fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to be found, and perhaps, also, is not to be lost.THE NOBLE SOUL HAS REVERENCE FOR ITSELF.
288. There are men who are unavoidably intellectual, let them turn and twist themselves as they will, and hold their hands before their treacherous eyesas though the hand were not a betrayer; it always comes out at last that they have something which they hidenamely, intellect. One of the subtlest means of deceiving, at least as long as possible, and of successfully representing oneself to be stupider than one really iswhich in everyday life is often as desirable as an umbrella,is called ENTHUSIASM, including what belongs to it, for instance, virtue. For as Galiani said, who was obliged to know it: VERTU EST ENTHOUSIASME.
289. In the writings of a recluse one always hears something of the echo of the wilderness, something of the murmuring tones and timid vigilance of solitude; in his strongest words, even in his cry itself, there sounds a new and more dangerous kind of silence, of concealment. He who has sat day and night, from year's end to year's end, alone with his soul in familiar discord and discourse, he who has become a cavebear, or a treasureseeker, or a treasureguardian and dragon in his caveit may be a labyrinth, but can also be a goldminehis ideas themselves eventually acquire a twilightcolour of their own, and an odour, as much of the depth as of the mould, something uncommunicative and repulsive, which blows chilly upon every passerby. The recluse does not believe that a philosophersupposing that a philosopher has always in the first place been a recluseever expressed his actual and ultimate opinions in books: are not books written precisely to hide what is in us?indeed, he will doubt whether a philosopher CAN have "ultimate and actual" opinions at all; whether behind every cave in him there is not, and must necessarily be, a still deeper cave: an ampler, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss behind every bottom, beneath every "foundation." Every philosophy is a foreground philosophythis is a recluse's verdict: "There is something arbitrary in the fact that the PHILOSOPHER came to a stand here, took a retrospect, and looked around; that he HERE laid his spade aside and did not dig any deeperthere is also something suspicious in it." Every philosophy also CONCEALS a philosophy; every opinion is also a LURKINGPLACE, every word is also a MASK.