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inner desperateness of higher men, this eternal too late!
in every sense may perhaps one day be the cause of his
turning with bitterness against his own lot, and of his
making an attempt at self-destruction of his going to
ruin himself. One may perceive in almost every
psychologist a tell-tale inclination for delightful intercourse
with commonplace and well-ordered men; the fact is
thereby disclosed that he always requires healing, that he
needs a sort of flight and forgetfulness, away from what his
insight and incisiveness from what his business has
laid upon his conscience. The fear of his memory is
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peculiar to him. He is easily silenced by the judgment of
others; he hears with unmoved countenance how people
honour, admire, love, and glorify, where he has
PERCEIVED or he even conceals his silence by
expressly assenting to some plausible opinion. Perhaps the
paradox of his situation becomes so dreadful that, precisely
where he has learnt GREAT SYMPATHY, together with
great CONTEMPT, the multitude, the educated, and the
visionaries, have on their part learnt great reverence
reverence for great men and marvelous animals, for the
sake of whom one blesses and honours the fatherland, the
earth, the dignity of mankind, and one s own self, to
whom one points the young, and in view of whom one
educates them. And who knows but in all great instances
hitherto just the same happened: that the multitude
worshipped a God, and that the God was only a poor
sacrificial animal! SUCCESS has always been the greatest
liar and the work itself is a success; the great statesman,
the conqueror, the discoverer, are disguised in their
creations until they are unrecognizable; the work of the
artist, of the philosopher, only invents him who has
created it, is REPUTED to have created it; the great
men, as they are reverenced, are poor little fictions
composed afterwards; in the world of historical values
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spurious coinage PREVAILS. Those great poets, for
example, such as Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist,
Gogol (I do not venture to mention much greater names,
but I have them in my mind), as they now appear, and
were perhaps obliged to be: men of the moment,
enthusiastic, sensuous, and childish, light- minded and
impulsive in their trust and distrust; with souls in which
usually some flaw has to be concealed; often taking
revenge with their works for an internal defilement, often
seeking forgetfulness in their soaring from a too true
memory, often lost in the mud and almost in love with it,
until they become like the Will-o -the-Wisps around the
swamps, and PRETEND TO BE stars the people then
call them idealists, often struggling with protracted
disgust, with an ever-reappearing phantom of disbelief,
which makes them cold, and obliges them to languish for
GLORIA and devour faith as it is out of the hands of
intoxicated adulators: what a TORMENT these great
artists are and the so-called higher men in general, to him
who has once found them out! It is thus conceivable that
it is just from woman who is clairvoyant in the world of
suffering, and also unfortunately eager to help and save to
an extent far beyond her powers that THEY have learnt
so readily those outbreaks of boundless devoted
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SYMPATHY, which the multitude, above all the reverent
multitude, do not understand, and overwhelm with prying
and self-gratifying interpretations. This sympathizing
invariably deceives itself as to its power; woman would
like to believe that love can do EVERYTHING it is the
SUPERSTITION peculiar to her. Alas, he who knows
the heart finds out how poor, helpless, pretentious, and
blundering even the best and deepest love is he finds that
it rather DESTROYS than saves! It is possible that
under the holy fable and travesty of the life of Jesus there
is hidden one of the most painful cases of the martyrdom
of KNOWLEDGE ABOUT LOVE: the martyrdom of
the most innocent and most craving heart, that never had
enough of any human love, that DEMANDED love, that
demanded inexorably and frantically to be loved and
nothing else, with terrible outbursts against those who
refused him their love; the story of a poor soul insatiated
and insatiable in love, that had to invent hell to send
thither those who WOULD NOT love him and that at
last, enlightened about human love, had to invent a God
who is entire love, entire CAPACITY for love who
takes pity on human love, because it is so paltry, so
ignorant! He who has such sentiments, he who has such
KNOWLEDGE about love SEEKS for death! But
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Beyond Good and Evil
why should one deal with such painful matters? Provided,
of course, that one is not obliged to do so.
270. The intellectual haughtiness and loathing of every
man who has suffered deeply it almost determines the
order of rank HOW deeply men can suffer the chilling
certainty, with which he is thoroughly imbued and
coloured, that by virtue of his suffering he KNOWS
MORE than the shrewdest and wisest can ever know, that
he has been familiar with, and at home in, many distant,
dreadful worlds of which YOU know nothing ! this
silent intellectual haughtiness of the sufferer, this pride of
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