111
Our vanity is most difficult to wound just when our pride has been wounded.
112
To him who feels himself preordained to contemplation and not to belief, all believers are too noisy and obtrusive; he guards against them.
113
“You want to prepossess him in your favour? Then you must be embarrassed before him.”
114
The immense expectation with regard to sexual love, and the coyness in this expectation, spoils all the perspectives of women at the outset.
115
Where there is neither love nor hatred in the game, woman’s play is mediocre.
116
The great epochs of our life are at the points when we gain courage to rebaptize our badness as the best in us.
117
The will to overcome an emotion, is ultimately only the will of another, or of several other, emotions.
118
There is an innocence of admiration: it is possessed by him to whom it has not yet occurred that he himself may be admired some day.
119
Our loathing of dirt may be so great as to prevent our cleaning ourselves—“justifying” ourselves.
120
Sensuality often forces the growth of love too much, so that its root remains weak, and is easily torn up.
121
It is a curious thing that God learned Greek when he wished to turn author—and that he did not learn it better.
122
To rejoice on account of praise is in many cases merely politeness of heart—and the very opposite of vanity of spirit.
123
Even concubinage has been corrupted—by marriage.
124
He who exults at the stake, does not triumph over pain, but because of the fact that he does not feel pain where he expected it. A parable.
125
When we have to change an opinion about anyone, we charge heavily to his account the inconvenience he thereby causes us.
126
A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or seven great men.—Yes, and then to get round them.
127
In the eyes of all true women science is hostile to the sense of shame. They feel as if one wished to peep under their skin with it—or worse still! under their dress and finery.
128
The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you allure the senses to it.
129
The devil has the most extensive perspectives for God; on that account he keeps so far away from him:—the devil, in effect, as the oldest friend of knowledge.
130
What a person is begins to betray itself when his talent decreases—when he ceases to show what he can do. Talent is also an adornment; an adornment is also a concealment.
131
The sexes deceive themselves about each other: the reason is that in reality they honour and love only themselves (or their own ideal, to express it more agreeably). Thus man wishes woman to be peaceable: but in fact woman is essentially unpeaceable, like the cat, however well she may have assumed the peaceable demeanour.
132
One is punished best for one’s virtues.
133
He who cannot find the way to his ideal, lives more frivolously and shamelessly than the man without an ideal.
134
From the senses originate all trustworthiness, all good conscience, all evidence of truth.
135
Pharisaism is not a deterioration of the good man; a considerable part of it is rather an essential condition of being good.
136
The one seeks an accoucheur for his thoughts, the other seeks someone whom he can assist: a good conversation thus originates.
137
In intercourse with scholars and artists one readily makes mistakes of opposite kinds: in a remarkable scholar one not infrequently finds a mediocre man; and often, even in a mediocre artist, one finds a very remarkable man.
138
We do the same when awake as when dreaming: we only invent and imagine him with whom we have intercourse—and forget it immediately.
139
In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man.
140
Advice As a Riddle—“If the band is not to break, bite it first—secure to make!”
141
The belly is the reason why man does not so readily take himself for a God.
142
The chastest utterance I ever heard: “Dans le véritable amour c’est l’âme qui enveloppe le corps.”
143
Our vanity would like what we do best to pass precisely for what is most difficult to us.—Concerning the origin of many systems of morals.
144
When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is generally something wrong with her sexual nature. Barrenness itself conduces to a certain virility of taste; man, indeed, if I may say so, is “the barren animal.”
145
Comparing man and woman generally, one may say that woman would not have the genius for adornment, if she had not the instinct for the secondary role.
146
He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.
147
From old Florentine novels—moreover, from life: Buona femmina e mala femmina vuol bastone. —Sacchetti, Nov. ’86.
148
To seduce their neighbour to a favourable opinion, and afterwards to believe implicitly in this opinion of their neighbour—who can do this conjuring trick so well as women?
149
That which an age considers evil is usually an unseasonable echo of what was formerly considered good—the atavism of an old ideal.
150
Around the hero everything becomes a tragedy; around the demigod everything becomes a satyr-play; and around God everything becomes—what? perhaps a “world”?
151
It is not enough to possess a talent: one must also have your permission to possess it;—eh, my friends?
152
“Where there is
