Human, All-Too-Human

customary valuations and valued customs

as if it were a beginning and not an end; also about the Greeks, also about the Germans and their future—and there would still probably be quite a long list of such alsos?

obtain temporary self-forgetfulness

what do you know, what could you know as to how much artifice of self-preservation, how much rationality and higher protection there is in such self-deception,—and how much falseness I still require in order to allow myself again and again the luxury of my sincerity? . . .

iscouragingly encouraging book

demands illusion, it lives by illusion . . .

-morrow and the day after to-morrow, actually and bodily, and not merely, as in my case, as the shadows of a hermit’s phantasmagoria—I should be the last to doubt thereof.

ays the imperious voice and seduction, and this “here,” this “at home” is all that the soul has hitherto loved!

udden fear and suspicion of that which it loved, a flash of disdain for what was called its “duty,” a rebellious, arbitrary, volcanically throbbing longing for travel, foreignness, estrangement, coldness, disenchantment, glaciation, a hatred of love, perhaps a sacrilegious clutch and look backwards, to where it hitherto adored and loved, perhaps a glow of shame at what it was just doing, and at the same time a rejoicing that it was doing it, an intoxicated, internal, exulting thrill which betrays a triumph—a triumph? Over what? Over whom?

n enigmatical, questionable, doubtful triumph, but the first triumph nevertheless