283.  If one wishes to praise at all, it is a delicate and at the same time a noble self-control, to praise only where one does not agree—­otherwise in fact one would praise oneself, which is contrary to good taste:—­a self-control, 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 refinement—­or 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 beyond . . .  To 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 thoughts—­the greatest thoughts, however, are the greatest events—­are longest in being comprehended:  the generations which are contemporary with them do not experience such events—­they 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 denies—­that 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 prospect—­but 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 claim—­actions are always ambiguous, always inscrutable; neither is it his “works.”  One finds nowadays