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 some one 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 veritable amour c’est l’ame 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?