The first thought of the day. — The best way to begin each day well is to think upon awakening whether we could not give at least one person pleasure on this day. If this practice could be accepted as a substitute for the religious habit of prayer, our fellow men would benefit by this change.

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Which philosophy society is always in need of. — The pillars of the social order rest on this foundation: that everyone cheerfully regards that which he is, does and strives after, his health or sickness, his poverty or prosperity, his honour or insignificance, and feels as he does so ‘I would not change places with anyone.’ — He who wants to influence the order of society has only to implant into people’s hearts this philosophy of cheerful rejection of changing places and absence of envy.

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Everyone superior in one thing. — In civilized circumstances, everyone feels superior to everyone else in at least one way; this is the basis of the general goodwill, inasmuch as everyone is someone who, under certain conditions, can be of help, and need therefore feel no shame in allowing himself to be helped.

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Gardener and garden. — Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and grey. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him!

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Refined cruelty as virtue. — Here is a morality which rests entirely on the drive to distinction — do not think too highly of it! For what kind of a drive is that and what thought lies behind it? We want to make the sight of us painful to another and to awaken in him the feeling of envy and of his own impotence and degradation; by dropping on to his tongue a drop of our honey, and while doing him this supposed favour looking him keenly and mockingly in the eyes, we want to make him savour the bitterness of his fate. This person has become humble and is now perfect in his humility — seek for those whom he has for long wished to torture with it! you will find them soon enough! That person is kind to animals and is admired on account of it — but there are certain people on whom he wants to vent his cruelty by this means. There stands a great artist: the pleasure he anticipated in the envy of his defeated rivals allowed his powers no rest until he had become great — how many bitter moments has his becoming great not cost the souls of others! The chastity of the nun: with what punitive eyes it looks into the faces of women who live otherwise! how much joy in revenge there is in these eyes! — The theme is brief, the variations that might be played upon it might be endless but hardly tedious — for it is still a far too paradoxical and almost pain-inducing novelty that the morality of distinction is in its ultimate foundation pleasure in refined cruelty. In its ultimate foundation — in this case that means: in its first generation. For when the habit of some distinguishing action is inherited, the thought that lies behind it is not inherited with it (thoughts are not hereditary, only feelings): and provided it is not again reproduced by education, even the second generation fails to experience any pleasure in cruelty in connection with it, but only pleasure in the habit as such. This pleasure, however, is the first stage of the ‘good’.

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The realm of beauty is bigger. — As we go about in nature, with joy and cunning, bent on discovering and as it were catching in the act the beauty proper to everything; as we try to see how that piece of coastline, with its rocks, inlets, olive trees and pines, attains to its perfection and mastery whether in the sunshine, or when the sky is stormy, or when twilight has almost gone: so we ought to go about among men, viewing and discovering them, showing them their good and evil, so that they shall behold their own proper beauty which unfolds itself in one case in the sunlight, in another amid storms, and in a third only when night is falling and the sky is full of rain. Is it then forbidden to enjoy the evil man as a wild landscape possessing its own bold lineaments and effects of light, if the same man appears to our eyes as a sketch and caricature and, as a blot in nature, causes us pain, when he poses as good and law-abiding? — Yes, it is forbidden: hitherto we have been permitted to seek beauty only in the morally good — a fact which sufficiently accounts for our having found so little of it and having had to seek about for imaginary beauties without backbone! — As surely as the wicked enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty: and many of them have not yet been discovered.

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What we are at liberty to do. — One can dispose of one’s drives like a gardener and, though few know it, cultivate the shoots of anger, pity, curiosity, vanity as productively and profitably as a beautiful fruit tree on a trellis; one can do it with the good or bad taste of a gardener and, as it were, in the French or English or Dutch or Chinese fashion; one can also let nature rule and only attend to a little embellishment and tidying-up here and there; one can, finally, without paying any attention to them at all, let the plants grow up and fight their fight out among themselves — indeed, one can take delight in such a wilderness, and desire precisely this delight, though it gives one some trouble, too. All this we are at liberty to do: but how many know we are at liberty to do it? Do the majority not believe in themselves as in complete fully-developed facts? Have the great philosophers not put their seal on this prejudice with the doctrine of the unchangeability of character?