debted to
the hardest years of my life than to any others. According to the voice of
my innermost nature, everything necessary, seen from above and in the
light of a _superior_ economy, is also useful in itself--not only should
one bear it, one should _love_ it.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} _Amor fati_: this is the very core of
my being--And as to my prolonged illness, do I not owe much more to it than
I owe to my health? To it I owe a _higher_ kind of health, a sort of
health which grows stronger under everything that does not actually kill
it!--_To it, I owe even my philosophy_.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} Only great suffering is the
ultimate emancipator of spirit, for it teaches one that _vast
suspiciousness_ which makes an X out of every U, a genuine and proper X,
_i.e._, the antepenultimate letter. Only great suffering; that great
suffering, under which we seem to be over a fire of greenwood, the
suffering that takes its time--forces us philosophers to descend into our
nethermost depths, and to let go of all trustfulness, all good-nature, all
whittling-down, all mildness, all mediocrity,--on which things we had
formerly staked our humanity. I doubt whether such suffering improves a
man; but I know that it makes him _deeper_.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} Supposing we learn to set our
pride, our scorn, our strength of will against it, and thus resemble the
Indian who, however cruelly he may be tortured, considers himself revenged
on his tormentor by the bitterness of his own tongue. Supposing we
withdraw from pain into nonentity, into the deaf, dumb, and rigid sphere
of self-surrender, self-forgetfulness, self-effacement: one is another
person when one leaves these protracted and dangerous exercises in the art
of self-mastery, one has one note of interrogation the more, and above all
one has the will henceforward to ask more, deeper, sterner, harder, more
wicked, and more silent questions, than anyone has ever asked on earth
before.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} Trust in life has vanished; life itself has become a
_problem_.--But let no one think that one has therefore become a spirit of
gloom or a blind owl! Even love of life is still possible,--but it is a
_different kind_ of love.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} It is the love for a woman whom we doubt.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}

2.

The rarest of all things is this: to have after all another taste--a
_second_ taste. Out of such abysses, out of the abyss of _great suspicion_
as well, a man return