290.  Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.  The latter perhaps wounds his vanity; but the former wounds his heart, his sympathy, which always says:  “Ah, why would you also have as hard a time of it as I have?”

291.  Man, a complex, mendacious, artful, and inscrutable animal, uncanny to the other animals by his artifice and sagacity, rather than by his strength, has invented the good conscience in order finally to enjoy his soul as something simple; and the whole of morality is a long, audacious falsification, by virtue of which generally enjoyment at the sight of the soul becomes possible.  From this point of view there is perhaps much more in the conception of “art” than is generally believed.

292.  A philosopher:  that is a man who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, and dreams extraordinary things; who is struck by his own thoughts as if they came from the outside, from above and below, as a species of events and lightning-flashes peculiar to him; who is perhaps himself a storm pregnant with new lightnings; a portentous man, around whom there is always rumbling and mumbling and gaping and something uncanny going on.  A philosopher:  alas, a being who often runs away from himself, is often afraid of himself—­but whose curiosity always makes him “come to himself” again.

293.  A man who says:  “I like that, I take it for my own, and mean to guard and protect it from every one”; a man who can conduct a case, carry out a resolution, remain true to an opinion, keep hold of a woman, punish and overthrow insolence; a man who has his indignation and his sword, and to whom the weak, the suffering, the oppressed, and even the animals willingly submit and naturally belong; in short, a man who is a master by nature—­ when such a man has sympathy, well!  That sympathy has value!  But of what account is the sympathy of those who suffer!  Or of those even who preach sympathy!  There is nowadays, throughout almost the whole of Europe, a sickly irritability and sensitiveness towards pain, and also a repulsive irrestrainableness in complaining, an effeminizing, which, with the aid of religion and philosophical nonsense, seeks to deck itself out as something superior—­there is a regular cult of suffering.  The unmanliness of that which is called “sympathy” by such groups of visionaries, is always, I believe, the first thing that strikes the eye.—­One must resolutely and radically taboo this latest form of bad taste; and finally I wish people to put the good amulet, “GAI saber” ("gay science,” in ordinary language), on heart and neck, as a protection against it.