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Know from henceforth that the kind of person who destiny calls: the ordinary rules of life are reversed and become quite different. Good and evil are transferred to another and higher plane, then virtues which might be applauded in an ordinary person would in you become vices, simply because they would only be the source of obstacles and ruin. While the great law of the world is not to do this, or that, to avoid one thing, or pursue another: it is to live. To enlarge and develop our most active and sublime qualities in such a way that from any sphere we can always strive to reach another one that is wider and more airy, more elevated. Do not forget that. Go straight ahead. Simply do as you please insofar as it serves your interests. Leave weakness and scruple to the petty minds and to the rabble of underlings. There is only one consideration worthy of you: the elevation and greatness of yourself. |
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I think that a decent man, a man who feels he has some soul, has now more than ever the strict duty of falling back upon himself, and since he can't save others, of striving for his own betterment. That is the essential task in times like ours. Everything that has been lost by society does not disappear, but takes refuge in individual lives. The mass is petty, wretched, shameful, and repugnant. The isolated man can rise above these, and just as in the ruins of Egypt, amidst heaps of rubble, broken and unrecognizable fragments, walls that have collapsed or subsided and are often difficult to repair, there will have survived some colossus, rusting into the sky which, by it's very height, preserves an idea of the nobility of the temple or town, now razed to the ground forever. So in the same way these isolated men can help to preserve our conception of God's noblest and finest creatures ought to be like. |