A healthy and vigorous little boy will look up sarcastically if he be asked: "Wilt thou become virtuous?"--but he immediately becomes eager if he be asked: "Wilt thou become stronger than thy comrades?" *** How does one become stronger?--By deciding slowly; and by holding firmly to the decision once it is made. Everything else follows of itself. Spontaneous and changeable natures: both species of the weak. We must not confound ourselves with them; we must feel distance--betimes! Beware of good-natured people!. Dealings with them make one torpid. All environment is good which makes one exercise those defensive and; aggressive powers which are instinctive in man. All one's inventiveness should apply itself to putting one's power of will to the test.... _Here_ the determining factor must be recognised as something which is not knowledge, astuteness, or wit. One must learn to command betimes,--likewise to obey. A man must learn modesty and tact in modesty: he must learn to distinguish and to honour where modesty is displayed; he must likewise distinguish and honour wherever he bestows his confidence. What does one repent most? One's modesty; the fact that one has not lent an ear to one's most individual needs; the fact that one has mistaken one's self; the fact that one has esteemed one's self low; the fact that one has lost all delicacy of hearing in regard to one's instincts.--This want of reverence in regard to one's self is avenged by all sorts of losses: in health, friendship, well-being, pride, cheerfulness, freedom, determination, courage. A man never forgives himself, later on, for this want of genuine egoism: he regards it as an objection and as a cause of doubt concerning his real ego. 919. I should like man to begin by _respecting_ himself: everything else follows of itself. Naturally a man ceases from being anything to others in this way: for this is precisely what they are least likely to forgive. "What? a man who respects himself?"[4] This is something quite different from the blind instinct to _love_ one's self. Nothing is more common in the love of the sexes or in that duality which is called ego, than a certain contempt for that which is loved the fatalism of love. [Footnote 4: Cf. Disraeli in _Tancred:_ "Self-respect, too, is a superstition of past ages.... It is not suited to these times; it is much too arrogant, too self-conceited, too egoistical. No one is important enough to have self-respect nowadays" (book iii. chap. v.).--Tr.] 920. "I will have this or that"; "I would that this or that were so"; "I know that this or that is so the degrees of power: the man of _will,_ the man of _desire,_ the man of _fate._ 921. _The means by which a strong species maintains itself_:-- It grants itself the right of exceptional actions, as a test of the power of self-control and of freedom. It abandons itself to states in which a man is not allowed to be anything else than a barbarian.