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.
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.
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.
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.