Magnanimity and related things. – Those paradoxical phenomena, like the sudden coldness in the behaviour of the emotional person, or the humour of the melancholy person, or above all magnanimity as a sudden renunciation of revenge or a satisfaction of envy, appear in people who have a powerful inner centrifugal force, in people of sudden satiety and sudden nausea. Their satisfactions are so quick and strong that they are immediately followed by weariness and aversion and a flight into the opposite taste: in this opposite, the cramp of feeling is resolved – in one person by sudden cold, in another by laughter, in a third by tears and self-sacrifice. The magnanimous person – at least the type of magnanimous person who has always made the strongest impression – strikes me as a person with a most extreme thirst for vengeance, who sees satisfaction nearby and drinks it down already in imagination so fully, thoroughly and to the last drop that a tremendous, quick nausea follows this quick excess and he now rises ‘above himself’, as they say, and forgives his enemy, indeed blesses and honours him. With this rape of himself, with this mockery of his drive for revenge he only gives in to the new drive which just now has become powerful in him (disgust), and he does so just as impatiently and excessively as just a moment ago he imaginatively anticipated and, as it were, exhausted his delight in revenge. Magnanimity has the same degree of egoism as revenge, only egoism of a different quality.