Being serious about truth. – Being serious about truth! How differently people understand these words! The very same opinions and types of proof and scrutiny that a thinker may consider a frivolity in himself to which he has, to his shame, succumbed on this or that occasion – these very same views may give an artist who encounters them and lives with them for a while the feeling that he has now become deeply serious about truth and that it is admirable that he, as an artist, has at the same time the most serious desire for the opposite of appearance. So it can happen that it is precisely with his ardent seriousness that someone betrays how shallow and undemanding his mind has been in playing the field of knowledge so far. – And does not everything that we take to be important betray us? It shows us what sort of thing has weight for us and for what sort of thing we have no weights.