The fool’s interlude. – The writer of this book is no misanthrope; today one pays too dearly for hatred of man. In order to hate the way one formerly hated the human being, Timonically,53 wholly, without exception, with one’s whole heart, with the whole love of hatred, one would have to renounce contempt. And how much fine joy, how much patience, how much graciousness even do we owe precisely to our contempt! Moreover, it makes us ‘God’s elect’: refined contempt is our taste and privilege, our art, our virtue perhaps, and we are the most modern of moderns…Hatred, in contrast, places people on a par, vis-à-vis; in hatred there is honour; finally, in hatred there is fear, an ample good piece of fear. We fearless ones, however, we more spiritual men of this age, we know our advantage well enough to live without fear of this age precisely because we are more spiritual. We will hardly be decapitated, imprisoned, or exiled; not even our books will be banned or burned. The age loves the spirit; it loves and needs us, even if we should have to make clear to it that we are artists of contempt; that every association with human beings makes us shudder slightly; that for all our mildness, patience, congeniality, and politeness, we cannot persuade our noses to give up their prejudices against the proximity of a human being; that we love nature the less humanly it behaves, and art if it is the artist’s escape from man or the artist’s mockery of man, or the artist’s mockery of himself…