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Not to take a Thing Pathetically.—What we do to benefit ourselves should not bring us in any moral praise, either from others or from ourselves, and the same remark applies to those things which we do to please ourselves. It is looked upon as bon ton among superior men to refrain from taking things pathetically in such cases, and to refrain from all pathetic feelings: the man who has accustomed himself to this has retrieved his naïveté.

Not to take a Thing Pathetically.—What we do to benefit ourselves should not bring us in any moral praise, either from others or from ourselves, and the same remark applies to those things which we do to please ourselves. It is looked upon as bon ton among superior men to refrain from taking things pathetically in such cases, and to refrain from all pathetic feelings: the man who has accustomed himself to this has retrieved his naïveté.

Approximate author period: c. 1872 AD · industrial

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Attribution & collection notes
Author or tradition
Friedrich Nietzsche
Attribution: attributed
Country attributed
Not established
A country attribution does not establish the earliest origin.
Historical period
Approximate author period: c. 1872 AD · industrial
author lifetime midpoint (1844–1900); not quotation composition date
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Recorded source
The Dawn of Day (1911 English edition) (1911 AD)

The Dawn of Day, complete printed unit 508; John McFarland Kennedy translation; New York: The MacMillan Company,1911

A collection's publication date can be later than the words it records.

The voice behind the words.

Friedrich Nietzsche: Photographic portrait, 1882

Author of Human, All-Too-Human, here represented by complete numbered passages in Helen Zimmern’s 1909 and Paul V. Cohn’s 1913 English editions. Catalogue lifetime 1844–1900; historical philosophical arguments and dated viewpoints require context, rather than treating every sentence as general advice.

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