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The Increase of What Is Interesting.—In the course of higher education everything becomes interesting to man, he knows how to find the instructive side of a thing quickly and to put his finger on the place where it can fill up a gap in his ideas, or where it may verify a thought. Through this boredom disappears more and more, and so does excessive excitability of temperament. Finally he moves among men like a botanist among plants, and looks upon himself as a phenomenon, which only greatly excites his discerning instinct.

The Increase of What Is Interesting.—In the course of higher education everything becomes interesting to man, he knows how to find the instructive side of a thing quickly and to put his finger on the place where it can fill up a gap in his ideas, or where it may verify a thought. Through this boredom disappears more and more, and so does excessive excitability of temperament. Finally he moves among men like a botanist among plants, and looks upon himself as a phenomenon, which only greatly excites his discerning instinct.

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
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Historical period
Approximate author period: c. 1872 AD · industrial
author lifetime midpoint (1844–1900); not quotation composition date
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Recorded source
Human, All-Too-Human, Part 1 (1909 English edition) (1909 AD)

Part1, complete printed aphorism 254; Helen Zimmern translation; Edinburgh and London: T.N. Foulis,1909

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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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