I have found strength where one does not look for it: in simple, mild, and pleasant people, without the least desire to rule and, conversely, the desire to rule has often appeared to me a sign of inward weakness: they fear their own slave soul and shroud it in a royal cloak (in the end, they still become the slaves of their followers, their fame).
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What is bad?-All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness?-The feeling that power is increasing-that resistance has been overcome.
To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength.
Both classically and romantically-minded spirits - in as much as these two species always exist - occupy themselves with a vision of the future: but the former do so out of a strength of their age, the latter out of its weakness.
I want to have my lion and my eagle about me, that I may always have hints and premonitions concerning the amount of my strength or weakness. Must I look down on them today, and be afraid of them? And will the hour come once more when they will look up to me, and tremble?
There is nothing they [Russian leaders] admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness.
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