Embrace intellectual curiosity from "summary" of The Gay Science (the Joyful Wisdom) by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
One thing is needful.—To “give style” to one’s character, a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a great mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed—both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and employed for distant views: it is meant to beckon toward the remote and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!To be sure, it has been the taste of a very few, but these very few were the best of their time. From this we may understand how it was possible for style to be so highly esteemed. It is not mere elegance of form—style is the ultimate morality of thinking. This is why the philosophical style has alone been honored in Germany, because it makes the understanding stronger and greater and more cunning than it is in itself. The philosophical man has intellectual conscience; he stands in awe of language. He is a conqueror not only of the realm of thought but of the realm of expressions as well. He knows the forces that are at his disposal; and the great style lies in using these forces sparingly. What is it that first gives us the idea of power, which shakes our very souls, if not the feeling of sudden and unexpected restraint, the sense of the terrible logic with which everything proceeds?—of Blitz and thunderbolts, of the tyranny of the emotions, of the catastrophic and the incomprehensible. The mathematical man, the truth-loving man, who becomes a logician and even more, a critic and epigrammatist, will always be a great stylist; for style is higher than the godhead. There are various ways of understanding the value of a thing: one may consider for instance that a thing is more valuable when one has paid more for it. This way of valuing things is a way of understanding that is most familiar. There is another way of understanding value
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