Virtue is under certain circumstances merely an honorable form of stupidity: who could be ill-disposed toward it on that account? And this kind of virtue has not been outlived even today. A kind of sturdy peasant simplicity, which, however, is possible in all classes and can be encountered only with respect and a smile, believes even today that everything is in good hands, namely in the "hands of God"; and when it maintains this proportion with the same modest certainty as it would that two and two make four, we others certainly refrain from contradicting. Why disturb THIS pure foolishness? Why darken it with our worries about man, people, goal, future? And even if we wanted to do it, we could not. They project their own honorable stupidity and goodness into the heart of things (the old God, deus myops, still lives among them! ); we others – we read something else into the heart of things: our own enigmatic nature, our contradictions, our deeper, more painful, more mistrustful wisdom. . Friedrich Nietzsche
About This Quote

Saying that virtue is under certain circumstances merely an honorable form of stupidity can be interpreted in two ways. First, it can be interpreted to mean that people are stubborn in their beliefs and not willing to compromise. Second, it can be interpreted to mean that people are stupid when they accept the things they are told without trying to understand what it means or how it affects them. The idea is that people are often unreasonable in their behavior when they are close-minded about what they are told. The notion of understanding something before judging it is central to the idea that virtue is an honorable form of stupidity, but this idea can take on a different meaning depending on how it is interpreted.

Source: The Will To Power

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  1. It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
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  3. The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
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