Beyond Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, final section, What is Noble, concludes with a number of aphorisms which seem quite personal.  It is as if the author says—“and now the heart of the matter.”  I was drawn to Nietzsche from a upbringing of religious fundamentalism.  Fundamentalism is both right and wrong.  There is a disquieting darkness to human nature.  There is magnificence.  Both are to be embraced,– if one is able.

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Anyone who does not want to see what is lofty in man looks that much more keenly to what is low in him and mere foreground—and thus betrays himself. #275

—Bad enough! The same old story! when one has finished building ones’ house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way—before one began. The eternal distasteful “too late!” The melancholy of everything finished! #277

Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a way of embracing happiness as if they wanted to crush and suffocate it, from jealousy: alas, they know only too well that it will flee. #279

But whatever happened to you?
I don’t know he said hesitantly; “Perhaps the Harpies flew over my table.”
If a person has desires of a high and choosy soul and only rarely finds his table set and his food ready, his danger will be great at all times; but today it is extraordinary. Thrown into a noisy and plebeian age with which he does not care to eat out of the same dishes, he can easily perish of hunger and thirst or, if eventually he “falls to” after all—of sudden nausea.
Probably all of us have sat at tables where we did not belong; and precisely the most spiritual among us, being hardest to nourish, know that dangerous dyspepsia which comes of a sudden insight and disappointment about our food and our neighbors at the table—the after-dinner nausea. #282

To be in a position to afford this real luxury of taste and morality, one must not live among dolts of the spirit but rather among people whose misunderstandings and blunders are still amusing owing to their subtlety—or one will have to pay dearly for it. #283

To live with tremendous and proud composure ; always beyond—. To have and not to have one’s effects, one’s pro and con, at will; to condescend to them, for a few hours; to seat oneself on then as on a horse, often as on an ass—for one must know how to make use of their stupidity as much as of their fire. To reserve one’s three hundred foregrounds; also the dark glasses; for there are cases when nobody may look into our eyes, still less into our “grounds.” And to choose for company that impish and cheerful vice, courtesy. As to remain master of one’s four virtues: of courage, insight, sympathy, and solitude. #284

Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy—that is a hermit’s judgment; “There is something arbitrary in his stopping here to look back and look around, in his not digging deeper here but laying his spade aside; there is also something suspicious about it.” Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word also a mask. #289

Man, a manifold, mendacious, artificial and opaque animal, uncanny to other animals less because of his strength than because of his cunning and shrewdness, has invented the good conscience to enjoy his soul for once as simple; and the whole of morality is a long undismayed forgery which alone makes it at all possible to enjoy the sight of the soul. For this point of view much more may belong in the concept of “art” than is generally believed. #291