Freedom from ressentiment, enlightenment over ressentiment –who knows the extent to which I ultimately owe thanks to my protracted sickness for this too! The problem is not exactly simple: one has to have experienced it from a state of strength and a state of weakness. If anything whatever has to be admitted against being sick, being weak, it is that in these conditions the actual curative instinct, that is to say the defensive and offensive instinct in man becomes soft. One does not know how to get free of anything, one does not know how to have done with anything, one does not know how to thrust back — everything hurts. Men and things come importunately close, events strike too deep, the memory is a festering wound. Being sick is itself a kind of ressentiment. — Against this the invalid has only one great means of cure — I call it Russian fatalism, that fatalism without rebellion with which a Russian soldier for whom the campaign has become too much at last lies down in the snow. No longer to take anything at all, to receive anything, to take anything into oneself — no longer to react at all… The great rationality of this fatalism, which is not always the courage to die but can be life-preservative under conditions highly dangerous to life, is reduction of the metabolism, making it slow down, a kind of will to hibernation. A couple of steps further in this logic and one has the fakir who sleeps for weeks on end in a grave… Because one would use oneself up too quickly if one reacted at all, one no longer reacts: this is the logic. And nothing burns one up quicker than the affects of ressentiment.
—Friedrich Nietzsche (translated by R. J. Hollingdale)
—found in “Why I Am So Wise”
—from Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is (1888; this translation 1979)