- We are from the start illogical and therefore unfair beings, and this we can know: it is one of the greatest and most insoluble disharmonies of existence.
- Forbidden generosity. There is not enough love and kindness in the world to permit us to give any of it away to imaginary beings.
- To that end, he gives man hope. In truth, it is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man's torment.
- In each of these cases, cause and effect are experienced in quite different categories of thought and feeling; nevertheless, it is automatically assumed that the perpetrator and the sufferer think and feel the same, and the guilt of the one is therefore measured by the pain of the other.
- Prevention of Suicide. There is a justice according to which we take a man's life, but no justice according to which we take his death: that is nothing but cruelty.
- When something is perfect, we tend to neglect to ask about its evolution, delighting rather in what is present, as if it had risen from the ground by magic.
- Furthermore, everything that is complete and perfect is admired; everything evolving is underestimated. Now, no one can see in an artist's work how it evolved: that is its advantage, for wherever we can see the evolution, we grow somewhat cooler. The complete art of representation wards off all thought of its evolution; it tyrannizes as present perfection. Therefore representative artists especially are credited with genius, but not scientific men. In truth, to esteem the former and underestimate the latter is only a childish use of reason.
- Books that teach us to dance. There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if bother were merely a mood or a whim, elicit a feeling of high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure.
- Joy in old age. The thinker or artist whore better self has fled into his works feels an almost malicious joy when he sees his body and spirit slowly broken into and destroyed by time; it is as if he were in a corner, watching a thief at work on his safe, all the while knowing that it is empty and that all his treasures have been rescued.
- However you may be, be your own source of experience! Throw off your discontent about your nature; forgive yourself your own self, for you have in it a ladder with a hundred rungs, on which you can climb to knowledge.
- Against trusting people. People who give us their complete trust believe that they therefore have a right to our own. This conclusion is false: rights are not won by gifts.
- Relatives of suicide. The relatives of a suicide resent him for not having stayed alive out of consideration for their reputation.
- Presence of witnesses. One is twice as happy to dive after a man who has fallen into the water if people are present who do not dare to.
- Incidentally, the habit of irony, like that of sarcasm, ruins the character; eventually it lends the quality of a gloating superiority; finally, one is like a snapping dog, who, besides biting, has also learned to laugh.
- Proteus nature. For the sake of love, women wholly become what they are in the imagination of the men who love them.
- Marriage as a long conversation. When entering a marriage, one should ask the question: do you think you will be able to have good conversations with this woman right into old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time in interaction is spend in conversation.
- Forgetting one's experiences. It is easy for a man who thinks a lot-and objectively-to forget his own experiences, but not the thoughts that were evoked by them.
- Growth of happiness. Near to the sorrow of the world, and often upon his volcanic earth, man has laid out his little gardens of happiness; whether he approaches life as one who wants only knowledge from existences, or as one who yields and resigns himself, or as one who rejoices in a difficulty overcome- everywhere he will find some happiness sprouting up next to the trouble. The more volcanic the earth, the greater the happiness will be-but it would be ludicrous to say that this happiness justified suffering per se.
- Ruins as decoration. People who go through many spiritual changes retain some views and habits from earlier stages, which then jut out into their new thinking and acting like a bit of inexplicable antiquity and gray stonework, often ornamenting the whole region.
nov 15 2010 ∞
aug 5 2013 +