We believe ourselves to understand thingsfirst when we h...

We believe ourselves to understand things
first when we have reduced them to what we do not understand and cannot
understand – to causality, axioms, God, character.

Not what lies behind the scientific image of
things – what is obscure, what is in itself and what is incomprehensible – lies
beyond all knowledge; but conversely it is the immediate, the sensual image,
the surface of things that face us that eludes us.

We wander and reach the goal – but, given
the relativity of all movement, who knows if we are not standing still and the
goal is coming to us. This would presuppose a movement of the objective world
of ideas. But on this ambiguity rests a lot of religious faith.

Art is our thanks to the world and to life.
After both have created the sensuous and spiritual forms of cognition of our
consciousness, we thank them by, once again with their help, creating a world
and a life.

Perhaps it is not just due to the stage of
humanity we are in, that it comes up with the highest problems, but not the
highest solutions. Perhaps it is humanity’s inner necessity, the essence of
man. The apple from the tree of knowledge was unripe.

When man describes himself as a fragment,
not only does he mean that he has no whole
life, but more profoundly, that he has no whole life.

That man is a being who can reach the
ultimate problems but not the ultimate solutions has to do with the fact that
he has to act as if he knew the future –although he does not know even one step
of it for sure.

How deep is mankind’s destiny embedded in
the fact that its two highest ideas – infinity and freedom – are literally only
negations, only the removal of obstacles!

What is decisive and characteristic of man
is what he is desperate about.

The meaninglessness and confinedness of life
strikes you often as so radical and inescapable that you totally despair about
it. The only thing that elevates you above this is to grasp this and to despair
about it.

The concept of consolation has a much
broader, deeper meaning than we usually attribute to it. Man is a being who
seeks to be consoled. Consolation is something other than help – even the
animal seeks the latter; but consolation is the strange experience which lets
suffering remain but, so to speak, abolishes the suffering from suffering. It
does not concern the evil cause but its reflex in the deepest part of the soul.
On the whole, man cannot be helped. That is why he has invented the wonderful
category of consolation – which comes to him not only through words spoken by
others for this purpose, but also from hundreds of circumstances in the world.

You can elevate man to the idea, but you
cannot lower the idea to man. [...]

In practice the worst errors are those
which come very close to the truth. [...]

The high point of lust is already surpassed
when you become aware of it, while suffering only reaches its high point with
it.

Simmel, aphoisms (via)