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July 13 - July 18, 2019
A person must have one or the other: either a disposition which is easygoing by nature, or else a disposition eased by art and knowledge.
He who directs his passion to things (the sciences, the national good, cultural interests, the arts) takes much of the fire out of his passion for people (even when they represent those things, as statesmen, philosophers, and artists represent their creations).
Man is very well defended against himself, against his own spying and sieges; usually he is able to make out no more of himself than his outer fortifications. The actual stronghold is inaccessible to him, even invisible, unless friends and enemies turn traitor and lead him there by a secret path.
People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.
A man’s behavior is unwittingly noble if he has grown accustomed never to want anything from men, and always to give to them.
Shared joy, not compassion, makes a friend.
Envy and jealousy are the pudenda of the human soul. The comparison can perhaps be pursued further.
Annoyance is a physical illness that is by no means ended simply by eliminating the cause of the annoyance.
We like to be out in nature so much because it has no opinion about us.
One man’s greater morality, in contrast to another’s, often lies only in the fact that his goals are quantitatively larger. The other man is pulled down by occupying himself with small things, in a narrow sphere.
No river is great and bounteous through itself alone, but rather because it takes up so many tributaries and carries them onwards: that makes it great. It is the same with all great minds. All that matters is that one man give the direction, which the many tributaries must then follow; it does not matter whether he is poorly or richly endowed in the beginning.
If a man has a great deal to put in them, a day will have a hundred pockets.
Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy’s staying alive.
He who speaks a bit of a foreign language has more delight in it than he who speaks it well; pleasure goes along with superficial knowledge.
There are people who want to make men’s lives more difficult for no other reason than afterwards to offer them their prescriptions for making life easier – their Christianity, for example.
When we have just gotten out of the way of a vehicle, we are most in danger of being run over.
We forget our guilt when we have confessed it to another, but usually the other person does not forget it.
The flame is not so bright to itself as to those on whom it shines: so too the wise man.
A profession is the backbone of life.
A little knowledge is more successful than complete knowledge: it conceives things as simpler than they are, thus resulting in opinions that are more comprehensible and persuasive.
Inconsiderate thinking is often the sign of a discordant inner state which craves numbness.
People are like piles of charcoal in the woods. Only when young people have stopped glowing, and carbonized, as charcoal does, do they become useful. As long as they smolder and smoke they are perhaps more interesting, but useless, and all too often troublesome. Mankind unsparingly uses every individual as material to heat its great machines; but what good are the machines when all individuals (that is, mankind) serve only to keep them going? Machines that are their own end – is that the umana commedia?
Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us. Love, springtime, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea – all these speak completely to the heart but once, if in fact they ever do get a chance to speak completely. For many men do not have those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real life.
The best way to begin each day well is to think upon awakening whether we could not give at least one person pleasure on this day. If this practice could be accepted as a substitute for the religious habit of prayer, our fellow men would benefit by this change.
Near to the sorrow of the world, and often upon its volcanic earth, man has laid out his little gardens of happiness; whether he approaches life as one who wants only knowledge from existence, 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.
The prince who discovers a casus belli for an earlier decision to wage war against his neighbor is like a father who imposes a mother upon his child, to be henceforth accepted as such. And are not almost all publicly announced motives for our actions such imposed mothers?
People who catch fire rapidly quickly become cold, and are therefore by and large unreliable. Therefore, all those who are always cold, or act that way, benefit from the prejudice that they are especially trustworthy, reliable people: they are being confused with those others who catch fire slowly and burn for a long time.
Religiously strict people, who judge themselves without mercy, are also those who have most often spoken ill of mankind in general. There has never been a saint who reserves sins to himself and virtues to others: he is as rare as the man who, following Buddha’s precept, hides his goodness from people and lets them see of himself only what is bad.
Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.
Need forces us to do the work whose product will quiet the need; we are habituated to work by the ever-new awakening of needs. But in those intervals when our needs are quieted and seem to sleep, boredom overtakes us. What is that? It is the habit of working as such, which now asserts itself as a new, additional need; the need becomes the greater, the greater our habit of working, perhaps even the greater our suffering from our needs. To escape boredom, man works either beyond what his usual needs require, or else he invents play, that is, work that is designed to quiet no need other than that
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The unpleasant personality who is full of mistrust, who reacts with envy to his competitors’ and neighbors’ successes, who flares up violently at divergent opinions, is showing that he belongs to an earlier stage of culture, and is thus a relic. For the way in which he interacts with people was proper and appropriate for the conditions of an age when rule by force prevailed: he is a backward person.
If there is a choice, a great sacrifice will be preferred to a small one, because we compensate ourselves for a great sacrifice with self-admiration, and this is not possible with a small one.
Those people whose strength lies in the profundity of their impressions (they are generally called ‘profound people’) are relatively controlled and decisive when anything sudden happens: for in the first moment the impression was still shallow; only later does it become profound. But long-foreseen, anticipated things or people excite such natures most, and make them almost incapable of maintaining presence of mind when their wait is over.
Some people are so used to solitude with themselves that they never compare themselves to others, but spin forth their monologue of a life in a calm, joyous mood, holding good conversations with themselves, even laughing. But if they are made to compare themselves with others, they tend to a brooding underestimation of their selves: so that they have to be forced to learn again from others to have a good, fair opinion of themselves. And even from this learned opinion they will always want to detract or reduce something.
Goethe: ‘The best is the deep quiet in which I live and grow against the world, and harvest what they cannot take from me by fire or sword.’
Why do we admire the man who remains faithful to his conviction and despise the one who changes it?
Therefore everyone should have come to know at least one science in its essentials; then he knows what method is, and how necessary is the most extreme circumspection. This advice should be given to women particularly, who are now the hopeless victims of all hypotheses, especially those which give the impression of being witty, thrilling, invigorating, or energizing.
For the indignant man, and whoever is continually tearing and rending himself with his teeth (or, instead of himself, the world, or God, or society) may indeed morally speaking stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense he is the more commonplace, less interesting, less instructive case. And no one lies so much as the indignant man.
There is much too much sugar and sorcery in those feelings of ‘for others’, of ‘not for me’, for one not to have to become doubly distrustful here and to ask: ‘are they not perhaps – seductions?’ That they give pleasure – to him who has them and to him who enjoys their fruits, also to the mere spectator – does not yet furnish an argument in their favour, but urges us rather to caution. So let us be cautious!
the French Revolution, that gruesome and, closely considered, superfluous farce, into which, however, noble and enthusiastic spectators all over Europe interpeted from a distance their own indignations and raptures so long and so passionately that the text disappeared beneath the interpretation:
Every profound spirit needs a mask: more, around every profound spirit a mask is continually growing, thanks to the constantly false, that is to say shallow interpretation of every word he speaks, every step he takes, every sign of life he gives.
One should not avoid one’s tests, although they are perhaps the most dangerous game one could play and are in the end tests which are taken before ourselves and before no other judge. Not to cleave to another person, though he be the one you love most – every person is a prison, also a nook and corner. Not to cleave to a fatherland, though it be the most suffering and in need of help – it is already easier to sever your heart from a victorious fatherland. Not to cleave to a feeling of pity, though it be for higher men into whose rare torment and helplessness chance allowed us to look. Not to
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In the end it must be as it is and has always been: great things are for the great, abysses for the profound, shudders and delicacies for the refined, and, in sum, all rare things for the rare.
