Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. II

„For philosophizing the two foremost requirements are these: first, that one have the courage to allow no question to weigh on one’s mind, and second, that one bring everything that is self-evidenta into clear consciousness, in order to conceive of it as a problem. Finally too the mind must be truly idle in order to actually philosophize; it must not pursue purposes and hence not be steered by the will, instead, it must devote itself undividedly to the instruction imparted by the intuitive worldb and one’s own consciousness.”

„The poet brings images of life, human characters and situations before one’s imagination, sets all this in motion, and leaves it to each person to think with these images as far as one’s power of mindc reaches. This is why he suffices for persons of the most varying capabilities, even for fools and sages alike. The philosopher on the other hand does not bring life itself in this manner, but instead the finished thoughts abstracted from life by him; now he requires that his reader think just this way and just as far as he himself. In this manner his public becomes very small. Accordingly the poet is to be compared to one who brings flowers, the philosopher to one who brings their quintessence.”

„just as there can be only one queen in a beehive, so too only one philosophy as order of the day”

„The poet’s work after all demands nothing more of the reader than to engage a series of entertaining or inspiring formulations, and a few hours of devotion. The philosopher’s work, on the other hand, aims to overthrow the reader’s entire way of thinking, and demands of him that he declare everything that he has learned and believed in this genre to be in error, his time and effort lost, and that he must begin anew; at best it leaves a few of the predecessor’s ruins standing, in order to make a foundation of them. To this is added the fact that it has an official opponent in every teacher of an already existing system, indeed, that occasionally even the state extends its protection to a preferred philosophical system and using its powerful, material means prevents the rise of any other. Now let one further add that the size of the philosophical public compared to the poetic is proportionate to the number of people who want to be instructed versus entertained and one is able to measure under which auspicesa a philosopher makes his appearance. – On the other hand, to be sure, what rewards the philosopher is the approval of thinkers, the eliteb of long periods of time and all countries, without national differences; the masses learn eventually to honour his name by deferring to authority. Accordingly, and because of the slow but deep effect of philosophy’s course on the entire human race, the history of philosophy has flowed for millennia beside the history of kings and yet counts a hundred times fewer names than the latter; which is why it is a great achievement for the philosopher to secure a lasting place there. The philosophical writer is the guide and his reader the wanderer. If they are to arrive together, then above all they must depart together, i.e., the author must take his reader up to a standpoint that they certainly have in 7 common; this however can be nothing other than that of empirical consciousness, common to all of us. Here then let him take him firmly by the hand to see how high above the clouds he may reach, on mountain paths, step by step. This is also how Kant did it; he proceeds from the entirely common consciousnessc of his own selfd as well as that of other things. – How wrong it is, on the other hand, to want to proceed from the standpoint of an alleged intellectual intuitione of hyperphysical relations, or even of events, or even of a reason that perceives the supernatural, or of an absolute self-thinking reason; for all of this means departing from a standpoint of cognitions that are not directly communicable, where already at the outset the reader never knows whether he is standing with his author or miles away from him.”

„One understands only oneself entirely, after all, others only half way; the best one can achieve is a community of concepts, but not the intuitive apprehensiona that forms the basis of these concepts.”

„Neither our knowledge nor our insights are ever especially increased by comparing and discussing what is said by another, for that is always merely like pouring water from one container into another. Only through one’s own consideration of things themselves can insight and knowledge really be increased, for it alone is the ever ready and ever proximate living source.”

„Those who hope to become philosophers by studying the history of philosophy should instead gather from this that philosophers, just as much as poets, are born only, and more rarely at that.”

„a true philosophy cannot be spun out of mere abstract concepts, but instead must be grounded on observation and experience, inner as well as outer. “Nor will anything proper be achieved in philosophy through experimental combinations with concepts as they have been carried out so often chiefly by the sophists of our time, that is Fichte and Schelling, but with the greatest repulsiveness by Hegel, and additionally, in morals, by Schleiermacher. Philosophy must have its source, just as art and poetry, in the intuitive apprehension of the world; and in the process, no matter how much the head has to maintain primacy, it must not stroll along so cold- bloodedly that in the end the total human being, with heart and head, is not brought into action and shaken through and through. Philosophy is no algebraic problem. On the contrary, Vauvenargues is right when he says: ‘Great thoughts come from the heart”

„philosophy should be communicable cognition, and therefore must be rationalism.”

„scepticism in philosophy is like the opposition in parliament, and is even just as beneficial, indeed essential.”

„That which one knowsb has double value if one at the same time does not purport to know what one does not know. For in this manner the former is free of the suspicion to which it is subject if one, like the Schellingians for instance, also purports to know that which one does not know.”

„I can regard myself as a mere temporal product of nature that has come into being and is destined for total destruction – as perhaps in the manner of Ecclesiastes. But it is true at the same time that I am everything that ever was and will be, and outside me there is nothing. Likewise it is true when I, in the manner of Anacreon, place the highest happiness in the enjoyment of the present, but it is true at the same time when I recognize the wholesomeness of suffering and the nullifying, indeed pernicious nature of all pleasure and conceive of death as the goal of my existence. All this has its basis in the fact that each view that can be logically carried out is only a fixed, intuitive and objective apprehension of nature that is translated into concepts, while nature, i.e., the intuitive, never lies nor contradicts itself, because its essence excludes any such thing. Therefore wherever there are contradiction and lies, there too are thoughts that have 14 not arisen from objective apprehension – e.g. in optimism. On the other hand an objective apprehension can be incomplete and one-sided, in which case it requires a supplement,b not a refutation.”

„In order to make us tolerant of foreign views that oppose our own and patient towards contradiction, perhaps nothing is more effective than to recollect how often we ourselves have successively held entirely opposing opinions about the same topic, and how sometimes within a very short period we have repeatedly changed them, rejecting and then accepting again now this opinion, now its opposite, depending on the light in which 15 now this, now that topic presents itself to us.Similarly, in order to gain access for our contradiction of another’s opinion, nothing is more effective than to say: “I myself thought that earlier, but …”

„It is of great value and use to discover, independently and before we know it, what thinkers before us have already 16 discovered. For one understands what one thinks on one’s own much more thoroughly than what is learned, and when later one finds it among earlier thinkers, one unexpectedly gains strong endorsement from external, recognized authority, that testifies to its truth; through which, subsequently, one gains confidence and steadfastness for championing it against any contradiction.On the other hand, when one has first discovered something in books but then also arrives at the same result through one’s own thinking, one never really knows for certain whether one has thought and judged this on one’s own and not merely copied the words or feelings of earlier thinkers. This in turn establishes a big difference with respect to the certainty of the matter. For in the latter case, one could have erred in the end simply out of preoccupation with the earlier thinkers, as water easily takes the path of preceding flows. But when two people calculate, each for themselves, and reach the same result, then this is a certainty; not however when the calculation of one has merely been looked through by another.”

„It is a consequence of the make-up of our intellect, which springs from the will, that we cannot do otherwise than conceive of the world as either end or means.”

„There is no rational psychology or doctrine of the soul,a because as Kant has proven, the soul is a transcendent and as such unproven and unjustified hypostasis; accordingly even the contrast between ‘spirit and nature’b must be left to the philistines and Hegelians. The essence in itselfc of a human being can only be understood in conjunction with the essence in itself of all things, hence of the world.”

„microcosm and macrocosm illuminate each other mutually, whereby they result in essentially the same thing.”

„La Rochefoucauld, Labruyère, Helvétius, Chamfort, Addison, Shaftesbury, Shenstone, Lichtenberg”

„An analytic judgement is merely a concept pulled apart; a synthetic judgement on the other hand is the formation of a new concept from two already present in different form in the intellect.”

„From a single proposition no more can result than already lies there, i.e., than it itself says towards an exhaustive understanding of its meaning; but when two propositions are syllogistically joined as premises, more can result than lies in each taken separately – just as a chemical compound displays qualities not attributable to its individual components. On this rests the value of conclusions.”

„If one proceeds here from the general to the specific, then it is deduction, but in the opposite direction it is induction.”

„Never let yourself be luredTo inconsistent prattle:Wise men will stoop to an ignorant word,When ignorants are in the battle”

„the more general a claim becomes, the more numerous the attacks to which it is exposed”

„At best one should attempt to come to the aid of another’s power of comprehension through arguments, but one should quit on the spot as soon as one notices obstinacy in his counter-arguments. For right away he will also become dishonest, and a sophism in theory is a chicanery in practice.”

„we can float about in the ether neither physically nor mentally”

„What is given and therefore absolutely real, then, generally speaking consists in natural laws and forces along with matter as their bearer; more specifically, however, it consists in innumerable suns floating freely in infinite space and their orbiting planets. Accordingly there is, as a result, nothing but spheres everywhere, some illuminating while others are illuminated. Life has evolved on the surface of the latter due to a process of putrefaction which, through gradual increase, gives rise to organic beings. These beings manifest themselves as individuals, temporally beginning and ending through reproduction and death, according to the natural laws guiding life force which, like all laws, constitute the ruling order of things existing from eternity to eternity, without beginning and end, and without accounting for themselves. Mankind occupies the pinnacle of this increase, for his existence likewise has a beginning, and its course has sorrows many and great, with few and meagrely apportioned joys; then, like any other, it has an end – after which it is as if it had never existed. Now our absolute physics, here conducting the investigation and playing the role of philosophy, explains to us how, as a result of those absolutely existing and obtaining natural laws, one phenomenon always brings forth another, or supplants it. Everything happens here quite naturally and is therefore perfectly clear and comprehensible, so that one could apply a phrase to the entire world thus explicated, one which Fichte was fond of uttering when he mustered his dramatic talents at the podium to say, in all earnestness, with impressive emphasis and a look that totally baffled his students: “It is because it is; and is as it is because it is so.”

„If up till now mankind had sought the reasons for his own existence by assuming that the laws of cognition, thinking and experience were purely objective, existing absolutely in and of themselves, and merely by virtue of them did he and everything else exist, then now he realizes that, to the contrary, his intellect and consequently his existence as well are the condition of all those laws and what results from them.”

„If I look at some object, say a view, and think to myself that in this moment my head would be chopped off, still I know that the object would remain there unmoved and undisturbed; but this implies to the deepest core that I too would still exist. Few people will get this, but for these few let it be said.”

„The ideality of time discovered by Kant is actually contained already in the law of inertia belonging to mechanics. For what this means, basically, is that mere time is incapable of producing any physical effect, which is why time itself and alone does not change anything in the rest or motion of a body. Already from this it emerges that it is not something physically real, but instead something transcendentally ideal, i.e., its origin is not in things but in the cognizing subject. If time inhered as a quality or accident in things in and of themselves, then its quantum, its length or brevity would have to be able to change something in things. Only it is completely incapable of doing this; instead, it flows over things without imprinting the slightest trace on them.”

„Spinoza says straight out: ‘Time is not a condition of things but instead a mere way of thinking”

„our intellect is only able to produce time because we ourselves are standing in eternity”

„a clock runs too fast, or too 44 slow, but time does not run along with it; instead, the actual course of time is the regular and the normal to which our terms fast and slow refer. A clock measures time, but it does not make it. If all clocks were to stop, if the sun itself were to stand still, if each and every movement or change were to come to a standstill, none of this would hinder the course of time for one moment; instead, it would continue its regular course and elapse now, unaccompanied by changes. Still, as I said earlier, it is not something perceptible, not something externally given and exerting an effect on us, and therefore it is not something actually objective. There is nothing left to say except that it lies in us, it is our own mental process advancing uninterruptedly or, as Kant says, it is the form of inner sense and of all our capacity for representing. Consequently, it constitutes the most basic scaffolding of the theatrical stage of this objective world. The regularity of time’s course in all heads proves more than anything else that we are all sunk in the same dream, indeed, that it is one being that dreams it.”

„Time is not merely a form a priori of our cognition, but instead it is the basis or the groundbass of the same; it is the first woof in the fabric of the whole world manifesting itself around us and the bearer of all our intuitive perceptions. The remaining forms of the principle of sufficient reason are copies of it, as it were; it is the archetype of all that. This is why all our representations concerning existence and reality are inseparable from it and we never get beyond conceiving each and every thing in terms of before and after, and why ‘when’ is even more inevitable than ‘where’. And yet, everything that manifests itself in time is mere appearance. Time is that arrangement of our intellect by virtue of which that which we conceive as the future appears not to exist at all now; this illusion disappears, however, when the future has become the present. In certain dreams, in clairvoyant somnambulism and in second sight this illusory form is suspended temporarily, which is why the future then manifests itself as the present. This explains why the attempts made from time to time to intentionally thwart the prophecies of[…]”

„this unity is conceived by our time-dependent apprehension as a succession of states, hence as past, present and future, while the essence in itself knows nothing of this, but instead exists in the permanent Now”

„The most illuminating and at the same time simple proof of the ideality of space is that we cannot abolish space in our thoughts, as we can everything else. We are capable merely of emptying it; we can think everything away, make everything disappear, and even very well imagine that the space between the fixed stars is absolutely empty, and so on. Only space itself we cannot get rid of by any means; whatever we do, wherever we wish to position ourselves, it is there and nowhere has an end, for it is the basis of all our representing and is its first condition.”

„That infinite space is independent of us, hence absolutely objective and 48 existing in itself, and a mere copy of it, as something infinite, got into our head through our eyes is the most absurd of all thoughts, but in a certain sense the most fruitful as well. For precisely by becoming clearly aware of this absurdity one directly recognizes the mere phenomenal existencea of this world, in that one construes it as a mere phenomenon of the brain which, as such, vanishes with the death of the brain leaving behind a quite different world, namely that of things in themselves. That one’s head is in space does not deter one from realizing that space is only in one’s head.”

„When I say ‘in a different world’ it would show a great lack of understanding to ask: ‘Where then is this different world?’ For it is only space that confers a meaning on all questions of Where, and it belongs after all to this world; outside of it there is no Where. Peace, tranquillity, and bliss dwell only where there are no Where and no When.”

„Light is to the external physical world what the intellect is to the inner world of consciousness.”

„That which eludes even this strategy, however, one must seek to make graspable through an intuitive image and simile; so deeply is intuition the basis of our cognition. This is also seen in the fact that while we do indeed think very great numbers in the abstract,f just as we think 52 very great distances that are expressible only by such means, such as those in astronomy; yet we do not really and directly comprehend them but instead have merely a relative conception of them.But more than any other it is the philosopher who should draw from the primal well that is intuitive cognition and always keep a focus on things themselves,a nature, the world, life, and not make books the texts of his thoughts; he should also always test and check all their ready-made and handed-down concepts, therefore using books not as sources of knowledgeb but instead only as an aid. For what they provide he obtains only second hand, and most often already somewhat falsified; it is after all only a reflection, a counterfeit of the original, namely the world, and rarely was the mirror perfectly clean. On the other hand nature, reality, never lies; indeed only it makes all truth into truth. For this reason the philosopher must make nature his object of study, and in fact its great, clear features, its main and basic character are where his problem arises.”

„How should a great mind find satisfaction in getting to know only a particular branch of the totality of things, a single field of it precisely and in its relations to the others, but losing sight of everything else? On the contrary he is manifestly focused on the whole; his striving goes towards the totality of things, towards the world in general, and so nothing may remain foreign to him. Consequently he cannot spend his life exhausting the micro-matters of a discipline. The eye becomes dull from staring too long at an object and no longer is able to see; in just this way the intellect becomes dull and confused from continuous thinking about the same thing, and incapable of pondering and grasping any more of it. One must leave to return to it again later, when one will find it again fresh and in clear outline. So when Plato in the Symposium relates that Socrates stood there rigid and stiff as a statue for twenty-four hours, reflecting on something that had occurred to him, to this account one must say not only ‘It is not true’a but also add ‘It is poorly invented’.”

„In a higher sense even the hours of inspiration, with their moments of illumination and actual conception, are only the lucid intervals of genius. Accordingly one could say that genius lives only one storey above madness. But even the reasond of the rational man really only works in lucid intervals, for he is not always so. Nor is the clever mane always so; even the mere scholar is not a scholar in every moment, for occasionally he is unable to recall and systematically organize the things most familiar to him. In brief, no one is wise all the time. All of this appears to point to a certain flood and ebb of the brain’s fluids, or tension and relaxation of its filaments. [* “Depending on whether the energy of the mind [Energie des Geistes] is raised or slackened (as a consequence of the physiological state of the organism), it flies at very different altitudes, sometimes soaring up in the ether and surveying the world, sometimes skipping over the morasses of the earth, mostly between the two extremes but closer to one or the other! The will can do nothing about any of this”

„It is self-evident that one should write down one’s valuable meditations as soon as possible, for if we do sometimes forget what we experienced, how much more do we forget what we thought. But thoughts do not come when we want, but instead when they want. On the other hand, it is better not to write down and so to make a collection of what we receive ready-made from external sources, what is merely learned and which in any case may be found again in books, for to write something down amounts to consigning it to oblivion. But one should deal strictly and despotically with one’s memory, so that it does not forget how to obey, e.g. when one cannot recall a certain thing, verse or word, one should not look it up in books, but instead interrogate memory periodically for weeks until it does what it is supposed to do. For the longer one has had to try to recollect something, the more firmly it sticks later on; what one has worked up out of the depths of memory with such effort will at another time be much more easily at one’s disposal if one had refreshed it with the help of books. [Memory is a capricious and moody being, comparable to a young girl; at times it quite unexpectedly withholds what it has delivered a hundred times, and then later it offers it up entirely on its own when we are no longer thinking about it. –A word sticks more firmly in the memory if one has connected it to an image rather than to a mere concept. –It would be a beautiful thing if one could know once and for all what one has learned, only things are different; everything learned must be refreshed from time to time by repetition, otherwise it is eventually forgotten. However, since mere repetition bores us, we must always be learning something new in addition, hence aut progedi, aut regredi [either progress or regress] Mnemonics on the other hand basically rests on the fact that one trusts one’s wit more than one’s memory and therefore transfers the services of the latter to the former. For wit must substitute what is difficult to retain for what is easy to retain, in order to translate it back into the former at some later time. Mnemonics however relates to natural memory as an artificial leg to a real one, and like everything it is subject to the Napoleonic expression tout ce qui n’est pas naturel est imparfait. It is beneficial in the beginning to use it for newly learned things or words, like a temporary crutch until they have been incorporated by natural, direct memory. How our memory manages to find immediately what is demanded each time, out of the often incalculable realm of its storage; how the sometimes longer, blind seeking for it actually transpires; how after first seeking in vain something comes to us as if whispered in our ear, completely on its own and for no reason, most often when we discover a tiny thread attached to it, but otherwise after a couple of hours, sometimes even days – all of this is a riddle even to those of us who are involved in such matters! But it seems indisputable to me that these subtle and mysterious operations involving such an immense quantity and diversity of recollection material could never be replaced by an artificial and conscious play with analogies, in which natural memory must again and again remain the first driving factor,a but now must retain two things instead of one, namely the sign and the signified.b In any case such an artificial memory can only contain a relatively minute store.18 – In general, however, there are two ways in which things are imprinted upon our memory; either by design, insofar as we memorize them on purpose, for which we sometimes make use of mnemonic devices if they are mere words or numbers; or on the other hand they imprint themselves on their own, without our help, by virtue of the impression they make on us and which we then designate as unforgettable. Nevertheless, just as one most often does not feel a wound when it is received but only later, so too many an event or thought that we have heard or read makes a deeper impression on us than we are immediately aware; later it occurs to us again and again, the result of which is that we do not forget it but instead incorporate it into the system of our thoughts in order for it to appear at the right time.19 To this end it is obvious that these thoughts should be of interest to us in some way. But for this it is required that a person have a mind that is lively, keenly assimilating that which is objective, and striving for knowledgec and insight. The surprising ignorance of many scholars in matters of their own discipline has its basis in a lack of objective interest in such things, hence the perceptions, observations, insights, etc. regarding these things do not make a lively impression on scholars and consequently do not sink in – just as they generally do not study with loved but instead under self-compulsion. Now the more things a person takes a lively, objective interest in, the more material will lodge itself spontaneously in his memory, especially in one’s youth when the novelty of things intensifies one’s interest in them. This second manner is much more certain than the first, and in addition it selects what is important to us entirely on its own, although in blockheads it will restrict itself to personal affairs.”

„The quality of our thoughts (their formal value) comes from within, but their direction and therewith their substance come from without, such that whatever we think in any given moment is the product of two fundamentally different factors. Accordingly, for the mind, objects are only what the plectrum is for the lyre, hence the great variety of thoughts which the same spectacle evokes in different heads.”

„while the objects are the plectrum, the lyre is the intellect. Whether this is well tuned and in high spirits constitutes the great difference in the world that manifests itself in each person’s head. Now just as the latter depends on physiological and anatomical conditions, so on the other hand the plectrum is held in the hand of chance, insofar as it brings about the objects that are to occupy us. Only here we deal with a big part of the matter at willa in that we can arbitrarily determine it, at least in part, by means of the objects with which we are occupied or surrounded. Hence we should use some care on this and proceed with methodical deliberateness. We are given advice in this regard by Locke’s excellent little book On the Conduct of the Understanding. However, good, serious thoughts about worthy subjects cannot be conjured up arbitrarily at any time. All we can do is keep the way clear for them by banishing all futile, silly or crude ruminations and turning away from all harebrained ideas and buffoonery. One could therefore say that, in order to think something clever, the best means would be not to think something insipid. If only one leaves the scene open to good thoughts, they will come. For precisely this reason one should not reach for a book in every idle moment, but instead just let the mind calm down for once; then something good can easily surface in it. The observation made by Riemer in his book on Goethe is quite appropriate, namely that our own thoughts almost always come to us while we are walking or standing, extremely rarely while sitting. Now because, generally speaking, the entry of lively, penetrating, valuable thoughts is more the consequence of favourable internal than external circumstances, this explains why such thoughts most often appear as numerous, relating to quite different subjects, in rapid succession and even almost simultaneously, in which case they intersect and disrupt one another like the crystals of a druse. Indeed, we can resemble the man who chases two hares at the same time.”

„we look at one another and interact with one another like masks with masks, we do not know who we are, like masks that do not even know themselves. And this is exactly how animals look at us, and we at them”

„our best, most ingenious and profound thoughts enter suddenly into consciousness like an inspiration and often even in the form of a weighty sentence. But obviously they are the results of long, unconscious meditation and countless aperçus extending far back and individually forgotten.23 I refer here to what I already wrote on this matter in my main work, vol. 2, chapter 14.a One almost dares to posit the physiological hypothesis that conscious thought occurs on the surface of the brain, while unconscious thought occurs deep inside its medullary substance.”

„If only someone endowed by nature with patience would make an effort to teach these apothecary apprentices and journeymen barbers, these know- nothings in their chemical kitchens, the difference between matter and material! The latter is already qualified matter, i.e., the combination of matter with form, which can also separate again. Consequently what is permanent is matter alone, not material, which can still possibly become something else – not excluding your sixty chemical elements. The indestructibility of matter can never be determined by experiments, which is why we would remain eternally uncertain about it if it were not a priori certain.”

„whoever, on the other hand, wants to demonstrate a priori that which can only be known a posteriori, from experience, engages in charlatanism and makes himself ridiculous.”

„a truth that brings us back from errors is comparable to a medication both through its bitter and repulsive taste as well as in the fact that it manifests its effect not at the moment of ingestion but instead after some time.”

„If therefore we already see the individual stubbornly clinging to his errors, then the masses and the crowds of people do so even more; 64 experience and instruction can wear themselves out on their opinions for centuries in vain once they have been hatched. This is why there are certain universally beloved and firmly accredited errors, smugly repeated every day by multitudes, of which I have begun an inventory and which I ask others to continue. (1) Suicide is a cowardly act.(2) Whoever mistrusts others is himself dishonest. (3) Merit and genius are sincerely modest.(4) The insane are completely unhappy.(5) Philosophy cannot be learned, but instead only philosophizing. (Is the opposite of the truth.)(6) It is easier to write a good tragedy than a good comedy.(7) The words attributed to Bacon: A bit of philosophy leads away from God; a lot of it leads back to him. Really? Go and see!a (Bacon, On the Dignity and Advancement of Learning,b Book I, p. 5.) (8) Knowledge is power.c And I’ll be damned! Someone can have much knowledged without therefore possessing powere in the least, while another has supreme power with precious little knowledge. Thus Herodotus quite properly expresses the opposite of that sentence: ‘The most heinous agony of man is this: that one understands much and yet is able to do nothing.’f – That once in a while a person’s knowledge gives him power over another, e.g. when he knows their secret or they are unable to figure out his etc., does not yet justify such a statement. People repeat most of these to one another casually, without thinking especially much about it and merely because when they first heard them they found that they sounded so wise.”

„whoever has the fortune of living more with books than with people always has in front of him only the easy transmission of thoughts and knowledge along with the quick action and reaction of minds upon one another. Meanwhile 65 he easily forgets how totally different it is in the, as it were, only real world of people, and in the end he might even think that every insight gained now belongs immediately to humanity. But one need only to have travelled one more day by train to notice that where one now finds oneself, certain prejudices, delusions, customs, habits and clothing dominate, yes have even been preserved for centuries, and yet they are unknown where we had been yesterday. It is no different with provincial dialects. From this we can conclude how wide is the gulf between common people and books, and how slowly even if surely the acknowledged truths reach the masses; which is why concerning the speed of transmission nothing is more dissimilar to physical light than intellectual light. All of this stems from the fact that the multitude really thinks very little, because it lacks time and practice in this. And so while it preserves its errors for a long time, unlike the educated world it is not a weathervane of the entire wind rose’s daily changing opinions. And this is very fortunate, for to imagine the great, ponderous masses in such rapid motion is a horrifying thought, especially if one considers how they would sweep up and overthrow everything as they made their turns.”

„The desire for knowledge, when directed at the universal, is called intellectual curiosity, when directed at the particular, simply curiosity. – Boys most often show intellectual curiosity, little girls mere curiosity, but the latter to a stupendous degree and often with repulsive naïveté. The trend towards the particular which is peculiar to the female sex, with their hostility to the universal, already shows itself in this”

„The understandinga is not an extensive, but instead an intensive magnitude, therefore one person can comfortably be a match for ten thousand, while an assembly of a thousand blockheads does not yield a single smart man.”

„What is really missing in tedious, commonplace minds, of which the world is stuffed full, are two closely related capabilities, namely to judge and to have one’s own thoughts.”

„The pleasure that a writer provides always requires a certain harmony between his manner of thinking and the reader’s, and will be all the greater the more complete this harmony is; which is why a great intellect can only be enjoyed completely and perfectly by another great intellect. Precisely upon this rest the disgust and aversion that bad or mediocre writers bring forth in thinking minds; in fact conversation has the same effect for most people: with each step one feels inadequacy and disharmony. –”

„Spanish proverb says: mas sabe el necio en su casa, que el cuerdo en la agena (‘A fool knows his way around his own house better than a wise man in someone else’s’). Hence in their own discipline anyone knows more than we do”

„It also surely happens that once, long ago, we heard an observation or an experience from an insignificant and uneducated person, but have not forgotten it since then. Now however, because of the source, one is inclined to underestimate it or to regard it as a matter long since and universally known. Now one must ask oneself whether one has heard or read it again in that long interval; if this is not the case, then one should hold it in high esteem. – Would one disdain a diamond because it might have been scraped out of some pile of manure?28”

„with every argument and every additional piece of data the will immediately chimes in and, making matters worse, without our being able to differentiate its voice from the intellect’s because after all both are fused together to form one I. This is clearest when we want to prognosticate the outcome of a matter we care about; here interest falsifies nearly every step of the intellect, now as fear, now as hope. It is scarcely possible to be clear in this, for the intellect then resembles a torch whose light one must use for reading, while the night wind makes it sputter. For this reason a loyal and upright friend is of inestimable value in very disturbing circumstances, because his impartiality sees things as they are, while in our eyes they manifest themselves falsely under the trickery of the passions. We can have a correct judgement about past events and a correct prognostication of those forthcoming only when they do not concern us at all, therefore leaving our interest totally untouched. Moreover we are not uncorrupted, on the contrary our intellect is infected and contaminated by the will 70 without our noticing. From this as well as from the incompleteness or even falsification of the data29 is explained that people of intellect and knowledge sometimes err through and throughc in predicting the outcome of political affairs.”

„The ordinary person shuns physical exertion but mental exertion even more, which is why he is so ignorant, so thoughtless and so undiscerning.”

„Only where the intellect already exceeds the necessary measure does cognition more or less become an end in itself. Accordingly it is quite an abnormal event for any person when the intellect abandons its natural role, namely service to the will and correspondingly the apprehension of mere relations of things, in order to occupy itself purely objectively. But precisely this is the origin of art, poetry and philosophy, which are therefore produced by an organ that is not originally reserved for them. For the intellect by birth is a miserable factory labourer pressed into work, whose demanding master, the will, keeps him busy from morning till night. But if this pressured drudge should just once produce a piece of his work voluntarily, in his time off, of his own accord and without ulterior motive, merely for his own satisfaction and delight, then this is a genuine work of art, indeed if carried higher, a work of genius.”

„No difference of class, rank or birth is as great as the gulf between the countless millions who regard and use their head only as a servant of their belly, i.e., as a tool for the purposes of the will, and the extremely few and rare who have the courage to say: No, it is too good for that, it should be active only towards its own ends, thus for comprehending the wondrous and colourful spectacle of this world in order to reproduce it afterwards in this or that manner, as image or as explanation according to the constitution of the respective individual who bears that head. These are the truly noble, the real noblesse of the world; the others are in bondage, glebae adscripti [soil-bound serfs]. Of course here are meant only those who have not only the courage, but instead also the calling and therefore the right to emancipate the head from service to the will, with the result that it is worth the sacrifice. With the others, in whom all this exists only partially, the gulf is not as wide, but a sharp demarcation still remains even in the case of a small but distinctive talent. – Whatever a nation has to show in works of fine art, poetry and philosophy is the dividend of the surplus of intellect which has existed in it. –The great majority of people are constituted in such a way that according to their entire nature they can be serious about nothing besides eating, drinking and reproducing. They will immediately use what the rare and more exalted natures have brought into the world, be it religion, science or art, as tools for their base purposes, mostly by making it into their mask.”

„Whoever has a decisive surplus of intellect beyond the measure required for the service of the will, a surplus which then ends up by itself in totally free activity not prompted by the will nor associated with the aims of the will, whose result will be a purely objective apprehension of the world and of things – such a person is a genius and this is stamped on his face. This is also true, however, of any surplus beyond the aforesaid paltry measure, though less markedly.”

„Through the rarest convergence of numerous highly favourable circumstances now and then, perhaps once in a century, a person is born with an intellect noticeably exceeding the normal measure – such intellect being a secondary, therefore an accidental quality with respect to the will. Now it can take a long time before he is discovered and recognized, because obtuseness deters the former, envy the latter; but once he is discovered, then people crowd around him and his works in the hope that some light from him will penetrate the darkness of their existence, indeed, furnish them with a clue about it, as would in a certain sense a revelation from a higher being (even if only a bit higher).”

„The genius for himself alone can no more have original thoughts than a woman for herself alone can bear children; instead, the external occasion must be added as father, in order to fertilize the genius so that it gives birth.”

„The common people at times have more understanding, because they have only as much understanding as they need’ (Lactantius, Divine Institutes,a Book III, ch. 5).”

„The great minds therefore owe the little minds some indulgence, because they are only great minds precisely by virtue of the smallness of others, since everything is relative.”

„For the person who is capable of grasping something with a grain of salt,b the relation of the genius to the normal person could perhaps be most clearly formulated as follows. A genius is a person who has a double 78 intellect; one for himself, for service to the will, and the other for the world whose mirror he becomes in that he apprehends it purely objectively. The sum or quintessence of this apprehension is reproduced in works of art, poetry or philosophy after the technical education has been added. The normal person, on the other hand, has only the first intellect, which one can call the subjective one, just as one can call the genius’ intellect the objective. Though the subjective intellect can exist in highly differentiated degrees of sharpness and perfection, still a certain gradation separates it from the double intellect of the genius, roughly as the notes of the chest-voice, no matter how high, are still essentially different from the falsetto of the head-voice.”

„Just as the brain leads the independent life of a parasite nourished by the organism without directly contributing to its inner economy, up there in its snug, well-protected housing, so too the intellectually highly-gifted person leads a second, purely intellectual life in addition to the one that is individual and common to everyone. This second life consists in the steady increase, correction and furthering not of mere knowing,b but instead of actual cognitionc and insight that are coherent; it remains unfazed by the fate of the person to the extent it is not disturbed somehow by its activity, which is also why it elevates and transports the person beyond fate and its changes. It consists in a constant thinking, learning, experimenting and practising, and eventually becomes the main existence which subordinates the personal one to itself as a mere means to an end. Goethe provides us with an example of the independence and separation of this intellectual life. In the midst of the battle turmoil of the war in Champagne he studies phenomena relating to colour theory, and as soon as he is allowed a brief respite from the boundless misery of that battle, in the fortress of Luxemburg, he immediately takes up the notebooks of his theory of colour. Thus he left behind a model that we who are the salt of the earth should follow, namely to always apply ourselves undisturbed to our intellectual life, no matter how our personal life is seized and shattered by the storms of the world, bearing constantly in mind that we are not sons of the maid but instead of the free. For our emblem and family coat of arms I suggest a tree violently shaken by the storm, but still sporting its red fruit on all branches, with the inscription: ‘while I am tousled they ripen’a or perhaps: ‘storm-tossed but fruitful’. To that purely intellectual life of the individual there is one just like it corresponding to the whole of humanity, whose real life likewise lies in the will both according to its empirical and transcendental significance. This purely intellectual life of humanity consists in its progressive knowledge by means of the sciences, and in the perfection of the arts, both of which slowly advance through the ages and centuries of human history, and to which the individual generations deliver their contributions as they hurry past. This intellectual life hovers like an ethereal ingredient, an aromatic scent emanating from the ferment, over the activity of the world, over the truly real life of the peoples led by the will, and alongside world history the history of philosophy, science and the arts strides guiltlessly, not spattered with blood.”

„The difference between the genius and normal minds is of course only quantitative, insofar as it is a difference of degree; nevertheless one is tempted to regard it as qualitative when one considers how ordinary minds, despite their individual diversity, still have a certain common direction in their thinking by virtue of which, in similar circumstances, all their thoughts immediately take the same path and end up on the same track.”

„A genius is a person in whose head the world as representationa has achieved a degree more of lucidity and exists more vividly defined; and since it is not the meticulous observation of the individual but instead only the intensity of the apprehension of the whole that provides the most important and profound insight, humanity therefore can expect the greatest enlightenment from him. This he will impart once he has achieved education, now in this and now in that form.”

„In order to have original, extraordinary, perhaps even immortal thoughts it suffices to alienate oneself so thoroughly from the world and things for a few moments that the most ordinary objects and events appear to one as entirely new and unfamiliar, thereby revealing their true nature. But what is required for this is not just difficult, but instead is not in our power at all and is in fact the working of genius.”

„Genius is among other minds what the carbuncle is among gemstones; it radiates its own light while the others only reflect what they receive. – One can also say that it relates to them as the idioelectric body to the mere conductors of electricity, which is why it is not appropriately applied to the actual mere scholar who spreads by teaching what he has learned, just as idioelectric bodies are not conductors. Instead it relates to mere scholarliness as text relates to notes. A scholar is one who has learned much; a genius is he from whom humanity learns what he has learned from no one. – Therefore the great minds, of which there is scarcely one for every hundred million people, are lighthouses for humanity, without which we would lose ourselves in the boundless sea of the most horrific errors and 82 regression.Meanwhile the actual, simple scholar, say the full professor at Göttingen, looks upon genius roughly as we look upon a hare, which is only enjoyable after its death when it can be prepared. Thus as long as it lives, one must merely shoot at it.”

„Whoever wants to experience gratitude from his own epoch must walk in step with it. But this way nothing great ever comes to pass. Whoever has this in mind must therefore direct his gaze to posterity and elaborate his work for it with firm confidence. Meanwhile of course it can happen that he remains unknown to his contemporaries and then he is to be compared to the man who has been forced to spend his life on a deserted island where he painstakingly erects a monument to convey the message of his existence to future sailors. If this seems harsh to him, then he could console himself with the thought that even the ordinary, merely practical person encounters the same fate without the hope of compensation for it. Such a person, under favourable circumstances, will be productive in a material way, will earn, purchase, build, cultivate, lay out, ground, arrange and beautify every day with hard work and tireless zeal. He imagines in the process that he is working for himself, yet at the end everything benefits only his descendants, and quite often not even his own. Accordingly he can say ‘through us, not for us’b and he has had his work as reward. Things go no better for him therefore than for the man of genius, who clearly also hoped for a reward, at least for honour, but in the end did everything merely for posterity. Of course in this both have also inherited much from their ancestors.”

„because everything great is relative, so it makes no difference whether I say Caius was a great man, or Caius had to live exclusively among pitiful little people, for Brobdingnag and Lilliputa differ only in their point of departure.”

„one should not have been surprised to find that people of genius are mostly antisocial and often offensive, for the blame is not with a lack of social interaction. Instead, their journey through this world resembles that of a person taking a walk on a beautiful, early morning where he observes nature with delight in its entire freshness and magnificence and must rely only on this, for society is not to be found here, rather at best only farmers bowed to the earth as they work the land. So it often happens that a great mind prefers his monologue to the dialogues that can be had in the world; if he does at some point acquiesce to one, then it can occur that the emptiness of the dialogue causes him to fall back again upon his monologue, forgetting his interlocutor or at least speaking to him like a child to a doll, unconcerned whether or not he is understood. Modesty in a great mind would certainly be liked by people, only unfortunately it is a contradiction in terms. For such a person would have to grant priority and value to the thoughts, opinions and views of others, whose number is legion, as well as to their way and manner. Moreover, he would have to subordinate his own constantly deviating thoughts to theirs and compromise them, or even suppress them entirely in order to let theirs rule the day. In this case he would produce and achieve exactly nothing, or just the same as the others. On the other hand, he can only produce what is great, genuine and extraordinary insofar as he disregards the way and manner, the thoughts and views of his contemporaries, heedlessly creating what they censure and despising what they praise. No man becomes great without this arrogance. But if his life and work should have fallen into a time that cannot acknowledge and appreciate him, then he still remains himself and resembles a noble traveller who must spend the night in a miserable shelter; the next day he continues his travels with pleasure. At need however a thinking or poetic mind can indeed be satisfied with his times, if only they allow him to think and write poetry undisturbed in his little corner, and with his fortune, if it grants him a corner in which he can think and write creatively without having to be concerned about others.That the brain is a mere labourer in the service of the belly is after all the common lot of almost all those who do not live on the work of their hands, and they certainly know how to make the best of it. But for great minds, i.e., for those whose cerebral powers exceed the measure required for the service of the will, it is enough to drive one to despair. Such a person will therefore prefer to live in the most limited circumstances if necessary, if only they provide him with the free use of his time for the development and application of his powers, hence with the leisure that is invaluable to him. Things are quite different of course with ordinary people whose leisure is without objective value and is even not without danger for them; they seem to sense this. For the technology of our age which has risen to unparalleled heights, in that it reproduces and increases luxury goods, gives those blessed by fortune the choice between more leisure and cultivation of the mind, on the one hand, and more luxury and high life accompanied by strenuous activity on the other hand. They characteristically choose the latter, as a rule, preferring champagne to leisure. This is also consistent, for to them every mental effort that does not serve the aims of the will is a folly, and the tendency for this they call eccentricity. According to this, concentricity would be persisting in the aims of the will and the belly, and of course the will is the centre, indeed the kernel of the world. On the whole however these kinds of alternatives do not occur frequently at all. For, just as most people have no surplus of money, but instead the bare minimum, so by the same token they have no surplus of understanding. Of this they have barely as much as suffices for the service of the will, i.e., for making a living. Having done this, they are happy to be able to gape, or to indulge in sensual pleasure, even in childish games, in cards, in dice; or they conduct the most insipid discourses, or they dress up foppishly and bow and scrape before one another. Even those who have a quite small surplus of intellectual power are few. Now just as those who have a small surplus of money give themselves pleasure, so these others also give themselves an intellectual pleasure. They take up some kind of liberal study that does not yield anything, or some kind of art, and are generally capable of an objective interest of some kind, which is why one can actually converse with them from time to time. But with the others it is better not to get involved, for with the “the exception of those cases in which they speak of their own experiences, report on something from their specialization, or possibly instruct us on something they learned from someone else, what they have to say will not be worth hearing. What one says to them, in turn, will rarely be properly grasped and understood by them, and will most often run counter to their views. Baltasar Gracián therefore very appropriately refers to them as hombres que no lo son – human beings who are not, and Giordano Bruno says the same with the words: ‘What a difference it is, whether one is dealing and trafficking with human beings, or with people 87 who are only created in their image and likeness’(On Cause,a Dialogue I, p. 224, ed. Wagner). This last statement corresponds wonderfully with the proverb in the Kural: ‘The common people look like human beings; I have never seen anything like them.’,*,41 – To fill the need for cheerful entertainment and in order to deprive solitude of its dreariness, on the other hand, I recommend dogs, in whose moral and intellectual qualities one will almost always experience joy and satisfaction.Meanwhile we want to be on our guard everywhere against being unjust. Just as the cleverness and sometimes then again the stupidity of my dog have astonished me, it has been no different for me in dealing with the human race. Countless times I have been outraged by their incompetence, complete lack of judgement and their bestiality, and have had to issue the old deep sigh: Verily the mother and nurse of the human race is stupidity.cBut then at other times I am amazed once more by how in such a race many kinds of useful and beautiful arts and sciences have sprung forth, taken root, maintained and perfected themselves, even though originating always in individuals, in the exceptions. And how this race with loyalty and persistence was able to preserve and protect from destruction the works of great minds, of Homer, Plato, Horace and so on, throughout two to three millennia by means of transcribing and safekeeping, withstanding all the torments and atrocities of its history. In this way it proved that it recognized the value of all this.42 I am likewise amazed by special, individual achievements, and occasionally by traits of intellect or judgement, as if by inspiration, among those who otherwise belong to the masses, indeed, sometimes even among the masses themselves when they judge quite properly, as happens most of the time as soon as their chorus has become large and complete. This is like the accord achieved by even untrained voices, which always ends up harmonious if only there are very many of them. Those who transcend this, whom we call geniuses, are merely the lucid intervals of the entire human race. Accordingly they achieve what is simply denied the rest. Furthermore their originality, too, is so great that not only does their difference from others become obvious, but instead the individuality of each one of them is so strongly pronounced that between all the geniuses that have been a total difference of character and intellect exists, by virtue of which each one has, in his works, delivered a gift to the world which it could have received from no one else in the whole human race. For this reason Ariosto’s ‘nature formed him and then broke the mould’b is such a thoroughly fitting and justifiably famous metaphor.”

„By virtue of the finite measure of human powers generally every great mind is so only under the condition that he has a decidedly weak side somewhere, even intellectually, in which he sometimes lags behind even mediocre minds. It will be that aspect that could have blocked the way to his outstanding capability, but it will always be difficult to describe this in a word, even with a given individual. It may be more easily expressed indirectly, for instance Plato’s weak side is precisely where Aristotle’s strength lies, and vice versa. Kant’s weak side is that in which Goethe is great, and vice versa.”

„those who familiarize themselves with the biography of a philosopher instead of studying his thoughts resemble those who preoccupy themselves with the frame instead of the actual painting, contemplating the carving and the value of the gilding. So far so good. But now there is yet another class whose interest is likewise focused on the material and personal, which goes even further in this direction and indeed to the point of complete uselessness. Because a great mind has opened the treasures of his innermost selfa to them, and produced works by means of the most extreme application of his powers, works which redound not only to their elevation and enlightenment but also that of their descendants into the tenth, even the twentieth generation – because he has bestowed a gift on mankind that no other can match, because of this these scoundrels feel justified in dragging his moral persona before their tribunal, to see if they cannot discover some blemish on him, and thus alleviate the pain of ‘the feeling that penetrates their nothingness’b which they experience at the sight of a great mind.”

„Talent works for money and fame, while the incentive that moves a genius to carry out his works is not so easily specified. He rarely receives money, nor is it the fame; only the French could think like this. – Fame is too uncertain and on closer examination of too little worth”

„Our intellect’s power of comprehensiona is suited exclusively for what the philosophers have now called finite things, now appearances, in brief for the ephemeral forms of this world and whatever suits our person, our aims and our preservation: it is immanent.”

„if we quarrel with nature we will usually be in the wrong.”

„According to your own metaphysics we are all this only in a certain sense, as thing in itself, not as appearance, as inner principle of the world, not as individuals, as will to life, not as subjects of individual cognition. Here we are speaking only of our intelligent nature, not of the will, and as intelligences we are individual and finite, thus our intellect is too. The purpose of our life (if I may be allowed a metaphorical expression) is practical, not theoretical; our action, not our cognition belongs to eternity. Our intellect is here to guide this action and at the same time hold a mirror up to our will, and this it does. Anything more would most likely render it unsuitable for this, as we see already how in the genius this small surplus of intellect can be an impediment to the career of the individual so gifted, making him outwardly unhappy even if it might be an inner blessing.”

„Thing in itself means that which exists independently of our perception, hence that which actually is. For Democritus it was formed matter, and basically it was the same thing for Locke; to Kant it was = x, to me will.”

„Just as we know merely the surface but not the great solid mass of the interior of the globe, so too we know empirically of the things and of the world generally nothing but their appearance, i.e., their surface”

„intelligence and character could be traced back to the more distant physical cause, namely the composition of his parents, insofar as they could only provide the germ for a being like themselves, but not for one higher and better. Metaphysically, on the other hand, the same person would have to be explained as the appearance of his own completely free and original will, which created its own suitable intellect. This is why all his deeds, as necessarily as they emanate from his character in conflict with the given motives, and his character appearing in turn as the result of his corporization, nonetheless are entirely attributable to him. So metaphysically the difference between him and his parents is also not absolute.”

„The inner essence of things is foreign to the principle of sufficient reason; it is the thing in itself, and that is nothing but pure will. It is because it wills, and it wills because it is. It is that which is simply reala in every being.”

„In every living being is the entire centre of the world, therefore its own existence is to it everything in everything. Egoism also is based on this. To believe that death annihilates it is extremely ridiculous, since all existence proceeds from it alone.”

„it may be the case that everything we complain about not knowing is not known by anyone, indeed is not even knowable in itself, i.e., not representable. For representation, in whose sphere all cognitionc lies and to which therefore all knowledged relates, is only the outer side of existence, something secondary, added-on, namely something that was not necessary for the preservation of things generally, hence for the world totality, but instead merely for the preservation of individual animal beings.”

„the forms of the understanding are merely of immanent, not of transcendent use”

„For precisely as a consequence of its objectivity now nature itself, the whole of things, becomes its object and its problem. Indeed in it nature for the first time begins properly to perceive itself as something that is and yet also could not be, or could well be other than it is, whereas in the ordinary, merely normal intellect nature does not perceive itself clearly, just as the miller does not hear his mill or as the perfumer 104 does not smell his shop. To the intellect nature appears to understand itself self-evidently; it is caught up in nature. Only in certain more lucid moments does it become aware of nature and then it is nearly terrified by it, but this soon gives way. Accordingly, we soon see what such normal minds are able to achieve in philosophy, even if they pile up together. On the other hand, if the intellect were metaphysical originally and by its disposition, then they would be able to advance philosophy, especially with their united efforts, like any other science.”

„Against pantheism I have mainly only this: that it does not mean anything. Naming the world God does not mean explaining it, but instead only enriching language with a superfluous synonym for the word ‘world’. Whether you say ‘the world is God’ or ‘the world is the world’ amounts to the same.”

„Moreover I suspect that all metals are the combination of two absolute elements yet unknown to us, and differing only in the relative quantum of the two. On this also their electric resistance is based, according to a law analogous to the one as a consequence of which the oxygen of the base of a salt stands to its radical in inverse ratio to that which both have to each other in the acid of the same salt. If one were able to split metals into these components, one would probably be able to make them too. But the door is barred to this.”

„The force of gravity in a stone is just as inexplicable as thinking in a human brain, and for this reason therefore it too would allow us to deduce a spirit in the stone.”

„Now if you assume a spirit in the human mind, like a deus ex machina,a then as mentioned above you would also have to concede a spirit to every stone. On the other hand, if your dead and purely passive matter can exert as gravity or attract, repel and spark as electricity, then it can also think as cerebral pulp. In brief, one can ascribe matter to every alleged spirit, but also spirit to all matter, from which it results that the opposition is false.”

„All the natural sciences succumb to the unavoidable disadvantage that they apprehend nature exclusively from the objective side, unconcerned about the subjective. But it is in the latter that the main thing necessarily lies; it devolves upon philosophy.”

„nature always appears only as a witness”

„Generally speaking, however, it is not the observation of rare and concealed phenomena,a those only demonstrable through experiments, that will lead to the discovery of the most important truths, but instead those of the phenomena lying exposed and accessible to everyone. Therefore the task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, so much as to think what no one has yet thought in that which everyone sees. For this reason it takes so much more to be a philosopher than a physicist.”

„An atom, no matter how small it may be, is still a continuum of uninterrupted matter;”

„The amount of manual work in experimentation alienates our physicists from real thinking, as well as from reading; they forget that experiments can never deliver the truth itself but instead merely the data for discovering truth.”

„Generally speaking, however, if there were atoms they would have to be without difference and qualities, thus not sulphur atoms and iron atoms, etc., but instead merely atoms of matter, because differences suspend simplicity. For example, the iron atom would have to contain something that the sulphur atom lacked, and so it would not be simple but compound; and generally speaking change of quality cannot take place without change of quantity. Ergo: If atoms are even possible, then they are conceivable only as the last constituents of absolute or abstract matter, but not of definite materials.”

„If in absolute space (i.e., apart from all environment) two bodies approach each other in a straight line, then phoronomically it makes no difference whether I say A approaches B or vice versa. But dynamically the difference is whether the moving cause acts or acted upon A or B, for this in turn stops the motion depending on whether I check A or B. It is precisely the same with circular motion; phoronomically it is all the same (in absolute space) whether the sun orbits the earth or the earth rotates on its axis, but dynamically the above-mentioned difference applies as well as the additional one that on the rotating body the tangential force conflicts with its cohesion and by virtue of precisely this force the circulating body would fly off if another force did not bind it to the centre of its motion.”

„Light undoubtedly has a certain connection to gravitation, but indirectly and in the sense of a reflection as its absolute opposite. It is essentially a disseminating force, while the other is contractive. Both act constantly in straight lines. Perhaps in a figurative sense one can call light the reflex of gravitation. – No body can exert an impact unless it is heavy at the same time; light is something imponderable [ein imponderabile] therefore it cannot exert an effect mechanically, i.e., through impact.”

„The more specific heat a body has, the less exterior heat is required to heat it, but also the less heat it can give off; it cools down rapidly, just as it heated up rapidly.”

„Light does not behave as materially as heat, having instead only a ghostly essence in that it appears and disappears without a trace, wherever it has been. In fact it actually exists only when it is originating; if it stops developing, then it also stops radiating, it disappears and we cannot say where it has gone.”

„Apes do what they see; people repeat what they hear.”

„the will always strives upward in its scale of objectivation”

„Discoveries occur mostly through mere probing and testing, while the theory of each is conceived afterwards; just as the proof to a known truth.”

„In general, moreover, it is not entirely safe to conclude the absence of all life from the lack of water and atmosphere; one could even call it narrow-minded, since it is based on the assumption of ‘everywhere as with us’. The phenomenon of animal life could well be enabled by other means than respiration and blood circulation, for the essential element of all life is the constant change of matter with the permanence of form. Of course we can only conceive of this through the agency of what is fluid and vaporous. – Yet matter generally is merely the visibility of the will, and it now strivesc everywhere, step by step, for the enhancementd of its appearance, whose forms, means and ways may be quite varied. – On the other hand we have to consider that most probably the chemical elements not only on the moon but also those on all planets are the same as on earth, because the entire system has precipitated from the same primordial luminous nebula into which the current sun had extended. This of course allows one to surmise a similarity of even the higher manifestations of the will.”

„all the chance events which intervene and intersect in the course of an individual’s life nevertheless correspond in a secret and pre-established harmony, producing a totality that is just as purposively fitting with respect to his character and his genuine, ultimate well-being – as if everything existed just for his sake as a mere phantasmagoria for him alone.”

„The geological events that preceded all life on earth never existed in any consciousness at all; not in their own, as they have none, and not in a foreign one, because there was none. Therefore, lacking any subject, they had no objective existence at all, i.e., they did not exist at all – but what then is the significance of their having existed? At bottom it is merely hypothetical, to wit; if there had been a consciousness in those ancient times, then such events would have manifested themselves in it. The regress of appearances leads us there, therefore it lay in the nature of the thing in itself to manifest itself in such events.”

„There are shallow empiricists in Germany who want their public to believe that nothing at all exists except nature and its laws. This does not work; nature is no thing in itself and its laws are not absolute”

„A complete fossilization is a total chemical change without any mechanical change.”

„the sexual drive always plays into the hands of hunger, just as the latter, when it is satisfied, into the hands of the sexual drive. Now the above law would guarantee that the matter could not be pushed to the point of an actual overpopulation of the earth, an evil whose horror the most vivid imagination could scarcely picture. This is so because according to the law in question, after the earth had attained as many people as it is optimally capable of sustaining, the fertility of the race meanwhile would have diminished to the point where it barely sufficed to replace the deaths, so accordingly each accidental increase of these deaths would once again bring the population below the maximum.”

„unity of species in no way implies unity of origin and descent from a single pair. “This is an absurd assumption in the first place. Who would believe that all oaks descend from a single first oak, all mice from a first pair of mice, all wolves from a first wolf? Instead, nature repeats the same process under the same conditions but in different places, and is much 166 too careful to leave the existence of a species wholly precarious, especially the higher kinds, by staking it on a single gamble and thereby abandoning its hard-won opus to a thousand accidents. On the contrary it knows what it wants, wills it decisively, and accordingly it goes to work; but the opportunity is never entirely singular and unique”

„a white person never sprang originally from the womb of nature”

„Just as dark colour is natural to the human being, so also is vegetable nourishment. But as with the former, he remains loyal to this only in the tropical climate. As he propagated into the colder zones, he had to counteract the climate that was unnatural to him with an unnatural diet. In the actual north one cannot exist at all without eating meat. I have been told that even in Copenhagen a six-week criminal sentence to bread and water, if carried out in the strictest sense and without exception, is regarded as life threatening. Mankind therefore has simultaneously become white and carnivorous.”

„Life can be defined as the condition of a body in which it always maintains the form essential (substantial) to it under the constant change of matter. If someone were to object that even a whirlpool or waterfall maintains its form under constant change of matter, then the answer would be that in these things the form is not at all essential, but instead accidental through and through, following the universal laws of nature, insofar as it depends on external circumstances; by changing them one can also arbitrarily change the form, without thereby touching the essential.”

„whoever denies life force basically denies his own existence, and therefore can boast of having reached the highest peak of absurdity”

„life force is the will. Supposedly a fundamental difference between the life force and all other natural forces is that once it retreats from a body, it does not take possession of it again.”

„once the life force has abandoned a body it cannot take possession of it again. Yet the reason for this is that it does not stick to the mere substance, like the forces of inorganic nature, but instead chiefly to the form. Its activity exists precisely in the production and maintenance (i.e., continued production) of this form; this is why, as soon as it retreats from a body, its form is already destroyed, at least in the finer parts. Now, however, production of form has its regular and even planned process in the definite succession of what is to be produced, that is: origin, means and progress.a Therefore the life force, wherever it appears anew, must begin its tissue from the beginning, hence really commence ab ovo.b Consequently it cannot again take up the work once it has stood still or is even in the process of decay; it cannot go and come like magnetism. On this rests the difference in question between the life force and other natural forces.”

„The life force is only one thing,e which, as primeval force, as metaphysical, as thing in itself, as will, is inexhaustible, hence requires no rest.”

„walking in fresh air is uncommonly favourable to inspiring one’s own thoughts. But this I attribute to the respiratory process that is accelerated by that motion, which partially strengthens and accelerates blood circulation and partially oxygenates the blood better.”

„the formation and maintenance of the parts, especially the nutrition of the brain but also every growth, every replacement, every healing and hence the effect of the healing power of natureb in all its forms, but especially in the beneficial crises of illness, take place mainly during sleep. On this account it is a main condition for lasting health and also for a long life that a person constantly enjoy uninterrupted and deep sleep. Yet it is not wise to extend the sleep as long as possible, for what it gains in extension it loses in intension, i.e., in terms of depth.”

„when we wake on our own early in the morning we should not try to fall asleep again, but simply get up, saying with Goethe ‘Cast it off, the shell of sleep!”

„Like all functions of organic life digestion, too, proceeds more easily and rapidly because of the pause in brain activity; hence a nap of ten to fifteen minutes half an hour after a meal has beneficent effects, to which coffee also contributes precisely because it accelerates digestion.”

„when brain activity is focused on demanding reflection or reading, respiration becomes lighter and slower, as Nasse has observed. On the other hand, exertions of irritability, as well as the vigorous affects like joy, anger and so on, also accelerate respiration along with blood circulation. Therefore anger is by no means uniformly harmful and can even have a beneficial effect on some natures if only it can be released properly; these types therefore strive instinctively for it, especially since it simultaneously promotes the discharge of bile.”

„We would be able to regard the living animal organism as a machine without a prime mover,a a series of movements without beginning, a chain of effects and causes none of which was the first, if life took its course without being connected to the external world. However, the connecting point is the breathing process; it is the closest and most essential connecting link with the external world and provides the first impulse. Therefore the movement of life must be thought of as emanating from it, and it in turn as the first link in the causal chain. Accordingly a puff of air emerges as the first impulse and therefore as the first external cause of life which, penetrating and oxygenating, introduces further processes and thus has life as a result. However, what now approaches this external cause from the inside manifests itself as a violent longing,b indeed an irresistible strainingc to breathe, therefore directly as will. – The second external cause of life is nourishment. It too initially acts from without, as motive, yet not so penetratingly and unremittingly as air; only in the stomach does its physiological causal activity begin. – Liebig has calculated the budget of organic nature and drawn up the balance of its expenditures and receipts”

„Stepping into a cold bath immediately and greatly accelerates respiration, 178 and this effect lasts for a while after getting out of the bath if the water was very cold; in his above mentioned book Marshall Hall explains this as a reflex movement, produced by the coldness suddenly acting on the spinal cord. To this efficient causef of the matter I would like to add the final cause, namely that nature wants to replace such a significant and sudden loss of heat as quickly as possible, which then occurs precisely through the increase of respiration as the inner source of heat. The secondary result of this, namely an increase of arterial and a decrease of venous blood, along with the direct effect on the nerves, may play a significant part in the incomparably clear, cheerful and purely contemplative mood which tends to be the direct result of a cold bath, and all the more so the colder it was.”

„the effect a representation has on the genitalia cannot, like that of a motive, be suspended by another representation, except only insofar as the former is displaced from consciousness by the latter and hence is no longer present. Then, however, it happens infallibly and even when the latter contains nothing at all contrary to the former, which is required on the other hand in the case of a counter-motive. – Accordingly, for the consummation of coitus it does not suffice that the presence of a woman affects a man as a motive (say for producing children, or for the sake of marital duty and so on), even if this as such were quite powerful; instead, her presence must act directly as stimulus.”

„grey and white hair for human beings is what the red and yellow leaves of October are for trees, and both often look quite good, only there must not be any falling out in addition.”

„I have actually found that, when I tried in vain to recall something to memory, I succeeded after all by a serious change of position. For thinking in general the most advantageous position appears to be the one in which the basis encephalia lies completely horizontally. Therefore in deep reflection the head leans forward”

„Just as the head leaning forward appears conducive to reflection, so too the opposite, therefore the elevating and even bending backwards of the head, looking upwards, aids the momentary exertion of memory, since those who are trying to recollect something 183 often assume such a position with success. – Also relevant here is that very smart dogs, who as is well known partially understand human speech, turn their head from one side to another when their master speaks to them and they attempt to decipher the meaning of his words; this gives them a highly intelligent and droll air”

„Morbus ipse est medela naturae, qua opitulatur perturbationibus organismi: ergo remedium medici medetur medelae. [Schopenhauer’s Latin formulation: ‘Illness itself is a healing attempt of nature, by which it comes to the aid of disturbances of the organism; therefore the remedy prescribed by the physician heals the healing attempt.’] There is only one healing power, and that is nature; in salves and pills there is none, at best they can give a hint to nature’s healing power regarding where there is something for it to do.”

„Only those cures which nature itself brings about using its own means are thorough. Here too the saying ‘Everything that is not natural is imperfect’a applies. The cures of the physicians are mostly directed at symptoms, which they regard as the illness itself, and that is why we feel uncomfortable after such a cure. If on the other hand we simply let nature have its time, then it eventually achieves the cure on its own, after which we are then better off than before the illness or, if a single body part was afflicted, this becomes stronger. One can observe this comfortably and without danger in the less serious illnesses as they often afflict us. I admit that there are exceptions, and so cases where only the physician can help; in particular syphilis is the triumph of medicine. But by far most recoveries are merely the work of nature, for which the physician cashes in – even when the recoveries only succeeded despite his efforts, and it would be a pity for the reputation and remuneration of physicians if the conclusion ‘with this, therefore because of this’a were not the general norm. The good patients of the physician regard their bodies as a clock or some other machine which can only be repaired by the mechanic if something on it goes wrong. But it is not so; the body is a machine that repairs itself, and most of the greater and smaller disorders that set in are dispatched entirely on their own by the healing power of nature. Therefore let these take their course, and few physicians, few medicines. – But the physician comforts the soul.”

„The different animal forms in which the will to life manifests itself relate to one another like the same thought in different languages, expressed according to the spirit of each; and the different species of a genus can be 187 regarded as a number of variations on the same theme.91 Nevertheless, on closer analysis that variety of animal forms is to be deduced from the different lifestyle of each species and the difference of purpose that arises from this.”

„The passions do not merely affect different parts of the body (see World as Will and Representation, 3rd ed., vol. 2, p. 297),d but conversely the individual state of separate organs excites the passions and even the representations associated with them. When the vesiculae seminalesa are periodically overfilled with sperm, lewd and obscene thoughts arise all the time and without particular cause; we of course think the reason for this is purely psychic, a perverse direction of our thoughts, only it is purely physical and stops as soon as the said excess is gone, through reabsorption of the sperm into the blood. Sometimes we are inclined to anger, feuding, rage and earnestly seek the causes of this; if we find no external causes, then in our thoughts we summon some long forgotten annoyance, in order to be angry and to fume. Quite probably this state is a result of an excess of bile. Sometimes we are inwardly anxious and fearful, without any cause, and the condition persists; in our thoughts we look for objects of concern and easily imagine we have found them. The English language calls this to catch blue devils; it probably arises from the intestines, etc.”

„With every newly discovered truth, perhaps without exception, it is soon discovered that something very like it had been said earlier and only one step was lacking to reach it; indeed, sometimes it had even been exactly expressed yet remained unnoticed because this happened without emphasis, in that the author had not recognized its value and had not grasped the richness of its consequences – which prevented him from actually developing it. In such cases then, people had, if not the plant, then at least the seed.”

„as soon as a false theory reaches a certain point, nature immediately steps in the way and throws the lie in its face.”

„But as concerns the Germans, their judgement on Goethe’s colour theory corresponds to the expectations one has to have of a nation that could extol a thoroughly hollow philosophaster like Hegel for thirty years as the greatest of all thinkers and sages – he who smeared witless and worthless nonsense – and moreover in such a chorus of all voicese that the whole of Europe echoed with it. I well know that ‘it is a right of man to be incomprehensible’,f,3 i.e., that everyone has the right to judge according to his understanding and as he wishes. But for that he will also have to put up with being judged by those who live after and even sooner by those who live next door for his judgements, for here too there is still a nemesis.”

„Whoever does not freely proclaim the truth is a traitor to the truth.”

„Physical truths can have much external significance, but they lack internal significance. The latter is the prerogative of intellectual and moral truths, which have the highest levels of the objectivation of the will as their theme, while the former have the lowest.”

„That the world has a mere physical but no moral significance is the greatest, most ruinous and fundamental error, the real perversity of the minda and in a basic sense it is certainly that which faith has personified as the antichrist. Nevertheless, and in spite of all religions which assert the contrary of this and seek to establish it in their mythological ways, that basic error never dies out on earth, but always raises its head from time to time until universal indignation once again forces it into hiding.”

„Quid superbit homo? Cujus conceptio culpa, /Nasci poena, labor vita, necesse mori!”

„What can humans boast? After all, their conceptionIs already guilt, birth is punishment, life labour, death inevitable!) Therefore, contrary to the above form of the Kantian moral principle, I wish to propose the following rule: for every human being with whom one comes into contact, do not undertake an objective evaluation of him according to value and dignity, hence do not take into consideration the baseness of his will, nor the limitation of his understanding and the wrongness of his notions, because the former could easily arouse hatred, the latter contempt for him. Instead, focus alone on his suffering, his distress, his fear, his pain – then you will always feel kinship with him, 216 sympathize with him and instead of hatred or contempt sense that compassionc for him which alone is agape,d and to which we are exhorted by the gospels. In order to prevent hatred and contempt from rising up against him, truly it is not the seeking of man’s ‘dignity’ but, quite to the contrary, only compassion that is the suitable position.”

„Buddhists as a result of their deeper ethical and metaphysical insights do not proceed from cardinal virtues but from cardinal vices, whose opposites or negations give rise to the cardinal virtues in the first place. According to I. J. Schmidt’s History of the Eastern Mongols,a p. 7, the Buddhist cardinal vices are sex, sloth, anger and greed. Probably, however, arrogance should take the place of sloth; that is how they are reported in the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, 1819 edition, vol. 6, p. 372, where, however, envy or hatred is added as a fifth.”

„Now if one were to compare these deeply conceived, basic oriental 217 concepts of ethics with the very famous Platonic cardinal virtues, repeated many thousands of times, of justice, courage, moderation and wisdom, then one finds the latter to be without a clear, guiding basic concept and therefore superficially chosen, even obviously false to some extent. Virtues must be qualities of the will, but wisdom belongs chiefly to the intellect.”

„Bravery is not a virtue at all, though occasionally it is its servant or tool; however, it is just as apt to serve the greatest worthlessness, and actually it is a quality of temperament.”

„The point at which moral virtues and vices in people first part company is that contrast of one’s basic attitude towards others, which takes on either the character of envy or that of compassion. For each human being carries these two diametrically opposed qualities in himself, inasmuch as they arise from the unavoidable comparison of one’s own condition with that of others, and depending on how this comparison affects his individual character, one or the other quality will become his basic attitude and the source of his behaviour. Envy of course builds the wall between You and I more firmly; for compassion it becomes thin and transparent, indeed, occasionally it is completely torn down, whereupon the difference between I and not-I disappears.”

„courage, however, can be traced back to the fact that one willingly faces threatening evils in the present moment in order to prevent greater ones lying in the future, whereas cowardice does the opposite.”

„For even though natural fear affects everyone in the same way, it is in not letting it be seen that one is brave, and precisely this constitutes bravery.”

„What qualifies as the virtue of a shoemaker is his ability to create a well- fitting shoe.”

„one should flee him like a carrier of the plague, and once his vice has been discovered, break with him right away so that later, when the consequences appear, one neither helps to bear them nor has to play the role of the friends of Timon of Athens. Likewise it is not to be expected that he who frivolously squanders his own fortune would leave untouched that of another, if it were to come into his hands; 221 instead, ‘wasting one’s own, wanting another’s’,a as Sallust quite rightly formulated (Catilina, ch. 5). Waste therefore leads not only to impoverishment, but through this to crime; almost all the criminals of the well-to-do classes have become so as a result of waste. Accordingly the Koran justly says (Sura 17, verse 29): ‘The wastrels are brothers of Satan.’ (See Sadi, trans. Graf, p. 254.)b,7 – Miserliness, on the other hand, is attended by superabundance, and when would this have arrived unwelcomed? But it must be a good vice that has good consequences. Miserliness thus proceeds from the correct principle that all pleasures have a merely negative effect, and therefore a happiness consisting of them is a chimera, whereas pains are positive and very real.”

„When physical pleasures seduce someone from the proper path, then his sensual nature, the animal in him, is at fault. He is simply swept away by thrills and acts without thinking, overwhelmed by the impression of the present moment. – On the other hand, by the time the vices he could never forsake finally forsake him due to physical frailty or old age, since his capacity for sensual pleasures has expired, then mental greedb survives the carnal as he turns to miserliness. Money, which as the representative of all worldly goods is their abstractum, now becomes the shrivelled stem to which his expired cravings cling as egoism in the abstract.c Now they regenerate themselves in his love for mammon.”

„Every human perfection is related to a fault into which it threatens to transform; however, inversely, every fault is related to a perfection. Hence the error we make with respect to a person is often based on the fact that in the beginning of our acquaintance we confuse his faults with the perfections related to them, or vice versa; then the cautious person strikes us as cowardly, the thrifty as cheap, or the wastrel even as liberal, the churl as straightforward and upright, the impertinent as endowed with noble self-confidence and so on.”

„no one should be overbearing. Just as everyone, even the greatest genius, is decidedly narrow-minded in some sphere of knowledge and thereby attests to his kinship with the essentially wrong-headed and absurd human race, so too everyone bears something downright bad inside, morally speaking, and even the best, yes most noble character will occasionally surprise us with individual traits of badness, as if to acknowledge his kinship with the human race, among whom any degree of worthlessness, 224 indeed of cruelty, may occur. For it is precisely by force of this badness in him, this evil principle, that he has had to become a human being. And for the same reason generally the world is that which my true mirror has shown it to be.”

„our entire civilized world is only a great masquerade. Here one encounters knights, preachers, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and who knows what else! But they are not what they represent; they are mere masks under which, as a rule, money speculators (money-makers) are hiding. Certainly one dons the mask of justice, which he has borrowed from the lawyer, merely to beat vigorously upon another; still another has for the same purpose chosen the public welfare and patriotism, and a third religion or religious purity. For all kinds of purposes many have already donned the mask of philosophy, even that of philanthropy and so on. Women have fewer choices; mostly they avail themselves of the mask of decency, bashfulness, domesticity and modesty. Then there are general masks, domino masks, as it were, that are therefore to be found everywhere; to these belong strict integrity, courtesy, sincere interest and grinning friendliness. For the most part, as mentioned, nothing but industrialists, trades people and speculators are hiding beneath all these masks. In this respect the only honest class are the merchants, since they alone portray themselves as what they are; they go about unmasked and therefore also stand low in rank. It is very important to be instructed already early in youth about how we find ourselves in a masquerade, for otherwise we will not at all understand or figure out many things, but instead stand there before them quite perplexed. Especially he will stand longest ‘whose heart Titan has moulded from better clay’.c Of this kind are the favour found by meanness, the neglect which even the rarest and greatest merit suffers at the hands of people who are its specialists, the hatred of truth and great talents, the ignorance of scholars in their specialization, and the fact that almost always the genuine article will be spurned while the merely spurious will be sought. Therefore let the young man be instructed that in this masquerade the apples are made of wax, the flowers of silk, the fishes of cardboard and everything, everything is fun and games; and that of those two he sees there so earnestly conducting business, one is selling nothing but spurious wares and the other is paying with counterfeit coins. But more serious considerations are to be made and worse things to be reported. The human being is at bottom a wild, horrible animal. We know it merely in its bridled and tame state, which we call civilization, and this is why we are shocked by the occasional eruptions of its nature. But where and when the lock and chain of lawful order happen to fall away and anarchy breaks out, then it shows what it is. – Meanwhile, whoever would like to inform himself about this even without such opportunity, can convince himself by drawing on a hundred old and new accounts that man is not inferior in cruelty and implacability to a tiger or hyena.”

„mankind is a predator which, as soon as it spies someone weaker, infallibly attacks him”

„Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure: Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure”

„man is the only animal which causes others pain for no other purpose than causing pain. The other animals never do it unless to satisfy their hunger or in the heat of battle. If it is said of the tiger that it kills more than it devours, then at least it slays everything only with the intention of devouring it, and it is simply that, as the French idiom puts it, ses yeux sont plus grands que son estomac.c No animal ever tortures merely to torture, but mankind does this and this constitutes the devilish character that is far more wicked than the merely animal. We have already spoken of the matter on a large scale, but it is also clear on a small scale where everyone has a chance to observe it daily. For instance, when two puppies are playing together, so peaceful and lovely to behold, and a child of three to four years come along, he will instantly start flailing at them with his whip or stick, almost inevitably, thereby demonstrating that he is already at this age the evil animal par excellence.”

„a wild animal lies at the heart of every person, only waiting for the opportunity to rant and rave; it wants to hurt others and annihilate them if they should dare to block its path.”

„the worst trait in human nature is schadenfreude, since it is closely related to cruelty, indeed really only differs from it as theory from practice, but generally manifests where compassion should normally find its place, which as its opposite is the true source of all justice and loving kindness. Opposed to compassion in another sense is envy, insofar as it arises from an opposite cause; its opposition to compassion thus rests chiefly in its cause, and only as a result of this does it appear in the sensation itself. Therefore envy is capable of being excused and is generally 230 human even though it is reprehensible, whereas schadenfreude is devilish and its mockery is the laughter of hell. It shows up, as I said, precisely where compassion is supposed to, while envy on the other hand shows up only where there is no occasion for compassion but instead the opposite. It arises in the human breast as just this opposite and consequently to this extent as a human attitude;”

„This is Samsara, and everything in it proclaims it; but more than anything it is the human world, in which morally speaking badness and baseness, and intellectually speaking incompetence and stupidity reign to a horrifying extent. Nevertheless, in it there occur, though quite sporadically but always surprising us anew, appearances of honesty, of goodness, even of nobility, and likewise of great understanding, of the thinking mind, even of genius. These never extinguish entirely; they glimmer out at us like individual gleaming points from the great mass of darkness. We must take them as a pledge that a good and redeeming principle lies in this Samsara, which can achieve a breakthrough and fulfil and liberate the whole.”

„There are in fact two opposite ways to become conscious of one’s own existence; first in empirical intuition, as it manifests itself externally, as infinitely tiny in a temporally and spatially infinite world, as one among thousands of millions of human beings who run around on this earthly sphere for the shortest of times, renewing themselves every thirty years.19 But the second way is by absorbing oneself into one’s own inner being and becoming conscious of being all in all and really the only actual being which, moreover, sees itself again in those others manifested externally, as if in a mirror. The first mode of cognition apprehends merely the appearance mediated by the principium individuationis,a but the other is a direct realization of oneself as the thing in itself.”

„This is precisely the basis on which every being, even the slightest, says to itself: ‘As long as I survive, let the world perish.’ And in truth even if all other beings in the world perished, still the whole essence of the world in itself would persist unharmed and undiminished in this single being, and laugh at that demise as a mirage. This is truly a conclusion that presupposes something impossible,c to which one could justifiably object that when a being, even the slightest, is completely annihilated, in and with it the entire world would have to have perished. In just this sense the mystic Angelus Silesius says: I know God cannot live a moment without me: If I would perish he must also cease to be.”

„Even the one who is nothingmay gain power in concert with gods, but Iventure to obtain this glory without them.”

„I think that when the Emperor of China or the King of Siam and other Asian monarchs grant permission to the European powers to send missionaries to their countries, they would be perfectly entitled to do this only under the condition that they be allowed to send just as many 241 Buddhist priests, with the same rights, into the respective European country, for which naturally they would choose those who have been previously well schooled in the corresponding European language. Then we would have an interesting competition to behold, and see who achieves the most.”

„As teachers you went there; As pupils you returned. Once it was veiled, but now you share The meaning you have learned.”

„He himself is such a man because, once and for all, he wills to be one.”

„The intellectual talents require education, of course, just as some natural products require preparation in order to be enjoyed or otherwise useful; but neither here nor there can preparation replace the original material. Therefore all the merely acquired, learned, and mastered qualities, meaning the qualities a posteriori whether moral or intellectual, are really fake, vain illusion without content.”

„there are human beings in whom the sight of another immediately excites a hostile feeling, such that their innermost being cries out: “Not I!”

„I once again!”

„people are cautious with important things, while with little things they follow their nature without thinking much.”

„Whoever is reckless on a small scale will be infamous on a large. If in such matters someone demonstrates through his absolutely reckless and egoistic behaviour that the sense of justice is foreign to his heart, then one should not trust him with a single penny without proper security. For who would believe that a man who proves himself to be unjust every day in all other matters not associated with property, whose boundless egoism shows through everywhere from the little matters of everyday day life which are not subjected to scrutiny, like a dirty shirt visible beneath a tattered jacket – who would believe that such a man would be honest in matters of mine and thine with no other impulse than that of justice? Whoever is reckless on a small scale will be infamous on a large. – Whoever ignores the small character traits has only himself to blame when he later comes to know the character in question, to his detriment, from the larger ones.27 According to the same principle one should immediately break with so-called good friends, even over small things, if they betray a malicious or bad or mean character, in order thus to prevent their bigger and worse tricks which are only waiting for an opportunity to show up. The same is true of servants; one should always think it better to be alone than among traitors. Actually the foundation and propaedeutic of all knowledge of mankind is the conviction that human behaviour on the whole and in essence is not guided by his reason and its designs. This is why no one becomes this or that because he wants to, however ardently, but instead his actions emanate from his inborn and unchangeable character, become more defined and specialized by motives, and consequently are the necessary product of these two factors. Accordingly one can visualize human behaviour as the course of a planet which is the result of the tangential force given to it and the centripetal force acting from its sun, where the first force represents character and the latter the influence of motives. This is almost more than a mere metaphor, insofar as tangential force, from which motion actually emanates, while it is restricted by gravitation, is metaphysically speaking the will presenting itself in such a body.”

„consciousness accompanies each deed with the commentary ‘you could also act differently’, even though its true meaning is: ‘You could also be someone else”

„If in the world the same people recurred just as the same cases recur, then a hundred years would never pass without our finding ourselves together once more, doing again exactly the same things as now.”

„After all, the one who called him into existence out of nothing has in the same way co-created and determined his essence as well, i.e., all his qualities.”

„How a human being is determines how he must act; therefore blame and merit do not adhere to his individual deeds, but to his essence and being.”

„The free being must also be the original being. If our will is free, then it is also the original being and vice versa.”

„Imitation and habit are the incentives of most human activity by far. However, the kind of effect example has is determined by each person’s character, which is why the same example can affect one person seductively, the other as a deterrent. Certain social improprieties give us a perfect opportunity to observe this when they eventually take hold after not showing up previously. Upon first perceiving such an impropriety someone will think “Whew, how can that be? How egoistic, how inconsiderate! I’m really going to be on my guard never to do something like that.”

„Aha! If he does it, then I can too.”

„On the whole example acts as a means of promoting the emergence of good and bad character traits, but it does not create them, hence Seneca’s proverb velle non discitura holds water here too. That all genuine moral qualities are innate, the good as well as the bad, is better suited to the doctrine of metempsychosis of the Brahmanists and Buddhists, according to which ‘a human being’s good and bad deeds follow from one existence into the other, like his shadow’, than it is to Judaism, which demands instead that a human being come into the world as a moral zero in order now to decide whether he wants to be an angel, or a devil, or whatever else in between these two by virtue of an inconceivable liberum arbitrium indifferentiae.b This I know full well, but do not concern myself with it 255 in the least, since my standard is truth. For I am no professor of philosophy, after all, and therefore do not see it as my vocation to secure above all things only the basic ideas of Judaism, even though they may eternally bar the way to every manner of philosophical knowledge. Liberum arbitrium indifferentiae under the name of ‘moral freedom’ is a most precious doll of philosophy professors, which we must let them have – these witty, honest and sincere men.”

„Whoever proceeds from the preconceived opinion that the concept of right must be a positive one and now undertakes to define it will not bring it about, for he wants to seize a shadow, follows a ghost, seeks a non-entity.a For the concept of right, just as that of freedom, is a negative one; its content is a mere negation. The concept of wrong is positive and is equivalent to injury in the broadest sense, therefore to laesio.b As such it can concern either the person, the property or honour. – Accordingly human rights are easy to define: Everyone has the right to do anything that does not injure another. – The right to or claim on something means nothing more than to do it, or take it or be able to use it without in any way thereby injuring another: simplicity is the sign of the true. – This sheds light on the meaninglessness of some questions, e.g. whether we have the right to take our own life. But as concerns the claims that others could personally have upon us, they rest upon the condition that we are living, and therefore cease if the condition ceases. That the one who no longer wants to live for himself should now continue to live merely as a machine for the use of others is an extravagant demand.”

„In my main work (vol. 2, ch. 47) I described how the state is essentially a mere institution of protection against external attacks on the whole and internal attacks on individuals against one another. From this it follows that the necessity of the state, in the final analysis, is based on the well-known injusticed of the human race; without this there would be no thought of the state, since no one would have to fear infringement of his rights and a mere union against the attacks of wild animals or the elements would have only a remote similarity to a state. From this standpoint one clearly sees the narrow- mindedness and shallowness of the philosophasters who in pompous phrases depict the state as the highest purpose and the blossom of human existence, thereby delivering an apotheosis of philistinism.”

„You take my life, When you do take the means, whereby I live”

„The free peasant of course has the advantage that he can get away and go into the wide world, whereas the serf and the adscript of the soild perhaps has the greater advantage that when he is rendered helpless by a bad harvest, illness, old age and incapacity his master has to care for him; therefore he sleeps peacefully while the master with a bad harvest tosses and turns in his bed, thinking up ways to provide bread for his serfs. Thus already Menander said (see Stobaeus, Anthology,a vol. 2, p. 389, Gaisford ed.): It is much better to serve a good master, Than to live in poverty under the name of freedom”

„nature has given a human being only as many powers as he needs, by applying them moderately, to scratch out a living from the earth; he has not received a great surplus of powers.”

„a great part of the powers of the human race is withdrawn from the production of what is necessary to all in order to secure what is superfluous and dispensable for a few. Therefore as long as luxury exists on the one hand, then necessarily on the other excessive work and a bad life must exist, be it under the name of poverty, of slavery, of proletarians,a or of slaves. Between them the fundamental difference is that slaves owe their origin to force, the poor to cunning. The whole unnatural state of society, the universal struggle to escape misery, the sea travel that costs so many lives, the complicated interests of trade and finally the wars which are occasioned by all of this – luxury is the sole root of it all, and it does not even make those who enjoy it happy, but instead sickly and ill-tempered. Accordingly for the alleviation of human misery the most effective thing would be to diminish, indeed eliminate luxury. Now this line of reasoning indisputably contains much truth. Nevertheless in effect it is contradicted by another line which moreover is confirmed by the testimony of experience. For, what the human race loses in muscle power (irritability) for its most essential purposes through those luxury-indulgent works is eventually replaced a thousand fold by the nervous powers (sensibility, intelligence) that are released (in the chemical sense) precisely on this occasion. For as the latter are of a higher kind their achievements also exceed those of the former a thousand fold: One good piece of advice often brings about greater advantage than many hands. - Euripides, Antiope A people of nothing but peasants would discover and invent little, but idle hands make for active minds. The arts and sciences themselves are children of luxury, and they pay their debt to it. Their work is the very perfection of 263 technology in all its branches, the mechanical, chemical and physical, which in our day has brought machinery to a height never previously anticipated and has achieved especially through steam engines and electricity things which earlier time would have ascribed to the help of the devil.”

„If machinery continues its progress to the same extent for a bit longer, it could come to the point that the expenditure of human energy will be saved almost completely, as a large part of horse power has already been saved. Then, to be sure, a certain universality of the intellectual culture of the human race would be conceivable, which however is impossible as long as a major part of it must engage in hard physical labour; for irritability and sensibility in general as in the individual are always and everywhere in antagonism, precisely because one and the same vital power underlies both. Furthermore, because ‘the arts refine customs’,b then wars on the large scale and brawls or duels on the small scale will perhaps disappear from the world, as both have already become much rarer. But it is not my purpose here to write a Utopia. – But aside from all these reasons, against the above discussed argument that points to the elimination of luxury and balanced distribution of all physical labour, we must also take into account that the great herd of the human race always and everywhere requires leaders, guides and counsellors in manifold forms, according to the business at hand, such as judges, rulers, military commanders, officials, priests, physicians, scholars, philosophers and so on, all of whom have the task of leading this extremely incompetent and for the most part misguided race through the labyrinth of life. Therefore each of them according to his position and talent has acquired an overview of this labyrinth in a narrower or broader horizon. Now it is only natural and fair that these leaders remain free of physical labour as well as common needs or discomfort, indeed even possess and enjoy more than the common man in accordance with their much greater achievements. Even the wholesalers are to be included in that exempted class of leaders, insofar as they anticipate and meet the needs of the people far in advance.”

„The first king was a soldier who got lucky”

„originally, it is not justice but force that rules on earth, and accordingly it has the advantage of first occupancyc over the former. Therefore force can never be annulled and really abolished from the world, but instead must always be present; one can only wish and demand that it stand on the side of justice and be allied with it.”

„It was a custom among the Persians that after the death of a king anarchy ruled for five days, so that one would be mindful of the value of the king’s dignity and of the law.”

„Justice in itself is powerless; by nature force rules. Now to attract force over to justice, so that justice rules by means of force,7 – this is the problem of statesmanship.”

„It will already amount to much if statecraft solves its problem to the extent that as little injustice as possible remains in the community, for it is merely the ideal goal that this should occur entirely, without any trace, which can only be achieved approximately. If wrong is thrown out on one side, then it sneaks back in on the other because, after all, injustice lies deep in human nature.”

„One tries to achieve this goal by the artificial form of a constitution and the perfection of legislation, yet these remain an asymptote 268 already because fixed concepts never exhaust all particular cases and cannot be brought down to what is individual, inasmuch as they resemble the stones of a mosaic, not the brush-stroke nuances of a painting. In addition, all experiments here are dangerous because we are dealing with a material that is most difficult to treat, namely the human race, whose handling is almost as dangerous as that of fulminating gold. In this respect, to be sure, freedom of the press is to the machinery of state what the safety valve is for the steam engine, for by means of it every dissatisfaction soon airs itself in words, and indeed will exhaust itself there if it does not have much substance. Now if it has substance, then it is good that one acknowledge this in time in order to help out. This way things go much better than if the dissatisfaction remained squeezed, brooding, fermenting, boiling and piling up until it finally reached the stage of explosion. – On the other hand, though, freedom of the press can be regarded as permission to sell poison: poison for the mind and the heart. For what cannot be planted in the heads of the great masses, lacking knowledge and judgement as they are, especially if one dangles advantage and gain before them? And of what atrocity is a human being not capable, once something has been planted in his head? I therefore greatly fear that the dangers of freedom of the press outweigh its use, especially where legal ways are available for handling complaints. In any case, however, freedom of the press should be conditioned on the strictest prohibition[…]”

„Every human enterprise connected with danger must also obey a single commander, every military campaign, every ship; everywhere one will must be what leads. Even the animal organism is constructed monarchically; the brain alone is the guide and ruler, the hêgemonikon.a Even if the heart, lungs and stomach contribute much more to the maintenance of the whole, these philistines still cannot steer and guide; this is the business of the brain alone and it must emanate from one point. Even the planetary system is monarchical. The republican system, on the other hand, is as anti-natural to humans as it is unfavourable to higher intellectual life, hence the arts and sciences. Corresponding to all of this we find that the peoples of the entire earth at all times, whether civilized or wild or in some middle stage, have always been governed monarchically: “Rule by many is not good; one alone should be ruler, One alone king. — Iliad II How could it have been possible at all that everywhere and at all times we see many millions, indeed up to hundreds of millions of people as subjects willingly obeying a single man, even occasionally a woman or temporarily even a child, if there were no monarchical instinct in people, driving them to it as the appropriate form? For this has not happened out of reflection.9 Everywhere one man is king, and as a rule his majesty is hereditary. He is, so to speak, the personification or the monogram of the entire nation, which achieves individuality in him; in this sense he can even rightly say: “I am the state”

„Everywhere and at all times there has been a lot of dissatisfaction with governments, laws and public institutions, but for the most part only because people are always ready to heap on them the burden of misery that clings inseparably to human existence itself, insofar as, mythically speaking, it is the curse acquired by Adam and along with him by the whole race. Nevertheless, this false delusion has never been made in a more mendacious and impudent manner than by the demagogues of the ‘time of now’.a For as enemies of Christianity they are optimists; to them the world is an ‘end in itself’,b and therefore in itself, i.e., according to its natural constitution, is quite exquisitely arranged, a veritable abode of bliss. On the other hand, the howling, colossal evils of the world they ascribe entirely to governments; if only governments did their part, then heaven would exist on earth, i.e., everyone would just gorge, guzzle, propagate and croak without effort and distress; for this is the paraphrase of their ‘end in itself’ and the goal of the ‘infinite progress of mankind’, which they tirelessly proclaim in pompous phrases.”

„It is also quite natural that he has more trust in those whose ancestors were most often the first servants and always the familiar environment of his own ancestors.”

„Of course character is inherited from the father, as my readers know. It is narrow-minded and ridiculous not to try to establish whose son a man is.”

„All women, with rare exceptions, are inclined to be wasteful, therefore every existing fortune, with the exception of rare cases where they have amassed it themselves, must be protected from their foolishness.”

„I am of the opinion that in a court of law the testimony of a woman, all things being equal,c should have less weight than that of a man, so that for instance two male witnesses would balance out perhaps three or even four female. “For I believe that the female 278 sex, taken en masse, daily releases three times as many lies into the atmosphere than the male, and does so with a semblance of veracity and sincerity never achieved by the male.”

„Would it not be better if there were no days off at all, but instead as many more hours off? How beneficently these sixteen hours of the boring and therefore dangerous Sunday would affect us, if twelve of them were distributed throughout all the days of the week! Sunday would always have enough time for religious worship with two hours, and more are hardly ever devoted to it, even less to pious meditation. The ancients did not have a weekly day of rest either. But of course it would be very difficult to actually preserve the two daily hours of leisure set aside for the people in this manner, and to protect them from interference.”

„Numbers 13 ff. along with Deuteronomy 2 give us an instructive example of the process of the gradual population of the earth, namely how migrating, mobile hordes attempted to displace already settled peoples who possessed good land. The most recent step in this direction was the migration of peoples to or better yet the conquest of, America, indeed, the continuing driving back of American natives, also those in Australia. The role of the Jews in their settling in the promised land and the Romans in theirs in Italy is essentially the same, namely peoples who immigrated, constantly waged war on their neighbours who were there previously and finally subjected them. Only the Romans advanced this incomparably further than the Jews.”

„it is a highly superficial and false view to regard the Jews merely as a religious sect. But if for the purpose of advancing this error Judaism is referred to as the ‘Jewish confession’, borrowing a phrase from the Christian Church, then this is a fundamentally false expression deliberately designed to mislead, and it should not be permitted. On the contrary, ‘Jewish nation’ is the right expression. The Jews have no confession at all; monotheism belongs to their nationality and state constitution and with them it goes without saying. Indeed, properly understood monotheism and Judaism are interchangeable expressions.”

„There is no affair where religion intrudes as directly and obviously into practical and material life as with oaths.”

„If in the course of daily interactions one were asked by one of the many people who wish to know everything but do not want to learn anything, about the continuation of life after death, certainly the most suitable and above all the most correct answer would be: “After your death you will be what you were before your birth.”

„No individual is suited to eternal life, he perishes in death. Yet we lose nothing by this. For a completely different existence underlies individual existence, whose manifestation the latter is. This different existence knows neither time nor duration nor destruction”

„Everyone feels that he is something different than a being once created out of nothing by another. From this the certainty arises for him that death may indeed make an end to his life, but not to his existence.”

„Whoever were to think that his existence is limited to his present life considers himself to be an animated nothing, since he was nothing thirty years ago and thirty years from now will again be nothing”

„The present has two halves, one objective and one subjective. Only the objective has the intuition of time as its form and so it rolls on undeterred; the subjective stands firm and is therefore always the same. From this arise our vivid recollection of the remote past and the consciousness of our immortality, in spite of our knowledge of the transience of our existence.My opening proposition ‘the world is my representation’ next results in ‘first I am, and then the world’. We should embrace this as an antidote against confusing death with annihilation.Everyone should think that his innermost core is something that contains the present and carries it around with it. At whatever time we might live, we always stand with our consciousness in the centre of time, never at its endpoints, and we could infer from this that everyone bears the immovable nucleus of the whole of infinite time within himself. This basically is also what gives him the confidence with which he lives out his life without constant dread of death. But now whoever is able to recall the remote past of his own lifetime most vividly, by virtue of the strength of his memory and imagination, will be more clearly conscious than others of the identity of the now in all time. Perhaps this proposition has even greater validity when stated conversely. In any case, however, such a clearer consciousness of the identity of all now is an essential requirement for a philosophical disposition. By means of it one grasps what is most transitory of all, the now, as the only thing that persists. Now whoever realizes in such an intuitive manner that the present, which in the narrowest sense is the sole form of all reality, has its source in us and therefore flows from within, not from without, cannot doubt the indestructibility of his own being. On the contrary he will comprehend that with his death the objective world with the medium of its presentation, the intellect, will indeed perish for him, but this does not harm his existence, for there was just as much reality within as without. He will say with full understanding: ‘I am all that was and is and will be.’a (See Stobaeus, Anthology,b tit. 44, 42; vol. 2, p. 201.)10 Whoever denies the validity of all this must assert the contrary and say: “Time is something purely objective and real that exists entirely independent of me. I am only thrown into it accidentally, have taken possession of a small part of it and thereby achieved a temporary reality, like thousands of others before me who no longer are anything, and I too will very soon be nothing. Time on the other hand is what is real; it then marches on without 290 me.”

„that we simply cannot imagine a not unconscious statec other than as a cognizing one which consequently carries in itself the basic form of all cognition, the separation into subject and object, into something that cognizes and something that is cognized. Only we have to consider that this entire form of cognition and being cognized is merely conditioned by our animal nature and consequently by a very secondary and derived nature, and therefore it is in no way the primal state of all essentialitye and all existence, which may be of quite a different kind and yet not unconscious. After all, even our own present essence, as far as we are able to pursue it internally, is mere will, and the latter in itself is already something without cognition.”

„Perhaps everyone from time to time will be able to sense a consciousness deep down that in fact a quite different kind of existence would suit him better and that he is more entitled to it than this unspeakably shabby, temporal, individual existence preoccupied with nothing but misery. At such times he will then think that death could lead him back to it.”

„that we should survive death in some sense is no greater wonder than procreation, which we have before our eyes every day. What dies goes back to where all life comes from, its own as well.”

„all beings living in this moment contain the kernel of all that will live in the future, and therefore are to a certain extent already here. At the same time, every animal standing before us in the prime of life seems to call out to us: “Why are you complaining about the transitoriness of living things? How could I exist if all those of my species who existed before me had not died?”

„every human being can be regarded from two opposed points of view. In the first he is the temporarily beginning and ending individual, transitory and rushing by, ‘the dream of a shadow’,b moreover sorely afflicted with errors and pains; in the second he is the indestructible primal essencec objectifying itself in every existing thing and as such able to say, like the statue of Isis at Sais: ‘I am all that was and is and will be’.”

„For us death is and remains something negative, the cessation of life, only it must also have a positive side that nonetheless remains hidden from us because our intellect is absolutely incapable of grasping it. Hence we know well what we lose through death, but not what we gain through it. –The loss of the intellect through death suffered by the will, which is the kernel of the appearance that perishes here and is indestructible as thing in itself, is the Lethe of just this individual will, without which it would recollect the many appearances whose kernel it has already been. –When someone dies, he should throw away his individuality like an old garment, and be glad of his new and better one, which he will now receive in exchange for it after receiving instructions. –If one were to accuse the World Spirit of annihilating individuals after a brief existence, it would say: “Just look at them, these individuals, look at their faults, their ridiculous, bad and loathsome qualities! I am supposed to let them last forever?”

„Instead of spending half a miracle on ceaselessly making new people and destroying the ones already living, why do you not simply, once and for all, leave it at the existing ones and allow them to continue to exist for all eternity?”

„They themselves always want to make new ones, so I must provide room for them. Indeed, if only that were not the case! – Although, just between us, a race that continued to live on and carry on in this manner, without a further goal than just existing, would be objectively and subjectively tedious – much more so than you can imagine. Just picture it to yourself!”

„Well now, they could accomplish something, in any number of ways.”

„Answering transcendent questions in the language created for immanent cognition can indeed lead to contradictions.”

„You, as an individual, end with your death. Only the individual is not your true and ultimate essence, but instead a mere expression of it; it is not the thing in itself, but only its appearance which manifests in the form of time and accordingly has a beginning and an end. Your essence in itself, on the other hand, knows neither time, nor beginning, nor end, nor the bounds of a given individuality, which is why it cannot be excluded from any individuality, but exists in everyone and everything. Therefore in the first sense you become nothing through your death; in the second you are and remain everything.”

„Suppose I guaranteed you the continuation of your individuality, but added the condition that before reawakening from it, a completely unconscious death sleep of three months would precede.Thrasymachus: That could be agreed on.Philalethes: But since we have no measure of time at all in a completely unconscious state, it is all the same to us whether three months or ten thousand years passed in the conscious world, while we were lying in that death sleep, for we would have to accept the one as well as the other on faith and trust on awakening. Accordingly it should be indifferent to you whether your individuality is given back to your after three months or after ten thousand years”

„I, I, I want existence! That is what I care about, and not about some existence for which I first have to figure out that it is mine.Philalethes: But just look around you! That which cries out “I, I, I want existence”

„This nothingnessa finds its expression in the entire form of existence; in the infinity of time and space, as opposed to the finitude of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole mode of reality’s existence; in the dependence and relativity of all things; in constant becoming without being; in constant desire without satisfaction; in the constant obstruction of dying, of which life consists until the obstruction is overcome. Time and the transitoriness of all things in it and by means of it are merely the form under which the nothingness of its own striving is revealed to the will to life, which is intransitory as thing in itself. – Time is that by virtue of which everything at every moment turns to nothing in our hands, whereby it loses all true value”

„What has been, that is no more; it exists no more than that which has never been. But everything that is, in the next moment has already been. Therefore the most insignificant present has the advantage of reality over the most significant past, whereby it relates to the former as something to nothing. –All of a sudden, to one’s astonishment, one exists after not having been for countless millennia, and after a brief period, one must not be again for the same length of time. – This can never be right, says the heart; and even a crude mind has to have an inkling of the ideality of time from considerations 302 of this kind. But this, along with the ideality of space, is the key to all true metaphysics, because through it room is made for an entirely different order of things than nature. This is why Kant is so great. Every event of our life belongs only for a moment to the Is, then forever to the Was. Each evening we are poorer by one day. Perhaps we would go insane watching the brief span of our time running out, if not for a mysterious awareness lying deep at the bottom of our beinga that the never to be exhausted fountain of eternity belongs to us, in order to enable us to refresh the period of life forever. On considerations such as those above one can indeed establish the doctrine that it is the greatest wisdom to enjoy the present and make this the purpose of one’s life, because after all the present alone is real and everything else is just thought-play. But one could just as well call it the greatest folly, for what no longer is a moment later, what vanishes as completely as a dream is never worthy of serious effort.”

„Our existence has no other ground or bottom to stand on than the fleeting present. Therefore it essentially has constant motion as its form, without the possibility of the rest for which we constantly strive. It resembles the pace of someone running down hill, who would have to fall if he tried to stop and only stays on his feet by running further; likewise the stick balanced on one’s finger tips, or the planet that would fall into its sun as soon as it ceased to hurtle forward irresistibly. – Thus unrest is the prototype of existence. In such a world, where there is no possibility of any kind of stability, no permanent state, but instead everything is caught up in restless turmoil and transformation, and everything hurries, flies to maintain its balance on the tightrope through constant advancing and moving on – in such a world happiness cannot even be conceived of. It cannot dwell where only Plato’s ‘constant becoming and never being’ occurs. First of all, no one is happy, 303 but strives his whole life for a purported happiness which he seldom achieves and even then only to be disappointed; as a rule though, in the end everyone returns to port shipwrecked and mastless.c However, then it is all the same whether he has been happy or unhappy in a life which has consisted merely of the fleeting present and is now over. Meanwhile one has to wonder how, in the human and animal worlds, that great, manifold and restless motion is produced and kept going by the two simple incentives of hunger and sex drive,d which are at best aided a bit by boredom, and how these are capable of playing the role of the first movera of such a complicated machine that moves the motley puppet show.But if we examine the matter more closely, then we see first of all how the existence of the inorganic is under attack at every moment and ultimately wiped out by chemical forces; that of the organic, on the other hand, is only made possible by the constant change of matter which requires continuous influx and therefore assistance from outside. Already in its own right, then, organic life resembles the stick balanced on the hand, which must always be moved and is therefore a constant need, an eternally recurring lack and endless distress. Nevertheless, it is only by means of this organic life that consciousness is possible. All this accordingly is finite existence, whose opposite would be conceived as infinite, neither exposed to attack from outside nor requiring assistance from outside; therefore something that ‘always is in like manner’,b in eternal rest, ‘neither becoming nor passing away’,c without change, without time, without multiplicity and diversity – negative cognition of which is the keynote of Plato’s philosophy. Such an existence must be that to which the negation of the will to life opens the way.”

„The scenes of our lives resemble the pictures in a crude mosaic, which have no effect up close but from which one must stand far away in order to find them beautiful. Therefore to achieve something that has been longed for is to discover that it is vain, and if we always live in the expectation of something better, often it is simultaneously in remorseful yearning for what has passed. On the other hand the present is only casually accepted for the time being and valued as nothing more than the path to the goal. This is why most people, when they look back at the end, find that they have lived their whole life through provisionally, and are amazed to see that what they allowed to pass by so unappreciated and unenjoyed was their very life, the very thing in whose expectation they lived. And so the course of one’s life, as a rule, is such that, made a fool of by hope, one dances into the arms of death. But now, on top of this, there is the insatiability of the individual will, by virtue of which every satisfaction produces a new desire and its yearning, eternally insatiable, stretches to eternity! At bottom, however, it rests on the fact that the will taken in itself is the ruler of worlds to whom everything belongs, who therefore cannot find satisfaction in a mere portion but only in the whole, which however is infinite. – Meanwhile, how it must arouse our compassion when we observe how precious little this ruler of the world gains in its individual appearance; usually only just as much as suffices to maintain the individual body. Hence its profound suffering.”

„In the present period, spiritually impotent and characterized by the worship of every species of baseness, and quite appropriately characterized by the self- fabricated word ‘time of now’a which is as pretentious as it is cacophonous, as though their Now were the Now par excellence,b the Now for whose sake alone all other Nows have existed – in this period not even the pantheists are ashamed to say that life is, as they call it, an ‘end in itself’.c – If this our existence were the ultimate goal of the world, then this would be the silliest goal every posited, whether we ourselves or another posited it. –Life poses itself primarily as a task, namely that of preserving it, of making a living. Once this is solved, then the gain becomes a burden and the second task arises of how to deal with our living, specifically to ward off 305 the boredom that falls upon every secure life in the manner of a lurking bird of prey. Thus the first task is to gain something, and the second is to numb ourselves against it once we have gained it, since it is a burden otherwise. – If one tries to capture the totality of the human world in a single glance, then one sees everywhere a restless struggle, a powerful wrestling for life and existence through the exertion of all bodily and mental powers in the face of all kinds of dangers and evils threatening and striking at any moment. And if one regards the prize at stake for all this, existence and life itself, then one finds a few intervals of painless existence which are immediately attacked by boredom and quickly brought to an end by new distress.4That behind distress immediately lies boredom, which even afflicts the smarter animals, is a result of the fact that life has no true genuine substance to it,a but instead is merely kept in motion by need and illusion; but as soon as it stalls, the utter desolation and emptiness of existence come to light.5 –That human existence must be a kind of mistake emerges sufficiently from the simple observation that a human being is a concretion of needs whose satisfaction, difficult as it is to achieve, provides him with nothing more than a painless state in which he is still abandoned to boredom, which simply proves that existence in itself has no value, for boredom is precisely the sensation of the emptiness of existence. If life, in the craving for which our essence and existence consist, had a positive value and real substance in itself, then there could be no boredom; instead, mere existence in itself would have to fulfil and satisfy us. Now however we cannot enjoy our existence except either through striving, where the distance and obstacles portray the goal to us as satisfying – an illusion that vanishes after it is reached – or in a purely intellectual activity in which, however, we actually step out of life in order to observe it from the outside, like viewers in theatre boxes. Even sensual pleasure itself consists of a continuous striving and 306 ceases as soon as its goal is reached. Thus whenever we are not involved in one of these two circumstances, but are instead reduced to existence itself, we are transported by its lack of substance and its nothingness – and that is boredom. – Even our inherent and ineradicable, greedy snatching for miraculous things reveals how eagerly we would like to see the very boring, natural order of the course of things interrupted. – Even the splendour and magnificence of the great in their pomp and celebrations is at bottom nothing but a vain effort to transcend the essential wretchedness of our existence. After all, when exposed to the light of day, what are gemstones, pearls, feathers, red velvet by candlelight, dancers, acrobats, masks and costumes and so on? – No human being has ever felt completely happy in the present, unless he had been drunk.”

„What a difference there is indeed between our beginning and our end! The former in the delirium of craving and the rapture of lust, the latter in the destruction of all organs and the musty odour of corpses. The path between these two also goes steadily downhill with respect to well-being and enjoying life. Blissfully dreaming childhood, cheerful youth, toilsome manhood, frail, often pitiful old age, the torments of final illness and finally the struggle with death – does it not look exactly as if existence were a blunder whose consequences inevitably and increasingly become apparent?”

„Our life is microscopic in kind; it is an indivisible point drawn apart by the two strong lenses of space and time and therefore we view it in highly surveyable magnification. –Time is a contrivance in our brain for giving the thoroughly vain existence of things and our self a semblance of reality by means of duration. – How foolish it is to regret and lament that in the past the opportunity for this or that happiness or pleasure was not taken!”

„If sufferinga is not the closest and most immediate goal of our life, then our existence is the most inexpedient thing in the world. For it is absurd to assume that endless pain, which springs from the distress that is essential to life and of which the world is everywhere full, should be pointless and purely accidental. Our sensitivity for pain is almost infinite, while that for pleasure has narrow limits. Each individual misfortune appears to be an exception, to be sure, but misfortune generally is the rule.”

„Just as the brook makes no eddy as long as it encounters no obstacles, so too human as well as animal nature entail that we do not properly notice and realise everything that goes in accordance with our will. If we were to notice it, then it must not have immediately gone in accordance with our will, but must have met with some obstacle. – On the other hand, we sense directly, immediately and very clearly everything that opposes, crosses and resists our will, therefore all that is unpleasant and painful. Just as we do not feel the health of our entire body but only the small place where the shoe pinches, so too we do not think of the totality of our well-functioning affairs, but of some insignificant trifle that annoys us. – On this rests the negativity of well-being and happiness, frequently emphasised by me, as opposed to the positivity of pain. Accordingly I know of no greater absurdity than that of most metaphysical systems which declare evil to be something negative, whereas it is precisely the positive that is making itself felt. On the other hand, the good, i.e., all happiness and satisfaction, is the negative, that is, the mere suspending of desire and ceasing of a pain. What is also consistent with this is that as a rule we find joys far below but pains far above our expectation. –”

„Nevertheless, just as our body would have to burst apart if the pressure of the atmosphere were removed from it, so too if the pressure of distress, toil, repulsiveness and the frustration of effort were removed from the life of human beings, then their insolence would rise if not to the point of bursting, then certainly to the point of manifesting the most unbridled folly, even raving madness. – In fact, everyone at all times needs a certain quantum of care, or pain, or distress, as a ship needs ballast in order to move steadily and in a straight line.”

„the happiness of a given course of life is not to be evaluated according to its joys and pleasures, but instead according to the absence of suffering, of the positive.”

„in animals the suffering of the present always remains, just as it is the first time, the suffering of the present, even if it recurs innumerable times in succession, and it cannot be added up. Hence the enviable carelessness and peace of mind of animals. On the other hand, in a human being, by means of reflection and what is connected with it, there develops out of those very elements of pleasure and suffering which animals have in common with humans an intensification of the sensation of his happiness and unhappiness; this can lead to momentary, occasionally even fatal ecstasy or to desperate suicide. On closer examination the course of events is as follows. He deliberately intensifies his needs, which originally are only a bit harder to satisfy than those of an animal, for the sake of intensifying pleasure; hence luxury, delicacies, tobacco, opium, spirit liquor, pomp and all that goes along with it. Then likewise as a result of reflection there is added a spring of pleasures flowing exclusively for him, and consequently of suffering as well, which force him to cope beyond all measure, indeed, almost more than all the others put together, namely ambition, and the sense of honour and shame – stated plainly, his opinion of the opinion of others about him. In thousand-fold and often strange forms, this now 313 becomes the goal of almost all of his efforts that go beyond physical pleasure or pain. Of course he still has the advantage over animals of real intellectual pleasures, which allow for many gradations indeed, from the silliest horse-play or even conversation to the highest intellectual achievements; but as a counterweight to this, on the side of suffering, boredom appears in him, which is not known by animals, at least in their natural state, but is sensed only by the very smartest domesticated animals in slight bouts. In humans, on the other hand, this turns into a real scourge, as can be seen in particular in that host of wretches who have always been intent on filling their wallet, but never their mind, and for whom now their very wealth becomes a punishment, delivering them into the hands of tormenting boredom. In order to escape it they try everything, running, creeping and travelling around, and scarcely arrived, they anxiously inquire everywhere about the night clubs of the place, just as the needy man inquires about its sources of aid. For truly, distress and boredom are the two poles of human life.”

„what someone enjoys in advance by hoping for and expecting gratification, afterwards detracts from the actual enjoyment of it, inasmuch as the thing itself then satisfies that much less. An animal on the other hand remains free from pleasure in advance as well as from this deduction of pleasure, and accordingly enjoys, entirely and undiminished, what is actually present and real. And likewise even evils press on an animal merely with their actual and own weight, whereas for us fear and foresight, the dread of evil,a are often multiplied tenfold. Precisely this total absorption in the present, unique to animals, contributes much to the joy we have in our domestic pets; they are the personified present and render palpable to us, in a sense, the value of each unburdened and undarkened hour, whereas we with our thoughts usually transcend it and leave it unnoticed. But this aforementioned quality of animals to be satisfied by mere existence more than we are, is abused by egoistic and heartless human beings and often exploited to such a great extent that we allow them nothing, but nothing at all besides mere bare existence. The bird that is organized to wander through half the world we imprison in the space of a single cubic foot, where it slowly pines itself to death and cries, for The bird in the cageSings not from pleasure, but from rage and man’s most loyal friend, the very intelligent dog, he puts upon a chain! I can never look at such a dog without heartfelt compassion for it and deep indignation for its master, and with gratification I think of the case reported a few years ago by The Times, of a certain Lord who kept a large dog on a chain. Once, strolling through his yard, he could not resist the urge to pet the dog, whereupon it immediately tore open his arm from top to bottom – justifiably! It was trying to say: “You are not my master, but 316 my devil, who makes my brief existence into a hell.”

„One can also conceive of our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful calm of nothingness.”

„No one is to be greatly envied, countless are to be greatly lamented. –Life is a chore to be worked off; in this sense defunctusa is a nice expression.13 – One should try to imagine that the act of procreation were neither a need, nor accompanied by sexual pleasure, but instead a matter of pure, rational reflection; could the human race even continue to exist? Would 319 not everyone, on the contrary, have so much compassion for the coming generation that he would rather spare it the burden of existence, or at least refuse to take it upon himself to cold-bloodedly impose it on them? –The world is simply hell, and human beings are on the one hand its tortured souls and on the other hand its devils. Now I suppose I will have to hear again that my philosophy is disconsolate,b just because I speak according to the truth, but the people want to hear that God the Lord has done everything right. Go to church and leave the philosophers in peace! At least do not demand that they arrange their doctrines according to your training and background; that is what the scoundrels do, the philosophasters – from them you can order whatever doctrines you like.”

„To the Greeks the world and gods were the work of an unfathomable necessity; this is tolerable inasmuch as it satisfies us temporarily. – Ormuzd lives in battle with Ahriman – this sounds plausible enough.a But a God such as Jehovah, who wantonly and for pleasureb creates this world of distress and misery and then even applauds himself with ‘everything was very good’c – that is unbearable.”

„Nothing can be more effective for patience in life and for casually enduring evils and people than a Buddhist reminder of this kind: ‘This is Samsara, the world of lust and craving, and therefore the world of birth, illness, ageing and dying; it is the world that should not be. And this here is the population of Samsara. So what better can you expect?’ I would like to prescribe that everyone repeat this four times daily, conscious of what he is saying.”

„Humanity is full of so many and such great miseries that, if it were not contrary to Christian religion, I would dare to say: If there were demons, then they pay the penalty for their crimes while in the bodies of human beings.”

„De admirandis naturae arcanis”

„The character of things of this world, namely the human world, is not so much imperfection, as is often claimed, but rather distortion in things moral, intellectual, physical, in everything. The occasionally heard excuse for many a vice: ‘and yet it is natural for human beings’, in no way suffices; instead, one should counter with: ‘precisely because it is bad, it is natural, and precisely because it is natural, it is bad’. – In order to understand this properly one must have learned the meaning of the doctrine of original sin. – In judging a human individual one should always embrace the point of view that his basisa is something that should not at all exist, something sinful, wrong, that which is meant by the term original sin, that for which he is doomed to die; this same bad fundamental property is characterized by the fact that no one can endure close scrutiny. What can be expected of such a being? If one proceeds on this basis, then one will judge him leniently, and will not be surprised when the devils hiding in him begin to show, and will better appreciate the goodness that has made its way into him despite everything, be it as a result of intellect or some other source. – 324 Secondly, one should also be mindful of one’s situation and seriously consider that life is essentially a state of distress and often of misery, where everyone has to struggle and fight for his existence and therefore cannot always put on a happy face. – If, on the contrary, the human being were in fact that which all optimistic religions and philosophies make him out to be, namely the work or even the incarnation of a God, or generally a being that in every sense ought to exist and to be exactly as he is – then how different would be the effect of our first sight of any human being, and our closer acquaintance and continued relationship with him, than is the case now! Pardon is the word to all᾽ (Shakespeare, Cymbeline, Act 5, scene 5). We should be indulgent towards every human folly, failing and vice, mindful that what we have before us here are only our own follies, failings and vices. After all, these are just the failings of mankind, to which we too belong, and accordingly all of its failings are in us, including those that fill us with indignation right now simply because they do not manifest themselves in us at this precise moment. They are not on the surface, to be sure, but they are lying down on the bottom and at the first opportunity they will show themselves, just as we see them now in someone else; and this even though one failing might be prominent in one man, and a different failing in another, or even when it cannot be denied that the total measure of all bad qualities in one man is much greater than in another. For the difference in individualities is incalculably great.”

„As far as I can tell, it is only the monotheistic, which is to say, Jewish religions whose confessors regard suicide as a crime. This is all the more notable since neither in the Old nor the New Testament can we find any kind of prohibition or even a mere firm disapproval of it, which is why the teachers of religion have to base their taboo against suicide on their own philosophical grounds. Meanwhile, these grounds are so shaky that they seek to compensate for the lack of strength of their arguments by the strength of expression of their horror, hence through verbal abuse. And so we have to hear that suicide is the greatest cowardice, or is only possible in madness, and further absurdities of this kind; or even the totally senseless phrase that suicide is ‘wrong’, even though quite obviously there is nothing in the world to which everyone has such an indisputable right as his own person and life.”

„When in heavy, terrifying dreams anxiety reaches its highest point, then by itself it will awaken us, causing all those nocturnal monsters to disappear. The same happens in the dream of life when the highest degree of anxiety compels us to break it off.”

„have we not noticed how immediately after coitus one hears 336 the pealing laughter of the devil?a which, seriously speaking, is based on the fact that sexual lust is the quintessence of the whole fraud of this noble world, especially when it is concentrated into falling in love through fixation on a particular woman. For it promises so unspeakably, infinitely and extravagantly much and then delivers so pitifully little.”

„Suicide can also be regarded as an experiment, a question one poses to nature and to which one tries to force an answer, namely what change in the existence and cognition of human beings is experienced through death. But it is a clumsy one, since it suspends the identity of the consciousness that would have to hear the answer.”

„A noble character will not readily complain about his own fate; instead, what applies to him is what Hamlet eulogizes in Horatio: for thou hast beenAs one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing. And this is to be understood from the fact that such a man, recognizing his own essence even in others and therefore sharing their fate, almost always sees around him still harsher lots than his own, which is why he cannot bring himself to complain of his. On the other hand an ignoble egoist who limits all reality to himself and regards others as mere masks and phantasms does not share in their fate, but will focus his entire sympathy on his own, therefore resulting in great sensitivity and frequent complaining.”

„A genuine monk is an extremely venerable being, but in most cases by far the cowl is a mere mask behind which there is no more a real monk than at a masquerade.”

„For the negation of one’s own will, the ideac that one is submitting and surrendering oneself totally and without reserve to a foreign, individual will is a psychic palliative, and therefore an appropriate allegorical vehicle of the truth.”

„The number of regular Trappists is small, to be sure, but on the other hand probably half of mankind consists of involuntary Trappists; poverty, obedience, lack of all pleasures, indeed, of the most necessary means of comfort, and often chastity that is forced on them or brought about by deficiency, are their lot. The difference is merely that the Trappists practise all this by free choice, methodically and without hoping for improvement, whereas the other means is to be counted among what I characterized with the expression deuteros plousa in my ascetic chapters.”

„Then old age and experience, hand in hand, Lead him to death and make him understand, After a search so painful and so long, That all his life he has been in the wrong. This accords entirely with my world view, which regards existence itself as something that should not be, as a kind of going astray from which our knowledge of the same is supposed to bring us back.”

„A happy lifee is impossible; the best a human being can attain is a heroic course of life. Such a life is led by one who, in some way and for some cause, fights against overwhelming odds for something that benefits everyone, and in the end he wins, though he will be poorly rewarded or not at all.”

„the needs of the people must be met according to the measure of their power of comprehension. Religion is the only means of proclaiming and rendering palpable the lofty meaning of life to the crude mind and clumsy understanding of the masses, who are deeply sunk in lowly toil and material labour. For mankind, as they normally are, originally have a mind for nothing other than the gratification of their physical needs and desires, and after that for a bit of entertainment and fun. Founders of religion and 344 philosophers come into the world to shake them out of their lethargy and to point out the lofty meaning of existence; philosophers for the few, the exempt; founders of religion for the many, for humanity on a large scale. For ‘it is impossible for the broad masses to be philosophically educated’,a as even your Plato said, and you should not forget. Religion is the metaphysics of the people,b which we must absolutely allow them and therefore outwardly respect; for to discredit it means to deprive them of it. Just as there is a folk poetry and in proverbs a folk wisdom, so too there must be a folk metaphysics. For mankind absolutely requires an interpretationc of life, and it must be suited to their power of comprehension. This is why it is always an allegorical cloak for the truth and in the context of practice and comfort, i.e., as a guide to conduct and as consolation in suffering and death, it accomplishes perhaps just as much as truth itself could, if we possessed it. Do not be offended by its muddled, baroque and seemingly contradictory form, for you with your education and learnedness cannot imagine the detours that are necessary to get through to the brutal people with profound truths. The various religions are simply different schemata in which the people grasp and visualize the truth that in itself is incomprehensible to them, yet becomes inseparable from the schemata for them. Therefore, my friend, do not take offence, but to mock religion is both narrow-minded and unfair.”

„the religions unabashedly appeal not to conviction, using reasons, but to faith, using revelation. Now for the latter our capacity is strongest in childhood, therefore the aim is above all to take control of this tender age. By these means, much more so than by threats and accounts of miracles, the doctrines of faith take root.”

„only childhood and not manhood is the time to sow the seeds of faith, especially where an earlier one has already taken root. But the acquired conviction which is claimed by the adult converts is, as a rule, only the mask of some personal interest. Precisely 348 because it is felt that this could hardly be otherwise, wherever someone changes his religion at a mature age he is despised by most people, although by doing this the people reveal that they regard religion not as a matter of rational conviction, but instead merely as the faith inoculated early and before all testing.”

„no matter where they are born, everyone has certain claims inculcated in him from earliest youth”

„during the whole era of Christianity theism lies like an oppressive nightmare on all intellectual and especially philosophical efforts, and inhibits or cripples any progress. The whole of nature is concealed from scholars in those times by God, devils, angels and demons; no investigation is carried out to the end, no matter is plumbed to its depth, instead everything that transcends the most obvious causal nexus is promptly laid to rest by those personalities, being summarily explained as Pomponatius expressed it on such an occasion: ‘Certainly the philosophers have nothing probable to offer on this matter, therefore it is necessary to resort to God, angels and demons’a (On Incantations,b ch. 7). Of course on this issue one may suspect this man of irony, since his tricks are known in others matters, yet with this he has merely articulated the general way of thinking of his age.”

„In the whole of antiquity there is no trace of an obligation to believe in any dogma. Only someone who publicly denied the existence of the gods or otherwise disparaged them was punishable, for he offended the state that served them; but apart from that it was left to everyone to think what they liked about it. “If someone preferred to court the favour of the gods privately, through prayer and sacrifice, then this was open to him at his own cost and risk; if he did not do this, no one had anything against it, least 352 of all the state. Among the Romans everyone had their own lares and penates at home,e but these were basically only the venerated images of his ancestors. (Apuleius, On the god of Socrates,f ch. 15, vol. 2, p. 237, Bipont edition.)7 The ancients did not at all have a firm, clear notion of the immortality of the soul and a life after death, least of all a dogmatic one, but instead loose, fluctuating, indefinite and problematic ideas, each in his own way; and their ideas about the gods were just as varied, individual and vague. Thus the ancients really did not have religion in our sense of the word. But on that account did anarchy and lawlessness prevail among them? Are not law and civil order on the contrary so much their work that they even constitute the foundation of our own? Was property not totally secured, even though it even consisted for the most part of slaves? And did this state of affairs not last for over a millennium? –”

„religion is the truth expressed allegorically and mythically, and thereby rendered accessible and digestible to humanity as a whole; for we could never bear it pure and undiluted, just as we could not live in pure oxygen but require an admixture of four-fifths nitrogen.”

„mystery’ is basically only the theological technical termc for religious allegory. Also, all religions have their mysteries. In fact a mystery is an obviously absurd dogma which harbours a lofty truth that in itself is completely incomprehensible to the crude understanding of the brutish masses, who now accept it in this disguise on faith and trust, without becoming bewildered by the absurdity that is obvious even to them. This way they share in the kernel of the matter to the extent possible. As clarification I can add that even in philosophy the use of mystery has been attempted, for instance when Pascal, who was a Pietist, mathematician and philosopher at the same time, in his threefold capacity said: God is the centre everywhere and nowhere periphery. Malebranche too quite rightly observed: Freedom is a mystery.d – One could go farther and assert that in religions really everything is a mystery. For to teach people in their brutishness the truth in the literal sensee is simply impossible; only its mythical–allegorical reflection is their share and will enlighten them. The naked truth does not belong before the eyes of the profane mob; it can appear before them only heavily veiled.”

„In reality on the other hand myth and allegory are the actual element of religion, but under this unavoidable condition, because of the intellectual limitation of the great masses, it very nicely satisfies the ineradicable metaphysical need of mankind and takes the place of pure philosophical truth, which is infinitely difficult and perhaps never attainable. Philalethes: Oh yes, somewhat the way that a wooden leg takes the place of a natural one; it fills the space, even does its job in a makeshift way, pretending the while to be regarded as natural, is now more, now less artfully constructed and so on. One difference, on the other hand, is that normally a natural leg was there before the wooden one, whereas religion everywhere gained a head-start on philosophy. Demopheles: All that may be; but for someone who does not have a natural leg, a wooden one is of great value. You must bear in mind that the metaphysical need of mankind absolutely requires gratification, because the horizon of our thoughts must be closed, and must not remain unlimited. Now mankind does not as a rule have power of judgement, and the ability to weigh reasons and then decide between true and false; moreover the work imposed on him by nature and its distress leaves him no time for such investigations, nor for the education they require. Thus in his case there can be no talk of convictions from reasons, but instead he is dependent on faith and authority. Even if a real and true philosophy were to take the place of religion, still it would be taken only on authority by at least nine-tenths of people, thus becoming a matter of faith again; for Plato’s ‘it is impossible for the broad masses to be philosophically educated’a will always stand. Authority however is founded only on time and circumstances, which is why we cannot grant it to that which has nothing going for itself but reasons. Accordingly we have to leave it to whatever has obtained it over the course of history, even if it is only the allegorically represented truth.”

„there cannot be a single metaphysics for everyone; the natural difference in mental powers and the additional factor of their cultivation will never permit this to happen. The great majority of human beings must necessarily be subject to heavy manual labour, which is crucial for the production of the species’ endless needs. Not only does this leave no time for education, learning and reflection, but also, by virtue of the decisive antagonism between irritability and sensibility, this copious and strenuous manual labour dulls the spirit, makes it heavy, clumsy, awkward and therefore incapable of grasping anything but quite simple and palpable relationships. Now at least nine-tenths of the human race fall into this category.”

„Whoever would make judgements concerning religion should always bear in mind the composition of the great masses for whom it is intended, and visualize their entire moral and intellectual baseness.”

„Someone who is better educated may still interpret religion for himself with a pinch of salt,e the scholar and thinker may secretly exchange it for a philosophy. And yet here too one philosophy does not fit all, but instead each attracts that public whose education and mental powers are suited to it according to the laws of elective affinity. This is why at all times there is a low school metaphysics for the learned plebs, and a higher one for the elites.”

„Religions fill and rule the world, and the great masses of humanity obey them. Meanwhile the quiet succession of philosophers moves along slowly, working on the unravelling of the great mystery for the few who are capable by talent and education. On average each century will bring forth one; as soon as he is found to be genuine, he will always be greeted with jubilation and listened to attentively.”

„Even if personified metaphysics is its enemy, still personified morality will be its friend. Perhaps in all religions the metaphysical aspect is false, but the moral aspect is true in all of them; this can be surmised already from the fact that in the former they are only fighting each other, but in the latter they agree – Philalethes: Which furnishes a proof to the logical rule that a true conclusion can result from false premises. Demopheles: Then keep to the conclusion and always bear in mind that religion has two sides. If it could not properly stand when seen merely from the theoretical and thus intellectual side, then on the other hand it shows itself from the moral side to be the sole means of steering, restraining and consoling this race of reason-endowed beasts, whose kinship with the ape does not exclude that with the tiger. At the same time, as a rule, it is the adequate gratification of their dull metaphysical need.”

„Before we take something from someone, we should have something better to give in its place. Philalethes: If only I did not have to hear that over and over again! To free someone from an error does not mean taking something from him, but giving; for the recognitiona that something is false just happens to be a truth. But no error is harmless, and each one will sooner or later cause mischief for whoever harbours it. Therefore do not cheat anyone, but instead admit to not knowing what you do not know, and leave everyone alone to make their own articles of faith. Maybe they will not turn out so bad, especially since they will rub off on and mutually rectify one another; in any case the multiplicity of viewpoints will establish tolerance. But those who are endowed with knowledge and ability might turn to the study of philosophers, or they could even personally continue the history of philosophy.”

„peoples identify and differentiate themselves much more according to religions than to governments or even languages. Consequently, the edifice of society, the state, stands perfectly firm only when a universally embraced system of metaphysics serves as its foundation. Naturally such a system can only be a popular metaphysics, i.e., religion.”

„religions are like glow worms; they need darkness in order to shine. A certain degree of general ignorance is the condition of all religions, and the sole element in which they can live.”

„listen here to a passage from Condorcet’s Progress of the Human Mind,d which appears to be written as a warning to our time: ‘The religious zeal of philosophers and great men was only political piety; every religion that one undertakes to defend because it is useful to leave the people their faith can only count on a more or less prolonged death struggle’a (Epoch 5). In the whole course of the process described above you can always observe how faith and knowledge relate to one another like the two pans of a scale; to the degree that one rises, the other sinks.”

„Perhaps the point in time so often prophesied will soon arrive when it parts from European humanity like a nursemaid whose care the child has outgrown, and whose education must now be assumed by a tutor. For without doubt, religious doctrines based merely on authority, miracles and revelation are aids suited only for 368 the childhood of humanity. Still, everyone would admit that a race whose whole duration up till now does not amount to more than about a hundred times the life of a sixty-year-old man, according to the corroborated findings of all physical and historical data, is still in its early childhood.”

„A brutal human being must first kneel and learn veneration and obedience, only then is it possible to civilize him.”

„the purpose of Christianity generally is not so much to make this life pleasant, but on the contrary to make us worthy of a better one; it looks beyond this span of time, this fleeting dream, in order to guide us to eternal salvation.”

„It is indisputable that the ancients were less cruel when compared with the subsequent Christian centuries than the Middle Ages with their legendary tortures and countless burnings at the stake; moreover the ancients were very patient, were especially fond of justice, sacrificed themselves for the fatherland, displayed noble-minded features of every kind and such a genuine humanity that to this very day familiarity with their deeds and thinking is called humanities study.c Religious wars, religious massacres, crusades, inquisition along with other heretic trials, extermination of America’s native population and the introduction of African slaves in their place – these were the fruits of Christianity and nothing analogous or holding a candle to them can be found among the ancients; for the slaves of the ancients, the household servants and the servants born in the master’s house,d a contented race faithfully devoted to their master, are as different from the wretched Negroes of the sugar plantations, who are a disgrace to mankind, as are their respective colours. Of course the blameworthy tolerance of pederasty, which is the main charge against the morality of the ancients, is trivial compared with the above cited Christian atrocities, and even among moderns it has by far not become as rare as suggested by its diminished visibility.”

„If only a statistician could first report how many crimes are prevented annually by religious motives, and how many by others; the former will be very few indeed. For, if someone feels tempted to commit a crime, reliably the first thing opposing this thought is the punishment it carries and the probability of getting caught; then as a second concern comes consideration for the danger to his honour. If I am not mistaken he will ruminate for hours on these two obstacles before the religious considerations even occur to him. But once he gets beyond those two early defences against crime, I believe religion alone will quite rarely deter him. Demopheles: I, however, believe that it will very often do so, especially when its influence already works through the medium of habit, so that an individual immediately recoils from grave misdeeds. The early impression sticks. By way of explanation, think of how many especially among the nobility frequently fulfil their given promise at a heavy cost, determined solely by the fact that in childhood their father had often stressed sternly that ‘a man of honour, or a gentleman,a or a cavalier keeps his word always and absolutely’. Philalethes: Without a certain innate probityb that doesn’t work either. You can’t just ascribe to religion what is the result of innate goodness of character, by virtue of which his compassion for the victim prevents him from committing the crime. This is the genuine moral motive and as such it is independent of all religions.”

„we see in all ages and countries that the majority of people find it much easier to beg for heaven through prayers than to earn it through deeds”

„the demoralizing influence of religions is less problematic than the moralizing one”

„Think of the fanaticism, of the endless persecutions, then of the religious wars, this bloody madness which the ancients could not imagine; then think of the crusades, which were a two-hundred-year utterly irresponsible slaughter, under the battle cry ‘God wills it’, for the purpose of conquering the tomb of the one who had preached love and tolerance; think of the cruel expulsion and extermination of the Moors and Jews from Spain; think of the Parisian blood weddings,a the inquisitions and other trials of heretics, and also of the bloody and great conquests of the Mohammedans on three continents; but then also think of the Christians in America, whose inhabitants they exterminated for the most part, and in Cuba even completely. According to Las Casas twelve million people were murdered within forty years, understandably all ‘for the greater glory of God’,b and for the sake of spreading the Gospel and moreover because whoever was not a Christian was not considered human. I touched on these things earlier, to be sure, but when in our day the Neueste Nachrichten aus dem Reiche Gottes,23 are still printed, we do not ever want to tire of reminding people of the older news. In particular let us not forget India, this sacred ground, this cradle of 378 the human race or at least of the race to which we belong, where first Mohammedans and thereafter Christians raged most atrociously against the followers of the sacred proto-religion; and the ever- deplorable, wanton and cruel destruction and defacing of the most ancient temples and images which still display the traces of the monotheistic raging of the Mohammedans, as it was carried out from Mahmud of Ghazni, curse his memory, on down to Aurangzeb the fratricide, which the Portuguese afterwards strove faithfully to imitate both through the destruction of temples and through the autos-da-féa of the inquisition at Goa. Let us also not forget the chosen people of God who, after stealing the golden and silver vessels loaned to them by their old, trusting friends in Egypt, at the express and special command of Jehovah now made their murderous and plundering raid on the Promised Land,,24 with Moses the murderer leading the way.”

„Tacitus (Histories, Book V, ch. 2) and Justinus (Book XXXVI, ch. 2) have handed down the historical basis of the Exodus, which is as instructive as it is entertaining to read, and from which we can infer how matters stand regarding the historical basis of the remaining books of the Old Testament. We see there in the cited passage that the Pharaoh no longer wanted to tolerate the filthy Jewish people in clean Egypt, who had sneaked in afflicted with dirty diseases (scabies) that threatened to be infectious; he therefore had them loaded onto ships and dumped on the Arabian coast. It is accurate that a detachment of Egyptians was sent after them, yet not to bring back the precious fellows, who had been deported after all, but to recover from them what they had stolen; for they had indeed stolen golden vessels from the temples – who would have loaned anything to such rabble? – It is also true that said detachment was destroyed by a natural event. On the Arabian coast there was great scarcity, above all of water. Then a daring fellow came along and offered to procure everything if people would follow and obey him. He claimed he had seen wild asses and so on. – I regard this to be the historical foundation because it is obviously the prose on which the poetry of the Exodus was built. Even though Justinus (i.e., Pompeius Trogus) here commits a huge anachronism (i.e., according to our assumptions based on the Exodus), this does not bother me, for a hundred anachronisms are not as questionable to me as a single miracle. – We also see from the two Roman classicists cited how much the Jews were loathed and despised at all times and by all peoples; in part this may stem from the fact that they were the only people on earth who did not ascribe to mankind an existence beyond this life, and therefore they were regarded as cattle, as the dregs of humanity – but as great masters at lying. –”

„Spence Hardy in his excellent book Eastern Monachism,a p. 412, praises the extraordinary tolerance of Buddhists and adds the assurance that the annals of Buddhism provide fewer examples of religious persecution than any other religion. In fact intolerance is essential only to monotheism; a lone God is by his nature a jealous God who does not allow another to live. On the other hand polytheistic gods are tolerant by their nature; they live and let live, gladly tolerating first their colleagues, the gods of the same religion, and afterwards this tolerance extends as well to foreign gods, who accordingly are hospitably received and later sometimes even obtain the rights of citizens, as demonstrated above all in the example of the Romans who willingly received and honoured Phrygian, Egyptian and other foreign gods. Therefore it is the monotheistic religions alone that provide us with the spectacle of religious wars, religious persecutions and heretic trials, along with iconoclasm, and the effacing of the images of foreign gods, toppling of Indian temples and Egyptian colossi which had looked at the sun for over three thousand years, all because someone’s jealous God had 381 said: “Thou shalt make no graven image”

„As a science philosophy has absolutely nothing to do with what should or may be believed, but merely with what one can know.”

„he is still only a big child who could seriously believe that beings who were not human ever gave our species clues about our own existence and purpose and the world’s. There is no revelation other than the thoughts of the sages, even though these, in keeping with all things human, are subject to error, and are often cloaked in fantastical allegories and myths, where they are then called religions. To this extent therefore it is of no consequence whether someone lives and dies trusting in his own or in the thoughts of others, for they are always merely human thoughts in which he trusts, and human impressions. Nevertheless human beings as a rule have a weakness that would rather trust others who claim supernatural sources than trust their own minds. But now if we contemplate the exceedingly great intellectual disparity between one human being and another, then perhaps the thoughts of one could indeed appear to some extent as revelations to another.”

„What better thing could be given to the masses, who after all are incapable of directly grasping the truth, than a beautiful allegory that suffices perfectly as a guide for practical living and as an anchor of consolation and hope?”

„Yet the bad point of all religions always remains that they are not allowed to be openly allegorical but only in secret, and so they must propound their teachings in all earnestness as literally true, something that brings about continuous deception and is a great drawback due to the essentially required absurdities in them. Indeed, what is even worse is that with time it comes to light that they are not literally true, and then they perish.”

„Taken literally the dogma here becomes outrageous, because not only does it demand payment for the blunders, or even the unbelief, of a scarcely twenty- year-old life through eternal torments, by virtue of its punishment in eternal hell, 388 but moreover this almost universal damnation is actually the effect of original sin and therefore the necessary result of the first fall from grace. But this should in any case have been foreseen by the one who in the first place failed to create human beings better than they are, and who then set a trap for them in which he must have known they would end up, since all things together are his work and nothing remains hidden from him. On this reasoning he would have summoned a feeble, sin-prone species into existence out of nothing just to deliver it over to infinite torment.34 Finally, on top of this the God who prescribes forbearance and forgiveness of every trespass, to the point of loving one’s enemy, himself does not practise it but on the contrary succumbs to the opposite, since a punishment that ensues at the end of all things, when everything is done and over forever, can bring about neither improvement nor deterrence and therefore amounts to mere vengeance.35 But, regarded in this manner, it even seems in fact that the whole species was specifically determined and expressly created for eternal torment and damnation – with the exception of those few who are saved, one knows not why,36 by the election of grace.”

„Vanini: ‘If God did not want the worst and most despicable acts in the world to have their way, then without doubt he would expel and banish all infamous deeds from the borders of the world with a wave of his hand; for who of us can resist the divine will? How can one assume that crimes could be committed against God’s will, when after all he grants the power to the criminals during the execution of a sin? But if a human being offends without God willing it to be, then God is weaker than the human being who opposes him and has the power to do so. From this one concludes that God wants to have the world as it is, for if he wanted a better one, then he would have a better one.’e (Amphitheatre of the World, Exercise 16,f p. 104.) He had in fact said earlier on page 103: ‘If God wants sins, then he is the one who commits them; if he does not want them, then they are committed nevertheless. Consequently one must say of him that he is either improvident, or impotent, or cruel, since he either does not know how, or is not able or does not care to fulfil his decree.”

„But truly, if a High Asian were to ask me what Europe is, then I would have to answer him: It is that part of the world that is completely possessed of the unheard-of and incredible delusion that the birth of a human being is his absolute beginning and he was created from nothing. –”

„one cannot remove a pillar from a structure without endangering the whole thing.”

„Christianity has the peculiar disadvantage that unlike the other religions it is not a pure doctrine, but essentially and mainly it is a history,g a series of events, a complex of facts, deeds and sufferings of individual beings, and this very history constitutes the dogma in whose belief people gain salvation. Other religions, in particular Buddhism, have of course an historical supplement in the life of their founder, but this is not part of the dogma itself and merely accompanies it.”

„Humans are the devils of the earth, and 395 animals the tormented souls.”

„rabble can only be reached by force, or by religion;”

„Not mercy but justice is what we owe animals, and we still owe them for the most part, in Europe, this continent that is so permeated by the Jewish stenchc that the obvious simple truth ‘an animal is essentially the same as a human being’ is an offensive paradox.”

„In their exhortations the animal protection societies still use the bad argument that cruelty against animals leads to cruelty against human beings – as if only humans were the direct object of moral duty, and animals only an indirect one, in itself a mere thing! Ugh!”

„what should we expect from the rabble when there are scholars and even zoologists who, instead of acknowledging the identity of what is essential in both human beings and animals, which is so intimately known to them, instead are so bigoted and obtuse as to engage in polemics and zealotry against honest and reasonable colleagues who relegate humans to the appropriate animal class, or demonstrate the great similarity of chimpanzees and orang- utans to humans?”

„Today on the other hand every quack feels empowered to perform the cruellest animal torture in his torture chamber, in order to decide problems whose solution has long since been found in books, but which he is too lazy and ignorant to put his nose into. Our physicians no longer have the classical education of earlier times, which endowed them with a certain humanity and a noble air. Now they go to university as early as possible, where the only thing they want to learn is bandages and salves, in order to then prosper on earth.”

„First learn something, then join the dialogue. This incidentally applies to all fellows who write books that prove nothing but their ignorance.) Obviously this belongs to the preliminary knowledge someone should have before undertaking to conduct experimental investigations on the brain of human beings and animals. But of course it is easier to slowly torture poor animals to death than to learn something.”

„What in all the world did the poor, harmless rabbit do to deserve being caught in order to be sacrificed to the agony of slow death by starvation? No one has a right to vivisection who is not already familiar with everything that is available in books on the circumstances to be investigated, and knows it. Obviously it is time that the Jewish conception of nature in Europe came to an end, at least with respect to animals, and that the eternal essence that lives in us as in all animals should be acknowledged as such, treated with kindness, and respected. Know this, heed this! It is a serious matter and nothing will detract from it, even if you were to cover the whole of Europe with synagogues. Someone would have to be bereft of all his senses and completely chloroformed by the Jewish stench not to see that an animal is essentially, principally and absolutely the same as we are, and 399 that the difference lies in mere accident, in the intellect, not in the substance, which is the will. The world is not shoddy workmanshipa and the animals are not manufactured articles for our use. Those kinds of views should be left to the synagogues and the philosophical lecture halls, which in essence are not so very different. On the other hand, the above knowledge furnishes us with a handy rule for treating animals properly. I advise the zealots and the preachers not to object too much here, for this time not only truth but morality as well is on our side. The greatest benefit of the railway is that it spares millions of draft-horses a miserable existence. It is unfortunately true that human beings who were driven northwards and became white as a result require the flesh of animals, although there are vegetarians in England; then however the death of such animals must be made completely painless through chloroform and a swift blow to the lethal spot, and this certainly not out of ‘mercy’ as the Old Testament puts it, but out of our solemn duty towards the eternal essence that lives in all animals as in us. All animals to be slaughtered should first be chloroformed; this would be a noble procedure, one honouring mankind, in which the elevated science of the West and the elevated morality of the East would go hand in hand, since Brahmanism and Buddhism do not limit their precepts to ‘one’s neighbour’ but instead take ‘all living beings’ under their protection. Despite all Jewish mythology and intimidation by preachers, even in Europe the truth which is totally self-evident and immediate to every human being whose mind is not twisted and befogged by the Jewish stench, must finally come into its own and no longer be covered up, namely, that animals in the most important respect and essentiallyb are 400 entirely the same as we are, and that the difference lies merely in the degree of intelligence, i.e., in brain activity, which in itself likewise has room for big differences among the different species of animals.”

„Whether one fashions an idol from wood, stone, metal or pieces it together from abstract concepts is all the same: it remains idolatry as soon as we have before us a personal being to whom we sacrifice, whom we invoke, and whom we thank. Nor is it very different at bottom whether one sacrifices his sheep or his inclinations. Every ritual or prayer speaks irrefutably of idolatry. This is why the mystical sects of all religions agree on suspending all ritual for their adepts.”

„Buddha himself says: ‘Whoever does not know the truth will become enslaved to life and death through the turning of the wheel’.”

„It is also written in Prabodha Chandrodaya (Act IV, sc. 3): ‘Ignorance is the source of Passion, who turns the wheel of this mortal existence.”

„a real miracle would everywhere be a contradictionb posed by nature to itself”

„For the masses the only comprehensible arguments are miracles, therefore all founders of religion perform them.Scriptures contain miracles in order to authenticate their content, but the time comes when they have the opposite effect. –The gospels intended to support their credibility through accounts of miracles, but this is precisely how they undermined it. –The miracles in the Bible are supposed to prove its truth, but they have the opposite effect.Theologians sometimes attempt to allegorize miracles, sometimes to naturalize them, in order to get rid of them somehow, for they sense that miraculum sigillum mendacii [a miracle is the sign of a lie].”

„religion has only one truth as it is suited to the people, an indirect, symbolic and allegorical truth”

„Whoever wants to be a rationalist must be a philosopher and as such emancipate himself from all authority, move forward and quail before nothing. But if one wants to be a theologian, then let him be consistent and never abandon the foundation of authority, not even when it demands that he believe the incomprehensible. One cannot serve two masters, therefore either reason or scripture. The golden mean here amounts to falling between two stools: either believing or philosophizing! But believing up to a certain point and no further, and likewise philosophizing up to a certain point and no further – these are half measures, which constitute the fundamental character of rationalism. On the other hand the rationalists are morally justified insofar as they go to work quite honestly and only deceive themselves; whereas the supernaturalists, with their vindication of literal truthc for a mere allegory, quite certainly try most of the time to deceive others on purpose.”

„Physics and metaphysics are the natural enemies of religion, and this is why religion is their enemy, striving at all times to oppress them just as they strive to undermine it. It is totally ridiculous to speak of peace and harmony between the two; it is a war of life and death. Religions are the children of ignorance who do not survive their mother for long. Omar, Omar understood this when he burned the Alexandrian library; his reason was that the contents of the books were either contained in the Koran or were superfluous, and this is regarded as silly, but it is quite shrewd when understood with a pinch of salt, for then it means that when the sciences go beyond the Koran they are the enemies of religion and therefore not to be tolerated. It would be much better for Christianity if the Christian rulers had been as clever as Omar.”

„Knowledgee of every kind that increases daily and spreads more and more in every direction expands everyone’s horizon, according to his own sphere, to such an extent that ultimately it must achieve a magnitude against which myths, which make up the skeleton of Christianity, shrivel to the point where faith no longer sticks to the bones. Mankind is outgrowing religion like a child’s dress, and there’s no stopping it – it will burst. Faith and knowledge do not tolerate one another in the same head; there they are like a wolf and a sheep in the same cage, and of course knowledge is the wolf that threatens to devour its neighbour.”

„Faith is like love; it cannot be forced. It is therefore a dubious undertaking to attempt to introduce or fortify it by state regulations, for just as the attempt to force love engenders hatred, so too forcing belief will really engender unbelief. Only quite indirectly and so by measures taken far in advance can faith be promoted, that is, by preparing good soil for it, in which it will thrive; ignorance is such soil. Therefore England has seen to this from the early times and up till our own, so that two-thirds of the nation cannot read; and so to this day a desperate faith prevails there, such that one would seek it in vain elsewhere. Now, however, even there the government is taking the people’s education out of the hands of the clergy, after which things will soon go downhill in matters of faith. – On the whole therefore Christianity is gradually approaching its end, undermined constantly by the sciences.66 Meanwhile there is a ray of hope for it in the realization that only those religions perish which have no records. The religion of the Greeks and Romans, these peoples who ruled the world, has perished. On the other hand, the religion of the despised little Jewish people has been preserved, likewise that of the Zend people, among the Persians. Meanwhile the religion of the Gauls, Scandinavians and Germanics has perished. But the Brahmanic and Buddhist religions continue to exist and flourish; they are the oldest of all and have detailed records.”

„What kind of bad conscience religion must have can be measured by the fact that mocking it is forbidden by such heavy penalties.European governments forbid any attack on the national religion. But they themselves send missionaries into Brahmanic and Buddhist countries, who zealously attack the religions there from top to bottom in order to make room for their imported one. And then they scream bloody murder when a Chinese emperor or a powerful mandarin of Tunkin chops the heads off such people.”

„A religion which has a single event as its foundation, indeed wishes to make the turning point of the world and all existence out of this one event that happened in a specific place and time, has such a weak foundation that it cannot possibly survive once a bit of reflection descends on the people. How wise on the other hand is the assumption in Buddhism of a thousand Buddhas! This way it does not look like Christianity, in which Jesus Christ has redeemed the world and no salvation is possible except through him – but four thousand years whose monuments stand great and magnificent in Egypt, Asia and Europe could know nothing of him, and those periods with all their magnificence went unseen to the devil! The numerous Buddhas are necessary because at the end of each kalpaa the world perishes and the teaching along with it, therefore a new world requires a new Buddha. Salvation is always there. That civilization is highest among the Christian peoples does not rest on 419 the fact that Christianity is favourable to it, but instead on the fact that it has died out and has little influence anymore; as long as it had influence, civilization lagged far behind, as in the Middle Ages. Islam, Brahmanism and Buddhism, on the other hand, still have far-reaching influence on life, though least in China, which is why their civilization somewhat resembles Europe’s. All religion is antagonistic to culture. In earlier centuries religion was a forest behind which armies could halt and take cover. The attempt to repeat this in our day has turned out badly.69 For after so many fellings it is merely brush now, behind which scoundrels occasionally hide. For this reason we have to beware of those who wish to drag religion into everything, and confront them with the proverb quoted above: detras de la cruz está el diablo.”

„Behind the cross stands the devil”

„poetry by nature is untranslatable”

„The moral meaning of metempsychosis in all Indian religions is not merely that we have to atone in a subsequent rebirth for every wrong we commit, but also that we have to regard every wrong that befalls us as well deserved on account of our misdeeds in an earlier existence.”

„Just as the Lalitavistara in the beginning was rather simple and natural, and became more complicated and wonderful in every new edition it underwent in each of the subsequent councils, so too was the case with the dogma itself, whose few, simple and magnificent precepts eventually became motley, muddled and complicated by more detailed explanations, spatial and temporal representations, personifications, empirical localizations and so on; the mind of the masses loves it this way because it wants to have fantastical preoccupation and cannot be satisfied with what is simple and abstract. The Brahmanistic dogmas and distinctions between Brahm and Brahma, between Paramatma and Djiwatma, Hiranya-Garbha, Pradjapati, Purusha, Prakriti, and so on (as one finds them very nicely illustrated in Obry’s excellent book On Indian Nirvana,b 1856) are at bottom mere mythological fictions, created with the purpose of representing objectively that which essentially and simply has only a subjective existence; which is precisely why Buddha let them go and knows nothing except Samsara and Nirvana. For the more muddled, motley and complex the dogmas became, the more mythological. The Yogi or Sannyasi c who best understands this is the one who, methodically seating himself in the right manner, withdraws all his senses into himself, forgetting the whole world and himself as well – what then remains in his consciousness is primordial being.d Only this is easier said than done. The depressed condition of the once so highly educated Hindus is the result of the horrible oppression they have suffered from the Mohammedans throughout 700 years, who wanted to forcibly convert them to Islam. – Now only one- eighth of India’s population is Mohammedan. (Edinburgh Review, Jan. 1858.)7”

„Greeks, especially in sculpture and architecture, and the ancients will never become antiquated. They are and will remain the polestar for all our efforts, be it in literature, or in the plastic arts, which we must never lose sight of. Disgrace awaits the age that would dare to set aside the ancients. If therefore some corrupt, miserable and purely materially minded ‘time of now’a should desert the school of the ancients in order to feel more comfortable in its own conceit, then it sows disgrace and ignominy. Perhaps one can characterize the spirit of the ancients by saying that they generally tried in all things to stay as close as possible to nature; whereas the spirit of modern times tries as much as possible to distance itself from nature. Look at the clothing, customs, utensils, dwellings, vessels, art, religion and lifestyle of the ancients and the moderns. On the other hand the Greeks lag far behind us in the mechanical and technical arts as well as in all branches of natural science, because these things simply demand time, patience, method and experience more than high intellectual powers. This is also why for us there is little to learn from most of the works of natural science of the ancients, besides of course learning just how much they didn’t know. Whoever wants to know how incredibly far the ignorance of the ancients extended should read the Problems of Aristotle;b they are a veritable specimen of the ignorance of the ancients.c To be sure, the problems are for the most part correctly and sometimes finely conceived, but the solutions are by and large pitiful because he knows no other elements of explanation than always ‘hot and cold, dry and moist’.”

„Our clothing has a definite influence on almost all our poses and gestures, unlike that of the ancients who, perhaps in accordance with their aesthetic sense, and anticipating the pitfalls of such influence, took this into account in having chosen to keep their clothing broad and loose-fitting. This is why when an actor wears an antique costume he must avoid all those movements and poses which are somehow caused by our clothing and have since become a habit.”

„historical can become allegorical and the allegorical historical”

„the will, which is originally without cognition and therefore a blind urge,c does not allow itself to be disturbed or inhibited in its willing and its craving even after cognition of its own essence has dawned on it through the world as representation; instead, it now wills consciously and soberlyd precisely that which it had willed up till now without cognition as instincte and impulse.”

„As we know, the world as will is the first (ordine prior) and the world as representation is the second (ordine posterior) world. The former is the world of longing and therefore of pain and thousand-fold woes. But the second is in itself essentially painless; moreover it contains a spectacle that is worth seeing, thoroughly significant, and at least entertaining. Aesthetic delight consists in the enjoyment of this second world.,1 – To become a pure subject of cognition means to be rid of oneself;*,2 but because human beings for the most part cannot do this, they are incapable as a rule of the purely objective apprehension of things, which constitutes the gift of the artist.”

„The pure subject of cognition appears when one forgets oneself, in order to dissolve completely in the perceived objects, so that only they remain in the consciousness.”

„wherever cognition of cause and effect, or some other grounds and consequences are at stake, thus in all branches of natural science and mathematics, as well as in history, or in discoveries and so on, the cognition sought after must be a purpose of the will, and the more intensely it strives for it, the sooner it will achieve it. This is exactly how in matters of state, in war, in financial or commercial business, in intrigues of all kinds and so on, the will through the vehemence of its craving must first compel the intellect to exert all its powers to track down precisely all the grounds and consequences in the situation at hand. Indeed, it is amazing how far the spurring of the will can drive a given intellect here beyond the ordinary measure of its powers. This is why, frankly, all exceptional achievements in such matters demand not only a clever or subtle mind, but also an energetic will, which must first impel the intellect so that it shifts into the laborious, tense and ceaseless activity without which such achievements cannot be carried out.”

„The unpremeditated, unintentional, indeed partly unconscious and instinctive dimension that we have observed from the beginning in works of the genius is simply the result of the fact that primal artistic cognitionc is totally separate and independent of the will, a will-free and will-less cognition. And precisely because the will is the real human being, we attribute such cognition to a being of this different nature, to a genius.”

„For the particular and the individual is grasped only intuitively, which is why I have defined poetry as the art of setting the imaginationa into play through words.”

„That the impressions we receive in our youth are so significant, and everything presents itself to us in the dawn of life so idealistically, with such transfiguration, stems from the fact that the individual is still just introducing us to its species, which is still new to us, and so each individual represents its species for us. Accordingly we apprehend in them the (Platonic) Idea of this species, to which as such beauty is essential.”

„Beauty and grace in the human form, in concert, are the clearest visibility of the will on the highest stage of its objectivation, and for precisely this reason they are the highest achievement of plastic art. Meanwhile, as I said in World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, § 41, every natural thing is indeed beautiful, hence every animal too. If sometimes this does not dawn on us in the case of certain animals, then it is because we are not capable of regarding them purely objectively and thereby apprehending their Idea, but instead are distracted from it by some kind of unavoidable association of thoughts, usually as a result of a similarity that overtakes us, e.g. that of an ape with a human being; here we do not apprehend the Idea of this animal, but see only the caricature of a human being. The similarity of a toad to dirt and mud seems to have the very same effect, yet this does not suffice to explain the boundless loathing, indeed the shock and horror that befall some people at the sight of these animals, just as the sight of spiders for others; on the contrary this seems to be grounded in a much deeper, metaphysical and mysterious connection. Corresponding with this opinion is the fact that these same animals are usually taken for sympathetic cures (and evil spells), hence for magical purposes; thus for instance a spider drives away fever when enclosed in a nutshell and worn around the neck of the patient until it is dead; or, in cases of grave mortal danger, a toad soaked in the patient’s urine in a tightly sealed pot is buried at the stroke of noon in the cellar of the house. Nevertheless, the slow torture of such animals demands atonement from eternal justice, and here again we have an explanation of the assumption that whoever practises magic devotes his soul to the devil.”

„It is remarkable to see how even the most mundane and insignificant vegetable nature immediately groups and portrays itself beautifully and picturesquely, as soon as the influence of human caprice is withdrawn; this is illustrated in every little patch set aside from culture or which has not yet been reached by it, even if it should bear only thistles, thorns and the most common wild flowers. On the other hand, the aesthetics of the plant world sink to their minimum in fields of grain and vegetables.”

„We have long since realized that every work designed for human purposes, hence every utensil and every building, must have a certain similarity to the works of nature in order to be beautiful; but we erred in thinking that this had to be direct and immediate in form, so that for instance columns had to represent trees or even human limbs, and vessels had to be shaped like mussels, or snails or calices of flowers, and vegetable or animal forms had to show up everywhere. Instead, that similarity should not be direct, but only indirect, i.e., it should not consist in the forms but in the character of the forms, which can be the same despite the complete difference of these forms. Accordingly buildings and utensils should not imitate nature, but should be created in nature’s spirit. This in turn shows itself when every thing and every part correspond to their purpose so directly that they immediately proclaim this purpose, which happens when they achieve it by the shortest route and in the simplest manner. For this conspicuous expediency is the character of a product of nature. Of course in this product the will works from the inside out and has completely mastered matter, whereas in the human work it works from the outside, only under the mediation of intuition and even a concept of the purpose of a thing, but then achieves and expresses its purpose through overwhelming a foreign matter, i.e., one originally expressing another will.”

„Quite appropriately, we have called the originating of the fundamental idea for a work of art its conception; for it is what is most essential, as reproduction is for the origin of human beings. And again similar to the latter, it requires not time so much as occasion and mood. Generally the object, as masculine so to speak, practises a constant act of begetting on the subject, as female. This act, however, only becomes fruitful in a few fortunate moments and with favoured subjects; but then some new, original idea stems from it which therefore survives. And just as with 456 physical procreation fruitfulness depends much more on the female than the male part, if the former (the subject) is in the mood suited for conceiving, then almost every object now falling into its apperception begins to speak to it, i.e., produce in it a lively, penetrating and original idea. This is why occasionally the sight of an insignificant object or event has become the germ of a great and beautiful work, just as Jakob Böhme was transported to the state of illumination and was initiated into the innermost ground of nature when he suddenly glimpsed a tin vessel. After all, in the end everything comes down to one’s own strength, and just as no food or medicine can impart or replace vital force, so no book or study can replace one’s own intellect.”

„An improviser, however, is a man who ‘is smart at all times’,a in that he has on him a complete and well assorted magazine of all kinds of commonplaces, and so promises prompt service for every wish according to the circumstances of the case and the occasion, providing ‘two hundred verses while standing on one foot’.”

„A man who undertakes to live on the favour of the Muses, I mean on his poetic talents, seems to me a bit like a girl that lives on her charms. Both profane for base profit what should be the free gift of their innermost nature. Both suffer from exhaustion, and both will in most cases end up in disgrace. Therefore do not degrade your Muse to a whore, or else I sing as does the bird up there, That in the branches lives. The song it puts into the air Is pay that richly gives. will be the poet’s motto. For poetic gifts belong to the holidays, not the work days of life. But if they should feel somewhat crowded and impaired by an occupation practised by the poet on the side, they can still thrive 457 because after all the poet does not need to acquire great knowledge and science, as is the case with the philosopher; indeed, the poet’s gifts are condensed in this manner, just as they are diluted by too much leisure and being practised ‘professionally’.d The philosopher, on the other hand, cannot very well practise another occupation for the reason cited above; and since earning money with philosophy has its other well-known major disadvantages, because of which the ancients made it the mark of the sophist as opposed to the philosopher, Solomon should be praised when he says: ‘Wisdom is good with an inheritance, and helps one to see the sun’ (Ecclesiastes 7:11). That we have classics of antiquity, i.e., spirits whose writings stride through the millennia in the undiminished brilliance of youth, is mostly due to the fact that writing books was not a paid occupation for the ancients; from this alone we may deduce that in addition to the good writings of these classics no bad ones still exist, since they did not, like even the best modern writers, carry their phlegm to market in exchange for money after their inspiration had fled.”

„Music is the true universal language understood everywhere, which is why it is spoken incessantly in all countries and throughout the centuries with great earnestness and enthusiasm, and a significant, promising melody soon makes its way around the entire globe, whereas one poor in meaning and insignificant immediately dies out and disappears, proving that the content of melody is something very easily understood. Yet it does not speak of things but of sheer well-being and woe,b which are the sole realities for the will; this is why it speaks so strongly to the heart, whereas it has nothing immediate to say to the head and it is an abuse of music to expect this of it. Therefore all imagistic musicc is reprehensible once and for all, even if Haydn and Beethoven stumbled into it; Mozart and Rossini never did so, to my knowledge. For expressing the passions is one thing, and 458 paintingd of objects is another. Even the grammar of this universal language has been regulated in the most precise manner, although only since Rameau laid the groundwork for it. On the other hand, until I came along, no one even attempted seriously to decipher its lexicon, by which I mean, as stated above, its undoubted significance, i.e., to render comprehensible to our reason even in a general sense what it is that music in melody and harmony signifies, and what it is speaking about. This, like so many other things, proves how little human beings are inclined to reflection and meditation,e and moreover how unconsciously they fritter away their lives. Everywhere their intention is only to enjoy, and this with the least possible expenditure of thought. Their nature demands it. This is why it ends up looking so ridiculous when they think they have to play the philosopher, as seen in our university professors, their exquisite works and the sincerity of their zeal for philosophy and truth.”

„Music therefore 459 relates to text or to the other realities imposed on it in an analogous servitude, although not quite so unavoidably. It must first conform to the text, although it by no means requires this, indeed, it moves about much more freely without it; but it must not only adapt every note to the length and meaning of the words, but also adopt throughout a certain homogeneity with the text and likewise bear the character of the other arbitrary purposes imposed on it, and accordingly be church, opera, military, dance music and so on.”

„Grand opera is really not a product of the pure artistic sense, but rather of the somewhat barbaric concept of heightening aesthetic pleasure by piling on different means, simultaneity of completely different impressions and 460 intensification of effect through an increase in the operative masses and forces. Whereas music, as the most powerful of all arts, is capable on its own of completely filling up the mind of anyone receptive to it; indeed, in order for its supreme productions to be properly grasped and enjoyed, they demand the whole undivided and undistracted mind, so that it can devote itself to them and immerse itself in them, in order to understand its incredibly intimate language. Instead of this, during such highly complicated opera music we simultaneously impinge on the mind through our eyes, by means of the most colourful pomp, fantastic images and the most vivid impressions of light and colour; in addition to this, the mind is occupied by the plot of the piece. Through all of this the mind is diverted, distracted and anaesthetized, and therefore rendered least receptive to the sacred, mysterious, intimate language of tones; such means stand in direct opposition to the attainment of the aim of music. To this we must add ballet, a spectacle often directed more towards lasciviousness than aesthetic pleasure, which moreover soon becomes extremely boring on account of the narrow scope of its means and the monotony arising from this, thereby contributing to the exhausting of one’s patience. This happens especially when the protracted repetitions of the same subordinate dance melody, lasting often for a quarter of an hour, exhaust and blunt our musical sense, so that we have no remaining receptivity for the subsequent musical impressions of a more serious and elevated nature.”

„Strictly speaking then, one could call opera an unmusical invention for the sake of unmusical spirits, for which the music must first be smuggled in by a foreign medium, say as the accompaniment to a long, drawn out and insipid love story and its wishy-washy poetry; for the text of an opera cannot in the least tolerate poetry that is condensed, and full of spirit and ideas, because the composition is no match for this.”

„A much purer musical pleasure than opera is provided by the sung mass, whose mostly unheard words or endlessly repeated halleluiahs, glorias, eleisons, amens, etc. become a mere solfeggio in which the music, preserving 463 only the general ecclesiastical character, behaves freely and is not plagued in its own sphere by all kinds of miseries, as in operatic singing.”

„an actor will portray any character better, the closer it is to 465 his own individuality, and will best portray the one who corresponds with this; this is why even the worst actor has a role that he can play exquisitely, for here he is like a living face among masks. The requirements of a good actor are, (1) that one is the kind of human being who possesses the gift of turning himself inside out, (2) that he has sufficient imagination to imagine fictitious circumstances and events so vividly that they stir him deep down, (3) that he has understanding, experience and education enough to enable him to properly understand human characters and relations.”

„fate is omnipotent, hence fighting it would be the most ridiculous of all presumptions, so that Byron has a perfect right to say: To strive, too, with our fate were such a strife As if the corn-sheaf should oppose the sickle. Don Juan V, 1712 Shakespeare also saw the matter in the same way: Fate, show thy force: ourselves we do not owe; What is decreed must be, and be this so! Twelfth Night, I, the close”

„Getting started is the hardest part,a people say. However, in dramaturgy the opposite is true: getting finished is hard. This is proved by the countless dramas whose first half is very promising, but which then become blurry, halting, shaky, especially in the notorious fourth act,13 and end up fizzling out with some contrived or unsatisfying conclusion, or one that everyone had long foreseen; or even sometimes, as in Emilia Galotti,b in an outrageous conclusion that sends the viewer home in a completely rotten mood. This difficulty with the ending is partially based on the fact that it is easier everywhere to entangle things than it is to unravel them, but partly on the fact that in the beginning we give the poet carte blanche, whereas at the end we make specific demands. Thus the end is supposed to be either completely happy or entirely tragic, whereas human affairs do not readily take such a decisive turn; then again it is supposed to turn out to be natural, correct and uncontrived, and yet at the same time unforeseen by anyone. – The same holds for epics and novels, only in drama its more compact nature makes it more visible by multiplying the difficulty. Nothing comes from nothing’c also applies in the fine arts. Good painters have real human beings stand as models for their historical 469 pictures, and for their heads they take real faces drawn from life, which they then idealize according to either their beauty or their character. Good novelists, I believe, do it the same way; schematically they underlay the characters of their fiction with real people of their acquaintance, whom they now idealize and complete according to their own intentions.The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events, but to make small ones interesting. A novel will be of a higher and nobler nature the more inner and the less outer life it portrays, and this relation will accompany all gradations of the novel…”

„Art consists in setting the inner life in strongest motion with the least possible expenditure of outer life, since the inner life is really the object of our interest”

„Everything is admired by fools and they love beyond measure What they are told in flowery and eccentric words”

„The title of Dante’s work is quite original and appropriate, and it can scarcely be doubted that it is ironic. A comedy indeed! Truly, there you have the world, a comedy for a God whose insatiable lust for revenge and studied cruelty in the last act lingers over the endless and senseless agony of the creatures he has leisurely called into existence, just because they didn’t turn out as he wanted and therefore acted or believed differently in their short lives than he would have wished. Moreover, compared with his outrageous cruelty all the crimes so harshly punished in the Inferno would not even be worth mentioning; indeed, he himself would be far worse than all the devils we encounter in the Inferno, since after all they only act on his orders and by virtue of his authority.”

„bad can turn to good and good to bad as quickly as the poles of an electromagnet are switched”

„Let us try to be just as posterity, even if we are not able to do so as contemporaries.”

„Human life is so brief and fleeting and spread out over such countless millions of individuals plunging in droves into the constantly gaping maw of oblivion, the monster who awaits them, that it is a very meritorious task to rescue anything at all from the general shipwreck of the world, such as the remembrance of what is most important and interesting, the main events and main figures. On the other hand, history could be considered a continuation of zoology, insofar as with all animals it suffices to observe the species, yet with mankind, because we have individual character, even the individuals along with their individual conditioning events must be learned. From this immediately follows the essential imperfection of history, since the individuals and events are countless and endless. By studying history the sum of what is yet to be learned is not in the least diminished by everything that one has already learned. With all real sciences a completeness of knowledge is at least foreseeable. – When the history of China and India is open to us, the endlessness of material will reveal the failure of our path and compel lovers of knowledge to realize that we must recognize the many in the one, the rule in the individual case, the activity of peoples in the knowledge of mankind, but not that facts must be endlessly enumerated. From one end to the other history tells of nothing but wars, and the same theme is the subject of all older paintings, as well as the most recent. But the origin of all war is lust to steal, which is why Voltaire rightly says: ‘In all wars it is only a matter of stealing.’a Indeed, as soon as a people senses an excess of powers, it falls upon its neighbours in order to appropriate the results of their work, instead of its own, whether these results are merely those present now or also include those of the future, in that it subjugates them. This is the stuff of world history and its heroic deeds. Especially in French dictionaries, under gloireb first artistic and literary fame should be treated, and then under gloire militairec it should simply read: voyez butin. Meanwhile it appears that two very religious peoples, Hindus and Egyptians, did not for the most part spend their energy on raiding or heroic deeds when they felt an excess of powers, but on buildings instead, which defy the millennia and do honour to their memory. Added to the above-mentioned and considerable imperfections of history is the fact that Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as is a common street whore with syphilis. Recent critical research on history labours to cure her, to be sure, but with its local remedies it is only capable of overcoming a few symptoms breaking out here and there, and meanwhile some measure of quackery also creeps in, making the malady even worse. This is how things stand with all history, more or less – with the exception of sacred history, as is self-evident. I believe that the events and figures of history roughly compare to those which really existed as the portraits of writers on their title pages to the writers themselves, therefore only as a vague outline, so that they have a weak resemblance, often distorted completely by one false feature, but sometimes have none at all. The newspapers are the second hand of history. However, it is usually not only made of baser metal than the other two, but seldom tells the correct time. – The so-called ‘lead articles’ in them are the chorus to the drama of contemporary events. – Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to the dramatic arts, since what matters is to make as much as possible of every event. This is why all who write for newspapers are also alarmists, by virtue of their trade; it is their way of making themselves interesting. But in doing so they resemble little dogs that immediately start to bark loudly at anything that even moves. Accordingly we have to adjust our attention to their alarm trumpet in such a way that it does not ruin our digestion, and generally keep in mind that the newspaper is a magnifying glass, and this only at best; for often it is a mere shadow play on the wall. In Europe world history is accompanied as well by a quite extraordinary chronological daily indicator, which reveals each decade at a glance with visual portrayals of events; it stands under the direction of the tailors. (For instance, I immediately recognized the fakeness of an alleged portrait of Mozart in his youth, exhibited in Frankfurt in 1856, because the clothing belonged to a period twenty years earlier.)23 Only in our present decade has this indicator gone out of order, because we do not even possess enough originality to invent our own fashion of clothing, as every other decade has, but instead we just represent a masquerade in which people run around in all kinds of discarded costumes from times gone by, as a living anachronism.24 Even the period preceding ours had the intelligence necessary to invent the tailcoat. On closer examination the situation is this. Just as every human being has a physiognomy by which he is provisionally judged, so does every age, and it is no less characteristic. For the spirit of a given age is like a sharp east wind that blows through everything, which is why we find its traces in all activity, thought, writing, music and painting, and in the flourishing of this or that art. It presses its stamp on everything and everyone, which is why for instance there had to be an age of senseless phrases, and one of music without melodies, and another of forms without purpose and aim. At best the thick walls of a cloister could block the entry of this east wind, provided it did not tear them down completely. This is why the spirit of an age also imparts its exterior physiognomy. The architecture of the day always plays the ground bass to this; first all ornaments, vessels, furniture, utensils of all kinds conform to it, and finally even clothing along with the style of trimming hair and beards.”

„It also belongs to the general tastelessness of this age that on the monuments erected to great men, they are portrayed in modern dress. For a monument is erected for the ideal figure, not the real one, the hero as such, the bearer of this or that quality, the originator of certain works or deeds, not the human being as he once poked around in the world, burdened with all the weaknesses and faults associated with our nature; and just as these are not supposed to be glorified, neither are his coat and pants as he wore them. As the ideal human being, however, he would stand there in human form, merely dressed in the manner of the ancients, therefore half naked. And only this is appropriate to sculpture as well, which relies on mere form and demands the whole and undiminished figure of a human being. And since I am on the topic of monuments, I want to note as well that it is an obvious affront to taste, indeed an absurdity actually, to place the statue on a pedestal that is ten to twenty feet tall, where no one can see it clearly, especially since as a rule it is made of bronze and therefore blackish. For it is not clear when seen from afar, and if one steps closer, then it rises up so high that it has the bright sky as background, which blinds the eyes. In Italian cities, especially in Florence and Rome, large numbers of statues stand in the squares and streets, but all of them on quite low pedestals, so that they can be clearly seen; even the colossal statues on Rome’s Monte Cavallo stand on low pedestals. Therefore here too the good taste of the Italians is demonstrated. The Germans, on the other hand, prefer a tall confectioner’s stand, with reliefs, for illustrating the hero in question”

„As the measure of a genius we should not take the faults in his productions or the weaker of his works in order to then rank him low, but only his most excellent work. For even in intellectual matters weakness and perverseness cling to human nature so strongly that even the most brilliant mind is not always completely free of them. This explains the grave errors that can be found even in the works of the greatest men, and Horace’s saying ‘when Homer the excellent one finally falls asleep’.a What distinguishes the genius, on the other hand, and should therefore be his standard is the height to which he was able to soar when time and mood were favourable to him, and which remains eternally unattainable to ordinary talents. By the same token it is very inept to compare great men in the same genre, say great poets, great musicians, philosophers, artists, because then we almost unavoidably do an injustice, at least for the moment.”

„what Labruyère says is as unfortunately true as it is nicely formulated: ‘Diamonds and pearls are the next rarest things in the world after the faculty of discernment.’a Faculty of discernment, esprit de discernement, and accordingly power of judgement, these are what is missing. They do not know how to distinguish the genuine from the fake, the oat from the chaff, the gold from the copper and do not perceive the vast gulf between the ordinary mind and the most rare. No one passes for what he is, rather only for that which others make of him. This is their trick for oppressing extraordinary spirits; they do not allow them (for as long as possible) to come up.4 The result of this is the drawback that is expressed in this way by an old-fashioned verse: ‘It’s just the fate of everyone whose greatness is on earth, That only when they’re dead and gone do we admit their worth’.”

„at bottom the public everywhere has no sense for what is exceptional and therefore no inkling of how infinitely rare are human beings who are truly able to achieve something in poetry, art or philosophy, and that nevertheless their works alone and exclusively merit our attention, which is why Horace’s ‘To be mediocre is allowed the poet neither by the gods, nor human beings, nor even advertising pillars’ should be rubbed daily and unrelentingly into the faces of the bunglers of poetry and likewise of all other higher disciplines”

„artists and poets have more room to manoeuvre than thinkers, because their public is at least one hundred times bigger.”

„For the precept of Jesus ben Sirach (Ecclesiastes 11:28) is faithfully observed: ‘Judge none blessed before his death.’ Thus whoever has created immortal works must console himself by applying the Indian myth to them, that the minutes of the lives of immortals seems like years on earth, and likewise the earth years seem only minutes to the immortals. The lack of power of judgement lamented here also reveals itself in the fact that in every century the exceptional work of the earlier period is indeed respected, but it fails to recognize its own, and the attention that is its due is lavished instead on shoddy workmanship carried around by every decade, which is then ridiculed for it by the next decade. But that people 488 have such difficulty recognizing genuine merit when it appears in their own time proves that they neither understand, nor enjoy nor even appreciate the works of genius that are long known to them and which they honour based on authority. The test of this proof is that once something bad, for instance Fichte’s philosophy, earns good standing, it retains its validity for another couple of generations. Only when its public is very large does its decline occur more rapidly.”

„Now just as the sun needs an eye in order to shine, and music an ear in order to sound, so too the merit of all masterpieces in art and science is conditioned by the kindred mind that is their equal, and to which they speak”

„just as the same oil painting looks different in a dark corner than when the sun shines on it, so too the impression of the same masterpiece is different according to the measure of the intellect that perceives it. Accordingly a beautiful work requires a sensitive mind, and a thoughtful work requires a thinking mind in order to truly exist and to live”

„when socializing everyone decisively prefers someone who resembles him, so that to a dummkopf the company of another dummkopf is vastly preferable to that of all great minds taken together. Accordingly everyone has first to like his own works best, because they are the mirror image of his own mind and the echo of his thoughts. Next in line, however, everyone will feel attracted to the works of those like him; thus the trite, shallow, eccentric person who deals in mere word junk will express his truly heartfelt approval only for what is trite, shallow and eccentric, whereas on the other hand he will approve the works of great intellects only on authority, that is, because he is forced to by fear, even though in his heart he dislikes them. ‘They do not speak to him’, indeed, they are repugnant to him, but this he will never admit even to himself. Only privileged minds are able to really enjoy the works of a genius; however, for the initial recognition of them, when they still exist without authority, significant superiority of the intellect is required.”

„human beings do not judge using their own means but instead merely on the authority of others. For what kind of judgements would be made about Plato and Kant, about Homer, Shakespeare and Goethe, if everyone judged according to what he really has and enjoys of them, as opposed to letting a compelling authority influence him to say something proper, however little he might feel it in his heart? Without such a state of affairs it would be impossible for true merit of a higher order to attain any fame at all. Moreover it is a second good fortune that everyone has just enough of his own judgement as is necessary to recognize his immediate superior and follow his authority, so that ultimately the many submit to the authority of the few and that hierarchy of judgements is formed upon which is based the possibility of firm and ultimately far-reaching fame. For the lowest class to whom the merits of a great spirit are entirely inaccessible, in the end it is only the monument which stirs a dull inkling of greatness through a sensual impression.”

„Envy, after all, is the soul of the league of mediocrities which flourishes everywhere, and silently comes together without invitation to oppose the outstanding individual in every genre. No one wants to hear of such an individual in his own circle of influence, or tolerate him in his sphere; instead, the unanimous password of mediocrity everywhere is: ‘If one among us should stand out, then he should go away and stand out somewhere else!’b In addition to the rareness of the exquisite and the difficulty it finds in being understood and recognized, there is also that snowballing effect of the envy of countless people to suppress it, indeed when possible to stifle it altogether.”

„Hence as soon as an eminent talent in any field lets itself be felt, the mediocrities of the discipline are all unanimously intent on covering it up, on depriving it of the opportunity and preventing in every way that it become known, show itself and come to light, just as if it were a high treason committed against their incompetence, triviality and ineptitude. For the most part their system of suppression has had good success over a long period of time, precisely because the genius, who offers them his wares with childish trust, so that they can enjoy them, is not equal in the least to the tricks and ruses of despicable souls who are at home only in what is vulgar, and moreover perfectly at home there. Indeed, he has no inkling of them, nor does he understand them, and so he probably begins to doubt his cause, unsettled by how he is received, and then begins to be unsure of himself and can even give up his efforts, if his eyes are not opened at the right time to those good-for- nothings and their dealings.”

„Envy is the sure sign of something lacking, and so when directed at merit, of a lack of merit”

„Every poet whose verses have given him cause to believe that he is indeed a poet, should respect and value himself highly, adhering to the proverb: A scoundrel is someone who considers himself a scoundrel.”

„A means frequently used by envy to disparage the good, and which basically is the mere reverse of this, is the dishonourable and unconscionable praising of the bad; for as soon as the bad gains validity, the good is lost. Therefore as effective as this method is for a while, especially when it is practised on a large scale, in the end a time of reckoning does come, and the provisional credit given to bad productions is paid for by the lasting discredit of their base eulogists, which is why they like to remain anonymous.”

„One must be wise in order to recognize the wise”

„fame is indeed very difficult to attain, but once attained is easy to preserve; similarly, that a fame that comes about quickly also extinguishes quickly, and here too the saying is ‘quick to happen, quick to go. Understandably those achievements whose value is so easily recognized by run of the mill types and so willingly validated by rivals will not stand very high above the productive capacity of either. For ‘everyone praises only as much as he hopes to achieve himself’.”

„a fame that is supposed to last a long time will ripen very late, and the centuries of its duration will usually have to be at the expense of the approbation of contemporaries. For whatever is supposed to maintain its validity for so long must have an excellence that is difficult to achieve, and even to recognize it requires minds which are not always there, at any rate in sufficient number to be able to make themselves heard, whereas ever-vigilant envy will do everything to drown out their voice. Mediocre achievements, on the other hand, because they are quickly recognized, run the risk that their possessor will survive them and himself, so that he will get obscurity in old age for fame in youth, whereas with great achievements inversely one will long remain obscure, but then attain brilliant fame in old age”

„the greatest masterpieces do not immediately attract the eye, nor make a significant impression at first, but only after repeated visits and then more and more.”

„Also to be counted along with fame that quickly sets in is false fame, namely the kind of artificial fame that is propped up by unjust praise, good friends, bribed critics, hints from above and collusion from below, given the correctly presupposed lack of judgement of the masses. It resembles the ox-bladder flotations with which heavy bodies are made to float. They hold it up for a longer or shorter period of time, depending on whether they are well inflated and tightly strapped shut, but the air eventually transudes after all, and the body sinks. This is the inevitable fate of works which do not have the source of their fame in themselves; the false praise fades away, the collusions die out, the connoisseur finds the reputation to be unsubstantiated and when it vanishes, an even greater disdain takes its place. On the other hand, genuine works which have the source of their fame in themselves and therefore are capable of rekindling admiration at any time resemble bodies of lower specific gravity which always keep themselves up by their own means, and thus glide down the current of time.”

„if one expands one’s gaze and focuses generally on the praise of contemporaries of all times, one will find that in fact it is always a whore, prostituted and sullied by a thousand undeserving men who have had her. Who could still desire such a wench? Who would want to take pride in her favour? Who would not scorn her? – On the other hand, fame in posterity is a proud, coy beauty who gives herself only to the worthy, the victor, and the rare hero. – That’s how it is. And from this, incidentally, we can conclude how badly off must be this species of bipeds, since generations, indeed centuries are required before a handful of minds is gathered together from its hundreds of millions, who are capable of distinguishing the good from the bad, genuine from spurious, gold from copper, and who accordingly are referred to as the tribunal of posterity. For them an additional favourable circumstance is that the irreconcilable envy of incompetence and the intentional flattery of churlishness are silenced, allowing insight to speak its piece.”

„Every hero is a Samson; the strong individual succumbs to the intrigues of the weak and the many; if he finally loses his patience, then he crushes them and himself. Or he is merely a Gulliver among Lilliputians whose excessive numbers ultimately overwhelm him anyway”

„whoever has stood beyond his century has just as surely stood beyond every other, unless in some century, by a rare stroke of luck, a few capable and fair critics in the area of his achievements had been born at the same time as him.”

„Fame is admiration extorted from human beings against their will, which must make breathing room for itself.”

„anyone who wishes to arrive at posterity must withdraw from the influence of his times, and in doing so of course renounce by and large any influence on his times and be prepared to purchase the fame of centuries at the expense of the approbation of contemporaries. For when some new and therefore paradoxical basic truth comes into the world, it will generally be opposed stubbornly and for as long as possible, indeed, it will still be denied when the opposition is wavering and almost won over. Meanwhile it continues to work in secrecy and eats away like an acid until everything around it is undermined; then a crashing sound is heard once in a while, the old error is caving in, and now suddenly the new 504 edifice of ideas stands there like an uncovered monument, universally recognized and admired. Of course all this tends to come about very slowly. For people as a rule do not take note of whom they should listen to until he is no longer there, so that “hear, hear!”

„The miserable composition of the human race does indeed assume a somewhat different form in every generation, but it is the same at all times. The distinguished minds rarely break through in their own lifetime, because basically they are only completely and properly understood by those who are already related to them. Since it is rare for even one man out of so many millions to go the route of immortality, by necessity he must be very isolated and will have made the journey to posterity through a horrifyingly barren region that resembles the desert of Libya, of which it is well known that only those who have seen it could possibly have an impression of it. Meanwhile, for this journey I recommend light baggage above all, otherwise too much will have to be thrown out along the way”

„Great minds relate to the short span of time in which they live as great buildings relate to a narrow space in which they stand. For these are not seen in their magnitude, because one stands too close to them; and for an analogous reason one does not notice great minds. But when a century intervenes, one recognizes and wants them back.”

„for a famous man the difference between fame in the 506 contemporary world versus fame in posterity in the end comes down only to the fact that in the former his admirers are separated from him by space, in the latter by time. For as a rule he does not have them before his eyes even in the case of fame in the contemporary world. Veneration does not tolerate proximity, instead it almost always holds itself at a distance because in the personal presence of the venerated it melts like butter in the sun. Accordingly, nine-tenths of those who live in proximity to someone who has already achieved fame among his contemporaries will esteem him only by the measure of his rank and fortune, and in any case the remaining tenth will have only a muted awareness of his superior qualities, as a result of news coming from a distance.”

„whoever produces a really great idea becomes aware of his connection with future generations at the moment of its conception, so that he feels the extension of his existence throughout the centuries and in this manner lives both for posterity and with it.”

„tribunal of posterity is the proper court of appeal against contemporary judgement, whether in favourable or unfavourable cases. This is why it is so difficult and rare to do equal justice to both contemporaries and posterity.”

„If truth speaks from the facts of things, one does not need to immediately come to its aid with words; time will help it grow a thousand tongues. – Of course the length of this time will be commensurate with the difficulty of its subject and the plausibility of what is false, but it will pass and in many cases it would be fruitless to try to anticipate it. In the worst case it will ultimately happen in theory as it does in practice, where deception and swindle, emboldened by favourable outcomes, are driven to ever greater extremes until the discovery shows up almost inevitably. Thus for instance even in theoretical matters the absurd grows ever higher due to the blind confidence of dummkopfs, until it has finally become so great that even the most obtuse eye recognizes it. Hence we should say to such types: The crazier the better! We can also fortify ourselves by looking back on all the fibs and fads that already had their day and were then completely set aside. In style, grammar and orthography there are some to which a lifespan of only three to four years was granted. In the case of the grander errors of course one will have to lament the brevity of human life, but will always do well to remain behind the times when one sees that the times themselves are about to go backwards. For there are two ways of not being on the same level as one’s times; either below, or above.”

„When we see the many and manifold institutions of teaching and learning and the great throng of pupils and masters, one could think that the human race is quite keen about insight and truth. But here appearance is deceiving. The masters teach in order to earn money and they do not strive for truth, but for its appearance and standing; the pupils do not learn in order to attain knowledge and insight, but in order to babble and give themselves airs. Thus a new generation like this appears every thirty years, a wide-eyed child,a knowing nothing and in all haste summarily devouring the results of human knowledge accumulated over thousands of years, and then claiming to be smarter than all the past. For this purpose he attends universities and reaches for books, moreover for the newest ones as his contemporaries and peers. Everything has to be brief and new, just as he is new! Then he gets ready to start judging.1 – I have not even taken into account here the actual professions.”

„Students and scholars of all kinds and every age as a rule are only focused on information,b not on insight. They make it a point of honour to have information about everything, about all rocks, plants, battles, experiments and especially about every manner of book. It does not occur to them that information is a mere means to insight, having little or no value in itself, whereas it is the way of thinking that characterizes philosophical minds.”

„Now just as too much reading and learning impairs one’s own thinking, too much writing and teaching disaccustoms an individual to clarity and eo ipsob thoroughness of knowledge and understanding, because they do not leave him enough time to achieve these. Then when speaking he has to fill in the gaps of his clear knowledge with words and phrases. This is what makes most books so infinitely boring, and not the dryness of the subject. For just as it is claimed that a good cook could make a tasty meal of even the sole of an old shoe, so too a good writer can make the driest subject entertaining.”

„For most scholars by far their pursuit of knowledgec is a means, not an end; for this reason they will never achieve anything great in it, because what is required here is that the individual who practises in a field of knowledge regard it as an end and everything else, even his very existence, merely as a means. For everything that someone practises not for its own sake he practises only halfway, and true excellence in works of any kind can only be attained by that which is produced for its own sake and not as a means to further ends. Likewise only those will rise to the level of new and great insights who have the achievement of their own knowledge as the immediate object of their studies, and are unconcerned about anyone else’s. But scholars as a rule study for the purpose of being able to teach and write, which is why their head resembles a stomach and bowels from which food emerges undigested. And this is the very reason why their teaching and writing will be of little use. For you cannot nourish others with undigested waste, but only with milk that has been secreted from one’s own blood.”

„Dilettantes, dilettantes! This is what those who pursue knowledge or art out of love for them and joy in them, ‘for their pleasure’,b are disparagingly called by those who are in it for profit, because they are delighted only by the money that can be earned through them.”

„It was Diderot who said in Rameau’s Nephewb that those who teach a science are not the ones who understand it and pursue it seriously, for the latter have no time to teach it.”

„the republic of scholars things are as a whole the same as in the Republic of Mexico, in which everyone is bent only on his own advantage, seeking prestige and power for himself, completely unconcerned about the whole that is destroyed in the meantime. In just this manner everyone in the republic of scholars asserts only himself in order to win prestige; the only thing they all agree on is not permitting a truly eminent mind to rise to prominence if he shows himself, since he immediately becomes dangerous to all. It is easy to see how all the sciences behave together in these circumstances”

„Of human knowledgea in general and of any kind, the greatest portion by far exists always on paper only, in books, this paper memory of humanity.4 Only a small portion of it is actually alive at any given time in a few minds. This arises especially from the brevity and uncertainty of life, moreover from the indolence and pleasure-seeking of mankind. Each respective generation hurries past and achieves only as much from human knowledge as it needs. Soon it dies out.”

„Human knowledge is incalculable in all directions, and of that which is worth knowing at all, no individual can know even a thousandth part. Accordingly the sciences have reached such an expansive breadth that anyone who wishes ‘to achieve something’ here must pursue only one quite specific discipline, without concern for everything else. Then he will stand above the vulgar masses in his own discipline, to be sure, yet in all other respects he will belong to them.”

„anyone who wants to become an actual philosopher must bring together in his mind the most remote ends of human knowledge, for where else could they ever come together? – Clearly intellects of the first order will never be academic specialists. To them as such the totality of existence is given as a problem, and each of them will in some form and manner impart new discoveries about it to mankind. For only he can deserve the name of genius who takes the whole, the great, the essential and the universal in things as the theme of his achievements, not he who spends his entire life on clarifying a special relation of things to one another.”

„Have a bit more honour in your person and a bit less money in your pocket, and let those without learning feel their inferiority, instead of bowing before their money belt! – For Greek and Latin authors German translations are the same kind of substitute as chicory for coffee; and moreover we absolutely cannot trust in their accuracy.”

„Just as the largest library when not properly arranged does not provide as much use as a very moderate but well arranged one, so the greatest amount of knowledge, if not worked through by one’s own thinking, has much less value than a far lesser quantity that has been thought through in various ways. For only through the universal combination of what we know, and comparing every truth with every other, do we completely assimilate our own knowledge and take control of it. One can only think through what one knows, which is why we should learn something; but one also knows only what has been thought through. Now we can always apply ourselves arbitrarily to reading and learning, whereas to thinking we really cannot. For thinking must be kindled and sustained like a fire by a draught of air; there must be some interest in its subject, which may be purely objective or merely subjective. The latter is only present in our personal affairs, but the former is only for those minds who think by nature, for whom thinking is as natural as breathing, but who are very rare. Therefore in most scholars there is so little of it.”

„Now this is why much reading deprives the mind of all elasticity, like a continually pressing weight bearing down on a spring; and the surest way to have no thoughts of one’s own is to immediately grab a book in every free moment. This practice is the reason why erudition makes most people even more stupid and simple than they already are by nature, and also deprives their writing of all success. As Pope says: For ever reading, never to be read. Pope,Dunciad, III, Scholars are those who have read in books; but the thinkers, geniuses, world illuminators and promoters of the human race are those who have read directly in the book of the world. At bottom only one’s own fundamental thoughts have truth and life, for only they are quite properly and completely understood. Foreign thoughts that are read are the scraps of someone else’s meal, the discarded clothes of a visiting stranger. The foreign thought that has been read somewhere relates to the 523 thought that originates in us as the fossilized imprint of a prehistoric plant relates to a blossoming plant of spring. Reading is a mere surrogate for one’s own thinking. By reading we let our thoughts be led by another on puppet strings. Moreover, many books are only good for demonstrating how many false trails there are and how seriously we could go astray if we allowed ourselves to be guided by them. But someone who is guided by genius, that is, who thinks for himself, voluntarily and properly – that someone has the compass for finding the right way. – Therefore people should only read when the source of their own thoughts stagnates, which will often enough be the case even with the best of minds. On the other hand, it is a sin against the holy spirit to scare off one’s own thoughts, which have original force, just in order to pick up a book. Then we resemble someone who flees the great outdoors in order to view a herbarium, or to contemplate beautiful landscapes in copper engravings. Even if occasionally we could have conveniently found ready made in a book the same truth or insight that we produced only with great effort and slowly by means of our own thinking and combining, still it is worth a hundred times more when it has been obtained through our own thinking. For only then does it enter into the whole system of our thoughts as an integrated part, as a living member, connected with it completely and firmly; then it is understood in all its grounds and consequences, and bears the colour, tone and stamp of our whole way of thinking, having come at just the right time when the need for it was stirring. Therefore it is lodged firmly and cannot disappear again.”

„Reading means thinking with another’s mind instead of one’s own. But to our own thinking, from which a coherent whole, a system of sorts but not strictly closed, is always striving to develop itself, nothing is more detrimental than too strong an influx of foreign thoughts brought on by constant reading, because each of these has sprung from another mind, belongs to another system, bears another colour, and will never on its own flow together into a totality of thinking, knowing, insight and conviction.”

„People who have spent their lives reading and have drawn their wisdom from books resemble those who have acquired precise information about a country from many travel descriptions. They can provide information about many things, but at bottom they really do not have any coherent, clear and thorough knowledgea of the country’s make-up. Alternatively, those who have spent their lives thinking resemble people who have been in that country themselves; they alone really know what they are talking about, how things are there in context, and are truly at home in it.”

„We can sit down and read at any time, but not sit down – and think. For with thoughts it is the same as with human beings; they cannot always be summoned at will, but we must wait for them to come.”

„When we have a decision to make in such circumstances, we certainly cannot sit down at some arbitrarily chosen moment, reflect on the reasons and suddenly decide; for often it is right here that our reflecting on a matter does not hold its ground, but wanders off to other things, which is sometimes even the fault of our reluctance in the matter. We should not try to force it then, but wait for the mood to commence on its own; this it will often do unexpectedly and repeatedly, and every different mood at every different time sheds new light on the matter. It is this slow process that is meant by the expression ripening of decisions. For the assignment must be made, and much of what we had overlooked earlier occurs to us, and even the reluctance will fade, since things usually seem much more bearable when they are clearly focused upon. – Likewise in the theoretical realm the right time must be awaited,4 and even the greatest mind is not capable of thinking for himself at all times. Therefore he does well to use his remaining time for reading, which as I have said is a surrogate for one’s own thinking, delivering material to the intellect insofar as another thinks for us, although always in a way that is not ours. This is precisely why we should not read too much, so that the mind does not accustom itself to the surrogate and thereby cease to learn the thing itself. This way it does not get accustomed to well-worn paths, and walking along someone else’s chain of thought will not estrange it from its own. Least of all should we withdraw entirely from the spectacle of the real world for the sake of reading, since the occasion and the mood for one’s own thinking occur far more frequently here than in reading. For that which is intuitive and real, in its originality and force, is the natural object of the thinking mind and is most easily capable of stirring it deeply. After these reflections it will not surprise us that the one who thinks for himself and the book philosopher are easy to recognize already by their manner of speaking; the former by the impression of seriousness, directness and originality, by the autoptic nature of all his thoughts and expressions; the latter, conversely, by the fact that everything is second hand, concepts handed down, rubbish pieced together, dim and dull like the copy of a copy. And his style, consisting of conventional, indeed banal phrases and trendy vogue words, resembles a small country whose currency consists of nothing but foreign coins because it does not mint its own.”

„Mere experience can no more replace thinking than reading can. Pure empiricism relates to thinking as eating to digestion and assimilation. When experience boasts that it alone has promoted human knowledge through its discoveries, it is as if the mouth were bragging that the existence of the body is its work alone.”

„People who are so eager and hasty to decide debatable questions by citing authorities are actually glad when they can put another’s understanding and insight into play, instead of their own, which are lacking. Their number is legion. For as Seneca says: ‘Everyone would rather believe than exercise judgement.’a Therefore the weapon of choice for their controversies is authorities; using them they start beating on one another, and whoever might happen to get caught in the middle does not do well to try to defend himself against them with reasons and arguments. For against this weapon they are horned Siegfrieds, dipped in the flood of incapacity to 529think and to judge. Therefore they will brandish their authorities as an argument whose validity is based on reverence,b and then shout “victory”

„In the realm of reality, as beautiful, happy and charming as it may have turned out, still we always move about under the influence of gravity, which we have to overcome constantly; conversely, in the realm of thoughts we are disembodied minds, without gravity and need. This is why no happiness on earth is equal to that which a beautiful and fruitful mind finds in itself in a fortuitous moment.”

„The presence of a thought is like the presence of a lover. We think we will never forget this thought and this lover could never become indifferent to us, but out of sight, out of mind! The most beautiful thought runs the risk of being irretrievably forgotten if it is not written down, and the lover of being lost to us if she has not been wedded.”

„There are plenty of thoughts which have value for the one who thinks them, but only few have the power to influence through repercussion or reflection, that is, to gain the reader’s interest after they have been written down.”

„Still, the only thing that has true value is what someone has first thought merely for himself. Thinkers can be divided into those who think chiefly for themselves and those who immediately think for others. The former are the genuine thinkers for themselvesa in the double sense of the word; they are 530the real philosophers. For they alone are serious about the matter. It is also the case that the pleasure and happiness of their existence consists precisely in thinking. The others are sophists; they want to shineb and seek their happiness in what they hope to obtain from others by so doing; their seriousness lies here. It can soon be seen from their entire way and manner to which class someone belongs. Lichtenberg is a model of the first type; Herder belongs to the second.”

„Consistent with this is the fact that even in conversations the thoughts of most people are found to be as close cropped as chaff, which is why a longer thread cannot be spun out of them.And if this world were populated by real thinking beings, it would be 531impossible for noise of every kind to be allowed such unlimited and generous scope, even the most terrible and useless noise at that. – Now if nature had really destined human beings for thinking, it would not have given us ears, or at least it would have equipped them with air-tight flaps, like those of bats, which I envy for that very reason. But in truth we are a poor animal just like the others, whose powers are calculated merely for the preservation of their existence, which is why we need ears that are always open so that, even without asking and by night as well as day, they can warn us of the stalker’s approach.”

„there are two kinds of writers: those who write for the sake of the subject and those who write for the sake of writing. The former have had thoughts or experiences that seem to them worthy of communicating; the latter need money and that is why they write, for money. They think for the purpose of writing. We will recognize them by the fact that they spin out their thoughts as long as possible and also elaborate half-true, crooked, forced and vacillating thoughts, and usually favour the twilight in order to appear as something they are not, which is why their writing lacks definiteness and full clarity. We are therefore soon able to observe that they write in order to fill up paper; sometimes we can observe this in our best writers, for instance in certain passages in Lessing’s Dramaturgya and even in some novels of Jean Paul.1 As soon as we notice it, we should throw the book away, for time is precious. At bottom, however, an author cheats his reader as soon as he writes in order to fill up paper, because he alleges that he writes because he has something to communicate.2 – Honoraria and reservation of copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes solely for the sake of the subject writes anything worthy of being written. What an inestimable gain it would be if in all branches of a literature only a few exquisite books existed! But it will never come to that as long as honoraria are to be earned. For it is as if a curse lay on money: every writer becomes bad as soon as he in any way writes for profit. The most exquisite works of great men are all from the time when they still had to write for nothing or for a very meagre honorarium. Here too the Spanish proverb applies: Honra y provecho no caben en un saco.b – The whole wretched state of literature in and outside Germany today has its roots in the earning of money through book writing. Anyone who needs money sits down and writes a book, and the public is stupid enough to buy it. The secondary consequence of this is the ruin of language.A great number of bad writers live solely off the foolishness of the public in not wanting to read anything but what is printed today: – the journalists. Aptly named! In German they would be called ‘day labourers’.”

„What characterizes great writers (of the higher breed) as well as artists and is therefore common to all of them is that they are serious about their subject; the rest are not serious about anything but their advantage and profit. –If someone acquires fame through a book written from some inner calling and drive, but then becomes a prolific writer because of it, then he has purchased his fame for the sake of filthy lucre. As soon as one writes because he wants to make something – it turns bad.Only in this century are there writers by profession [Profession]. Up to this time there were writers by calling [Beruf].”

„we can say that there are three kinds of authors; first those who write without thinking. They write from memory, from reminiscences, or even directly from the books of others. This class is the most numerous. – Secondly, those who think while they write. They think in order to write, and are very common. – Thirdly, those who have thought before they set out to write. They write merely because they have thought, and are rare.”

„The only writer worth reading is the one who writes directly from the material in his own mind. But book makers, compendia writers and ordinary historians and so on take their material directly from books; from here it passes into their fingers without even having first undergone transit toll or inspection, let alone editing, in the head. (How learned many a man would be if he knew everything that is written in his own books!)”

„There is no greater error than to believe that the last word spoken is always more correct, that everything written later is an improvement of what was written earlier and that every change represents progress. The thinking minds, the people of proper judgement and the people who are serious about things are all only exceptions; everywhere in the world the scum are the rule, and they are always at hand and busily at work to corrupt and ‘unimprove’a in their way anything said by thinkers after mature consideration.5 Therefore whoever wants to inform himself about a subject should beware of reaching for the latest books on it, in the assumption that the sciences always make progress and6 that during the writing of these new books older ones had been used”

„In the sciences everyone wants to bring something new to market in order to validate himself; this often consists merely of overturning the correct view that prevailed hitherto in order to replace it with his own nonsense; occasionally this works for a short time, and then we return to the older correct view”

„the new is rarely the good, because the good is only the new for a short time. What the address is to a letter the title should be to a book, that is, it should primarily have the aim of channelling it to that portion of the public which may be interested in its content. Therefore the title should be characteristic, and because it is essentially brief, it should be concise, laconic, pregnant and whenever possible a monogram of its content. Accordingly those titles are bad which are long-winded, insignificant, crooked, ambiguous or even false and misleading, and which cause their books to share the fate of wrongly addressed letters. But the worst are the stolen titles, i.e., those already borne by another book, for they are plagiarism first and secondly the most conclusive proof of an absolute total lack of originality, since whoever does not have enough originality to think of a new title for his book will be far less capable of giving it a new content. Related to these are the imitated, i.e., the half-stolen titles, for instance when long after I wrote On Will in Nature Oersted writes ‘On Mind in Nature’.”

„In order to secure the enduring attention and interest of the public, one must either write something of lasting value or constantly write something new, which for this very reason will prove to be increasingly worse”

„A book can never be more than the printed impression of its author’s thoughts. The value of these thoughts lies either in the subject matter, hence in that about which he has thought, or in the form, i.e., the elaboration of the material, thus in what he thought about it.”

„the others will always think only that which any other can also think. They give the impression of their mind, but everyone already possesses its original himself. Nevertheless the public directs its interest much more to the material than to the form, and in so doing remains behind in its higher culture. It displays this tendency most ridiculously with poetic works, by carefully investigating the real events or the personal circumstances of the poet that served as his occasion; indeed, these ultimately become more interesting to the public than the works themselves, and they read more about Goethe than by him, and study the Faust legend more assiduously than Faust. And when Bürger says: ‘they will launch scholarly investigations on who Lenore really was’,a we see this literally fulfilled in Goethe’s case since we already have many scholarly investigations of Faust and the Faust legend. They are and remain of a material nature. – This preference for subject matter as opposed to form is as if someone ignored the form and painting of a beautiful Etruscan vase in order to chemically investigate its clay and colours”

„The actual life of a thought lasts only until it reaches the borderline of words; there it petrifies and is henceforth dead, but indestructible, like the fossilized animals and plants of the prehistoric world. Its momentary actual life can also be compared to that of a crystal in the moment of its crystallization. For as soon as our thinking has found words it is no longer profound or serious in the deepest sense. Where it begins to exist for others it ceases to live in us, as the child separates itself from the mother when it embarks on its own existence. After all, even the poet says: You must not confuse me with your gainsaying!The moment we speak we are in fact straying.”

„The pen is to thinking what the stick is to walking, but the lightest gait is without a stick and the most perfect thinking takes places without a pen. Only when we begin to age do we like to avail ourselves of a stick and a pen.”

„In the mind in which it once lodges itself or is even born, a hypothesis leads a life that resembles that of an organism to the extent that it absorbs from its external world only what is conducive and homogeneous to it, whereas it either does not allow what is heterogeneous and harmful to approach it, or, if unavoidably exposed to something, it excretes it again wholly intact.”

„Satire like algebra should operate merely with abstract and indefinite, not with concrete values or with stated quantities; and it should not be practised on living human beings any more than anatomy, on pain of no longer being certain of one’s own skin and life.”

„At almost all times in art as well as in literature some false fundamental view, manner or affectation is in fashion and is admired. The ordinary minds strive eagerly to adopt and practise it. The man of insight recognizes and scorns it; he stays out of fashion.b But after a few years even the public figures it out and recognizes the fooleryc for what it is, now ridicules it, and the admired cosmetics of all those affected works falls down from the wall it adorns like a shoddy plaster ornamentation; then they stand there like this wall. Thus we should not be angry but pleased when some false fundamental view that has long been functioning in secret is suddenly expressed in a decisive, loud and clear manner; for now its falseness will soon be felt, known and likewise finally expressed. In this case it’s as if an abscess ruptured.”

„whoever considers nothing bad also considers nothing good”

„Every honourable man puts his name to that which he writes”

„All anonymous reviewing amounts to lying and deceit.”

„Whoever writes and polemicizes anonymously eo ipso brings down on himself the presumption that he wants to cheat the public or impugn the honour of others without risk to himself.”

„every anonymous reviewer should be treated like a scoundrel and a cur, especially in anti-critiques, and not as a few from the pack of defiled authors do out of cowardice, addressing him as ‘the honourable reviewer’.”

„An especially ridiculous impertinence of such anonymous critics is that, like kings, they will use the royal We, whereas they should not only speak in the singular, but in the diminutive, indeed, in the humilitive,a for instance ‘my miserable paucity, my cowardly cunning, my masked incompetence, my meagre scoundrelocity’b and so forth.”

„we can bet a hundred to one that whoever does not want to give his name is out to cheat the public.”

„From the start an anonymous reviewer should be regarded as a crook who is out to cheat us. In sympathy with this the reviewers of all honest literary journals sign their reviews. – He wants to deceive the public and dishonour writers; the former usually for the advantage of a book dealer, the latter in order to cool his envy. – In short, the literary villainy of anonymous reviewing must be stopped.”

„Style is the physiognomy of the mind. It is more infallible than that of the body. To imitate someone else’s style amounts to wearing a mask. As beautiful as it may be, soon it will become insipid and unbearable due to its lifelessness, so that even the ugliest living face is better.”

„In order to venture a preliminary assessment of the value of a writer’s intellectual output, it is not necessary to know precisely what he was 548 thinking about, or what he has thought; this would require us to have read all of his works; – instead it is sufficient in the first instance to know how he has thought.”

„I read a couple of pages of an author and I already know pretty well how far he can bring me”

„nothing is easier than writing so that no one can understand it, just as conversely nothing is harder than to express meaningful thoughts so that everyone must understand them. Unintelligibility is related to unintelligent, and it is always infinitely more likely that it conceals a mystification rather than a great profundity”

„an author should guard against nothing so much as against the obvious effort to show more intellect than he has”

„simplicity is ever a sign not only of truth but also of genius”

„Whoever has something to say that is worthy of being said does not need to disguise it in precious expressions, difficult phrases and obscure allusions, rather, he can say it simply, clearly and naïvely and be certain that it will not lack for effect. Therefore whoever uses the foregoing artificial means betrays his poverty of thought, intellect and knowledge”

„We could infer the witlessness and tediousness of the writings of ordinary minds even from the fact that they always speak only with semi-consciousness, that is, they themselves do not really understand the meaning of their own words, since in their case they are something memorized and adopted ready- made, which is why they have pieced together ‘whole phrases’ (phrases banales) as opposed to words.”

„It is always better to leave out something good than to add something insignificant. Here Hesiod’s ‘the half is more than the whole’d finds its proper application. And generally, do not say everything! ‘The secret of being boring consists in saying everything.’e,32 Thus wherever possible, nothing but the main thing, and nothing that the reader would think even on his own. – To use many words in order to communicate few thoughts is everywhere the infallible sign of mediocrity; conversely, that of the eminent mind is to encapsulate many thoughts in few words.”

„Everything that is dispensable has a disadvantageous effect.”

„as soon as one jackass has rendered such a heroic deed, a hundred others join in and copy him jubilantly. And nowhere is there opposition! No opposition to this stupidity; instead, as soon as anyone has perpetrated a really asinine blunder, the others admire it and rush to copy it.”

„Generally speaking we should never make even the smallest sacrifice for the sake of brevity at the expense of distinction and precision of expression, for it is the possibility of these that gives language its value, since it is only by virtue of them that it succeeds in expressing accurately and unequivocally each nuance, each modulation of a thought, thus allowing it to appear as if in a clinging wet robe as opposed to a sack.”

„to the young people of the uneducated classes the newspaper is an authority, because it is printed after all.”

„Ordinary minds should stay on the beaten path and not undertake to reform the language.”

„Germans hate order, rules and law in all things; they love individual whim and their own caprice, mixed with a somewhat insipid fairness according to their own sharp judgement. Therefore I doubt whether the German will ever learn to keep to the right in streets, roads and paths, as every Briton in the United Kingdom and all the colonies unerringly does – no matter how great and obvious the advantage of this might be. Even in clubs and societies and so on we can see that many like to wantonly break the most suitable laws of society, even without any advantage to their own convenience. But Goethe says: To live for one’s own senses is uncouth:The noble strive for order and for law. (Nachlass, vol. 17, p. 297”

„we should not contract the words and forms of speech, but enlarge our thoughts, just as a convalescent should be able to fit again into the clothes he wore previously by restoring his full body size, not by tailoring his clothes to be smaller.”

„Whoever writes negligently confesses from the start that he himself does not attach great value to his thoughts.”

„just as I hesitate at first to engage in conversation with a man who is badly dressed in dirty clothes, so too I will put aside a book immediately once I catch sight of the negligence of its style.”

„The guiding principle of stylistics should be that a person can clearly think only one thought at a time, and therefore it should not be expected of him that he think two or even several at a time. – But this is expected of him by those who insert additional thoughts as parenthetical clauses into the gaps of a main period broken up for this purpose, which unnecessarily and wantonly causes confusion in the reader.”

„This phrase structure reaches the highest degree of absurdity when the parenthetical clauses are not even organically inserted, but are wedged in by directly breaking a period. So for instance if it is an impertinence to interrupt others, then it is no less so to interrupt oneself as happens in a phrase structure which has been used and enjoyed six times on every page for several years by all bad, negligent, hasty scribblers who have only their wages in mind”

„Ignorance only degrades mankind when it is encountered in the company of wealth. The poor man is limited by his poverty and plight; his achievements take the place of knowledge and occupy his thoughts. On the other hand, wealthy men who are ignorant live merely for their pleasures and resemble animals, as can be seen every day. Added to this is the accusation that wealth and leisure were not used for what grants them the greatest possible value.”

„When we read someone else thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. This is like the pupil who in learning to write traces with his pen the strokes made in pencil by the teacher. Accordingly in reading we are for the most part absolved of the work of thinking. This is why we sense relief when we transition from preoccupation with our own thoughts to reading. But during reading our mind is really only the playground of the thoughts of others. What remains when these finally move on?1 It stems from this that whoever reads very much and almost the whole day, but in between recovers by thoughtless pastime, gradually loses the ability to think on his own – as someone who always rides forgets in the end how to walk. But such is the case of many scholars: they have read themselves stupid. For constant reading immediately taken up again in every free moment is even more mentally paralysing than constant manual labour, since in the latter we can still muse about our own thoughts. But just as a coiled spring finally loses its elasticity through the sustained pressure of a foreign body, so too the mind through the constant force of other people’s thoughts. And just as one ruins the stomach by too much food and so harms the entire body, so too we can overfill and choke the mind with too much mental food. For the more one reads, the fewer traces are left behind in the mind by what was read; it becomes like a tablet on which many things have been written over one another. Therefore we do not reach the point of rumination;* but only through this do we assimilate what we have read, just as food does not nourish us through eating but through digestion.2 On the other hand, if we read continuously without later thinking about it further, then it does not take root and most of it is lost. Generally speaking things are no different with mental food than with physical food; scarcely one-fifth of what we take in becomes assimilated, the rest is lost through evaporation, respiration, or otherwise. Add to all this that thoughts committed to paper are generally nothing more than a man’s footprints in the sand; although we see the way he has taken, we have to use our own eyes to know what he has seen along the way.”

„There is no literary quality, as for instance power of persuasion, wealth of imagery, gift of comparison, boldness, or bitterness, or brevity, or grace, or ease of expression, nor wit, surprising contrasts, laconism, naïveté and so on, that we can acquire by reading writers who have them. But by reading we could indeed summon such qualities in us if we already have them as an inclination, hence potentially,a and we could become aware of them, could 590 see all the things we could do with them, could be strengthened in our tendency, even in our courage to apply them, and we could evaluate the effect of their use by example and thus learn to use them properly, only after which, of course, we would possess these qualities actually. Therefore this is the only way reading shapes us for writing, in that it teaches us the use we can make of our own natural gifts, but always assuming we possess them. Without them, on the other hand, we learn nothing by reading except cold, dead mannerisms, and we become shallow imitators.”

„Just as the strata of the earth successively preserve the living creatures of past epochs, so too the shelves of libraries successively preserve the errors of the past and their stories, which like the former were quite alive in their time and made a lot of noise, but now stand there rigid and petrified, while only the literary palaeontologist observes them.”

„with respect to our reading the art of not reading is extremely important. It consists in our not picking up whatever happens to be occupying the greater public at any given time, such as for instance political or literary pamphlets, novels, poems and so on, which currently make a lot of noise and even reach several editions in the first and last years of their run. On the contrary, we should consider that whoever writes for fools always finds a large public, and we should devote the always precious and carefully measured time set aside for reading exclusively to the works of the great minds of all times and peoples, who tower over the rest of humanity, and who are distinguished as such by the voice of fame. Only they really shape and instruct us. Of the inferior we can never read too little and the good never too often. Bad books are intellectual poison: they ruin the mind.In order to read the good it is a condition that we do not read the bad; for life is short, and our time and our powers are limited.”

„Assiduously read the ancients, the true and genuine ancients: What moderns say about them does not mean much”

„Oh how one ordinary mind is so similar to the next! How all of them have been poured from one mould! How each of them has the same insight given the same occasion, and nothing else! Now add their lowly personal intentions. And the worthless gossip of such creatures is read by a stupid public if only it is printed today, while they let the great minds languish on bookshelves.”

„At all times there are two literatures that walk side by side but somewhat unknown to one another; one is real and one merely appears to be. The former grows into permanent literature. Practised by people who live for science or poetry, it goes its way earnestly and silently, but extremely slowly, producing in Europe scarcely a dozen works in a century, yet those that remain. The other is practised by those who live from science or poetry; it gallops amidst the noise and shouting of its stakeholders, and each year it brings many thousands of works to market. But after a few years people ask: where are they? Where is their fame,b so premature and loud? We could also describe the latter as flowing, the former as enduring literature.”

„It would be nice to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them, but we usually confuse the purchase of books with the assimilation of their content. –To demand of someone that he retain everything he has ever read is like demanding that he still carry in himself what he has ever eaten. He has 594 lived physically off the former and mentally of the latter, and through them has become what he is. But just as the body assimilates what is homogeneous to it, everyone retains what interests him, i.e., whatever fits into his system of thoughts or suits his purpose. Of course everyone has the latter, but few indeed have something resembling a system of thoughts, which is why they take an objective interest in nothing, and for this reason nothing from their reading sticks with them: they retain nothing of it. ’Repetition is the mother of study.’ Every book worth reading at all should immediately be read twice, partly because we understand things better in their context the second time and only really understand the beginning when we know the end, and partly because we bring a different spirit and mood to every passage the second time around, which makes for a different impression and is as if we view an object in another light. Works are the quintessence of a mind; they will therefore be incomparably richer in content than his company, and will also essentially replace this – indeed, far exceed and leave it behind. Even the writings of an ordinary mind can be instructive, worth reading and entertaining, precisely because they are his quintessence, the result and fruit of all his thinking and studying – whereas his company cannot suffice for us. Therefore we can read books by people whose company would afford us no pleasure, and this is why elevated spiritual culture eventually brings us to the point where we find entertainment almost only in books, and no longer in other people. There is no greater quickening for the mind than reading the ancient classics; as soon as we have picked up any one of them, and even if only for a half hour, we at once feel refreshed, relieved, purified, elevated and fortified, no different than if we had quenched our thirst at a mountain spring. Is this due to the ancient languages and their perfection? Or is it on account of the greatness of the minds whose works remain unharmed and unweakened by millennia? Perhaps it is due to both. But I know that if the learning of ancient languages should cease one day, as is now threatened, 595 then a new literature will arise consisting of such barbaric, trite and worthless writing as has never before existed, especially since the German language, which does indeed possess some of the perfections of the ancient ones, is being zealously and methodically dilapidated and mutilated by the worthless scribblers of today’s ‘time of now’,b so that it is gradually transitioning into a miserable jargon, impoverished and crippled. There are two histories: the political and that of literature and art. The former is of the will, the latter of the intellect. Therefore the former is dreadful without exception, even terrifying: fear, distress, deceit and horrific murder en masse. The latter on the other hand is everywhere delightful and cheerful, like the isolated intellect, even where it describes erroneous paths. Its main branch is the history of philosophy, which is really its bass part whose notes are sounded even in the other history; from its foundation there it too guides opinion, but opinion rules the world. Really therefore philosophy, properly understood, is also the most powerful material force, though it works very slowly.”

„On the other hand at the same time we see everywhere how the descendants stick with the language of their parents and only gradually undertake small changes in it. But experience does not teach that the languages perfect themselves grammatically in the succession of generations, but rather, as I have said, precisely the opposite, namely they become increasingly simpler and worse. – Are we nonetheless to assume that the life of language resembles that of a plant which, having sprouted from a simple seed, gradually develops as an insignificant shoot, reaches its acme and from then on slowly declines again as it ages, but that we knew only of its decline, not of its earlier growth? This is merely a metaphorical and moreover quite arbitrary hypothesis – a parable, not an explanation! In order to arrive at one, to me the most plausible assumption is that mankind instinctively invented language, in that originally an instinct is found in him by virtue of which he produces without reflection and conscious intention the tool and organ indispensable to the use of his reason and its organ, while said instinct is later gradually lost in the course of generations once the language already exists and the instinct is no longer used. Now just as all works produced merely by instinct, e.g. the hives of bees and wasps, beaver lodges, and birds’ nests in their manifold and always expedient forms have their own peculiar perfection, in that they are precisely and do exactly what is demanded by their purpose, such that we marvel at the profound wisdom inherent in them – so it is too with the first and original language: it had the lofty perfection of all works of instinct, and to trace this perfection in order to bring it into the light of reflection and of clear consciousness is the work of grammar appearing only thousands of years later.”

„Learning several languages is not only an indirect, but also a direct and deeply engaging intellectual means of education. Hence the declaration of Charles V: ‘As many languages as someone knows, that many times is he a human being.’ (Quot linguas quis callet, tot homines valet.)”

„An exact equivalent for every word of a language cannot be found in every other.”

„Poems cannot be translated, but merely recomposed, which is always dicey.”

„To really have a mastery of several modern languages and to read them with ease is a means of liberating oneself from the national limitations that otherwise affect everyone”

„one thinks differently in each language, and consequently our thinking acquires a new modification and colouring by learning any language, and that polyglottism in addition to its many indirect uses is also a direct means of education for the mind, in that it corrects and perfects 605 our views through the conspicuous multifariousness and nuancing of concepts, just as it increases the alacrity of our thinking, since in learning many languages concepts increasingly become separated from words. The ancient languages achieve this incomparably more than the modern, by virtue of their great difference from ours, which does not allow that we reproduce word for word but demands that we melt down our entire thinking and pour it into a different mould.”

„Someone who understands no Latin resembles a person who finds himself in a beautiful landscape during foggy weather; his horizon is extremely limited, he sees clearly only what is closest, and just a few steps beyond this it gets lost in a blur.”

„By nature we first reach for audible signs, and then chiefly in order to express our affects but then later also our thoughts;”

„Meanwhile experience has brought to light an exceedingly great advantage of Chinese characters, namely that one need not know Chinese in order to express oneself in 610 them, instead, everyone reads them off in his own language, just like our numerical symbols which generally are for numerical concepts what the Chinese written characters are for all concepts, and what algebraic symbols are even for abstract concepts of quantities.”

„Every animal being, especially the human, requires a certain suitability and proportion between his will and his intellect in order to exist and get on in the world. The more precisely and properly nature has achieved these, the more easily, certainly and pleasantly he will go through the world.”

„in youth the excessive energy of apprehending the objective world, accompanied by lively imagination and lacking all experience, renders the mind susceptible to and easily fills it with extravagant concepts and even chimeras, which produces an eccentric and indeed fantastical character. Now even if later this dissipates and goes away after the lesson of experience has sunk in, still a genius will never feel as at home in the ordinary outside world and everyday civil society, nor really engage and move about in it as comfortably as a normal mind, but instead will often commit strange blunders. For the ordinary mind is so perfectly at home in the narrow sphere of his concepts and apprehension that no one can get to him there and his knowledge always remains true to its original purpose, to provide for the service of the will, and therefore applies itself accordingly without ever being extravagant. A genius on the other hand, as I also indicated in my earlier discussion, is at bottom a monstrosity by excess,a just as conversely a passionate, vehement man without understanding, a brainless raging beast, is a monstrosity by defect.”

„That the sight of animals intrigues us so much is based mainly on the fact that it pleases us to see our own nature before us in a very simplified form. There is only one mendacious being in the world: it is the human being. Every other is true and sincere, in that it openly gives itself as that which it is, and expresses itself as it feels. An emblematic or allegorical expression of this fundamental difference is that all animals go about in their natural state, contributing greatly to our delightful impression at the sight of them, which makes my heart swell especially if they are animals of the wild – whereas humans have become a caricature, a monstrosity through their clothing, the sight of which already makes them repulsive and is even further exacerbated by their unnatural white colour, and by the disgusting consequences of an unnatural diet of meat, spirituous drinks, tobacco, debaucheries and diseases. Mankind stands there as a stain on nature! – The Greeks limited their clothing as much as possible, because they felt this.”

„Mental anxiety causes palpitations of the heart, and they in turn cause mental anxiety. Grief, care, and restlessness of mind have an inhibiting and complicating effect on the vital process and the working of the organism, 618 whether on our circulation, secretions or digestion. On the other hand if these workings, be they of the heart, the intestines, the portal veins,a the seminal vesicles or anywhere else, are inhibited, obstructed or otherwise disturbed by physical causes, what arises is emotional unease, anxiety, melancholy and grief without cause, hence the condition we call hypochondria. In the same manner, moreover, rage makes a person shout, behave intensely and gesticulate violently; but these same physical expressions increase the rage or fan it at the slightest provocation. I do not need to say how much all of this confirms my doctrine of the unity and identity of the will with the body, according to which even the body is nothing more than the will itself, manifesting itself in the spatial intuition of the brain.”

„Much indeed that is attributed to the force of habit is instead based on the constancy and unchangeability of the original and innate character, as a result of which we always do the same thing under the same circumstances, so that what happened the first time had the same necessity as the hundredth time. – Real force of habit on the other hand is actually based on inertia that wants to spare the intellect and the will the work, difficulty and even the danger of a fresh choice and therefore allows us to do today what we already did yesterday and a hundred times before, and of which we know that it leads to its purpose. But the truth of this matter lies deeper, for it needs to be understood in a more precise sense than appears at first glance. What for bodies is the force of inertia insofar as they are moved merely by mechanical causes, is precisely the power of habit for bodies which are moved by motives. The actions we complete from mere habit really happen without individual and separate motive affecting one specific case, which is also why we really do not think of them as we perform them. Only the first exemplars of every action that becomes a habit had a motive, whose secondary after-effect is the present habit which now suffices to enable the action to continue, exactly as a body set in motion by a thrust needs no new thrust to continue its motion but continues to move for all eternity as long as it is not impeded. The same applies to animals in that their training is a forced habit. A horse calmly continues to pull its cart without being driven; this movement is still the effect of the whip strokes by which it was initially driven, which perpetuated into habit according to the law of inertia. – All this is really more than mere simile; it is the identity of the matter,a namely of the will, at widely different stages of its objectivation according to which the same law of motion shapes itself so differently.”

„Viva muchos años is a common greeting in Spanish, and throughout the world it is very customary to wish someone a long life. This surely cannot be explained from knowledge of what life is, but on the contrary from knowledge of what mankind is by nature, namely will to life. –The desire everyone has that he may be remembered after death, and which intensifies in those who are high-striving into a desire for posthumous fame seems to me to arise from the clinging to lifec which, when it sees itself cut off from any possibility of real existence, now reaches for the only kind that remains, though it is merely ideal, and therefore grasps at a shadow.”

„We desire the end, more or less, of all our doings and dealings, and are impatient to finish and glad to be finished. It is only the end in general, the end of all ends, that as a rule we desire as far off as possible.”

„Every separation gives us a foretaste of death – and every reunion a foretaste of resurrection. – This is why even people who were indifferent to one another jubilate so much when they meet again after twenty or even thirty years.”

„Our profound pain at the death of every friendly being arises from the feeling that in every individual there is something inexpressible which is unique to him alone and therefore utterly irretrievable. ‘Every individual being is unfathomable.’ This applies even to the animal individual, where it is most poignantly felt by someone who has accidentally and fatally injured a beloved animal and now receives its parting look, which causes heart-rending anguish.”

„It can happen that even after a short time we mourn the death of our enemies and adversaries almost as much as that of our friends – namely when we miss them as witnesses of our brilliant successes.”

„Hope is confusing the wish for an event with its probability. But perhaps no one is free from the foolishness of the heart that so strongly distorts the intellect’s correct assessment of probability that it regards one in a thousand as an easily possible case. And yet a hopeless misfortune resembles a quick death blow, whereas a constantly thwarted and repeatedly revived hope resembles a slow torturous death.* Whoever has been abandoned by hope has also been abandoned by fear; this is the meaning of the expression ‘desperate’. For it is natural for a human being to believe what he desires, and to believe it because he desires it. Now when this benevolent, soothing peculiarity of his nature is wiped out by repeated, extremely harsh blows of fate and he is even brought around to the reverse situation of believing that what he does not desire must happen while what he desires never could, simply because he desires it, then this is precisely the state which we have called despair.”

„Hope is a state to which our whole being, namely will and intellect, concurs; the former in that it desires the object of hope, the latter in that it calculates it to be probable. The bigger the share of the latter factor and the smaller the former, the better things will be for hope; in the opposite case, the worse.”

„That we so often err in others is not always directly the fault of our judgement, but stems mostly from Bacon’s observation that ‘the intellect is not a light that burns without oil, but draws its supply from the will and from the passions.’a For from the start we are predisposed for or against them by trivial things, without knowing it. Often it is due to our not stopping at the qualities that we really discover in other people, but inferring others from them, which we hold to be inseparable from or incompatible with them, for example, from correctly perceived generosity we infer justness, from piety honesty, from lying cheating, from cheating stealing and so on, which opens the door to many errors partly because of the strangeness of human characters, partly because of the one- sidedness of our point of view. Character of course is generally consistent and coherent, but the root of all its qualities lies too deep for us to be able to determine from isolated data which can coexist in a given case and which cannot.”

„In all European languages the customary use of the word person for referring to a human individual is unconsciously fitting, for persona really means the mask of an actor, and certainly no one shows himself as he is, but everyone wears a mask and plays a role. – Generally speaking the whole of 623 social life is a continuous performing of comedies. This makes it insipid to people of substance, whereas banal minds really delight in it.”

„It can well happen to us that we blurt out something that could be dangerous to us in some way, but our discreet silence does not abandon us in the case of things that could make us ridiculous, because here the effect follows on the heels of the cause.”

„Suffering an injustice kindles an ardent thirst for revenge in a natural human being, and it has often been said that revenge is sweet. This is confirmed by the many sacrifices that are made just to savour it without even intending any restitution.”

„All the suffering heaped upon us by nature, chance or fate is, all things being equal,d not as painful as that which is inflicted on us by the whim of others. This comes from the fact that we acknowledge nature and chance as the original rulers of the world, and we recognize that what befalls us through them could have befallen any other in the same way, which is why in our suffering from this source we lament the common lot of mankind more than our own. On the other hand, suffering through the whim of others adds an entirely unique, bitter ingredient to the pain or to the 624 damage itself, namely the awareness of another’s superiority, whether by force or cunning, in the face of one’s own impotence. The harm suffered is healed by restitution when possible, but that bitter ingredient, that realization that ‘I have to tolerate this from you’ which often hurts more than the damage itself, can only be neutralized by revenge. For insofar as we inflict harm on the perpetrator by force or by cunning, we demonstrate our superiority over him and thereby annul the evidence of his over us. This gives the spirit the satisfaction for which it thirsts. Accordingly where there is much pride, or vanity, there is also much craving for revenge. But just as every fulfilled wish is more or less unveiled as a delusion,e so too the desire for revenge. In most cases the hoped for pleasure is spoiled for us by compassion, indeed, the revenge we take will often rend the heart later on and torment the conscience; its motive is no longer effective, and the proof of our malice remains in plain sight.”

„The anguish of unfulfilled desire is small compared to that of regret, for the former stands before the future, which is always open and immeasurably vast, while the latter stands before the irrevocably closed past.”

„Patience, patientia, but especially Spanish sufrimiento is so named based on suffering,a and is consequently passivity, the opposite of the activity of the mind, with which it can scarcely be reconciled when that activity is great. It is the innate virtue of the phlegmatic, as well as the intellectually slothful and mentally deprived, and of women. That it is nevertheless so very useful and necessary points to the sad state of affairs of this world.”

„Money is human happiness in the abstract; therefore, whoever is no longer able to enjoy happiness concretely devotes his entire heart to it.”

„All obstinacy is based on the will forcing itself into the place of cognition.”

„Annoyance and melancholy lie far apart; the distance from cheerfulness to melancholy is much closer than that from annoyance.Melancholy attracts; annoyance repels.Hypochondria torments us not only with unrelenting annoyance and anger over things in the present; not only with baseless fear of artificially designed misfortunes of the future, but also with unmerited reproaches about our own actions in the past.The most immediate effect of hypochondria is a constant seeking and brooding about things that otherwise would anger or frighten us. Its cause is an inner pathological displeasure, in addition to an inner disquiet that often emanates from one’s temperament; when both reach their highest degree, they lead to suicide.”

„Rage immediately creates a deception which consists in a monstrous magnification and distortion of its occasion. This deception itself now heightens the rage and in turn is magnified again by this heightened rage. The mutual effect continually intensifies in this manner until the ‘brief rage’a appears.To prevent this, animated types should try to master themselves as soon as they begin to grow angry, so that they can momentarily shut the matter out of their mind; for when they return to it after an hour it will no longer seem so serious and soon perhaps appear insignificant.”

„Hatred is an affair of the heart, contempt that of the head. The I has neither one in its power, since its heart is unchangeable and moved by motives, and its head judges according to immutable rules and objective data. The I is merely the connection of this heart with this head, the bond. Hatred and contempt are in decisive antagonism and mutually exclusive. It is even the case that some hatred has no other source than the respect commanded by another’s merits. And on the other hand, if one were to hate all miserable creatures, he would have his work cut out for him; yet every single one of them can be despised with the greatest ease. True, genuine contempt, which is the reverse of true, genuine pride, remains quite secretive and reveals nothing of itself. For whoever lets his contempt be noticed already gives a sign of some respect in so doing, in that he wants the other to know how little he esteems him; now he reveals hatred, which excludes and only feigns contempt. Genuine contempt, on the contrary, is the pure conviction of the worthlessness of the other and is compatible with consideration and indulgence, by means of which we avoid irritating the despised person for the sake of our own peace and security, since anyone can do harm. If nevertheless this pure, cold, upright contempt should ever become visible, then it is reciprocated with the bloodiest hatred, because it is not in the despised person’s power to requite with the same.”

„Every incident that puts us into any kind of unpleasant mood, no matter how insignificant, will leave an after-effect in our mind which, as long as it lasts, will inhibit the clear and objective apprehension of things and circumstances, indeed, tinge all our thoughts just as a very tiny object held up close to our eye will limit and distort our field of vision.”

„Whoever wants to eavesdrop on his own sincere feelings towards a person should pay attention to the impression made by the first sight of an unexpected letter from him.”

„At times it seems that we simultaneously want and do not want something and accordingly we are simultaneously pleased and displeased by the same event. When for instance we have to pass a decisive test in some way or situation, the success of which will be of very great value to us, then we both desire and fear the moment of this test. If we learn while waiting that it has been postponed this time, this will simultaneously please and displease us, for though it is counter to our intention, it still gives us momentary relief. It’s the same when we are awaiting an important, decisive letter and it does not arrive. In such cases really two different motives affect us; one stronger but more distant – the desire to pass the test and have the decision; and a weaker but closer one – the desire to be left in peace for now, unhurried, and thus to continue enjoying the advantage of the condition of hopeful uncertainty over that of the quite possibly unhappy outcome. Accordingly what happens here in the moral sense is what happens physically when a smaller but closer object in our field of vision covers or obstructs a larger, more distant object.”

„Reason also deserves to be called a prophet, after all, it holds out to us the prospect of the future as the eventual consequence and effect of our present actions. Therefore it is precisely suited to hold us in check when cravings of sexual lust, or outbursts of rage, or stirrings of greed threaten to lead us to things we would have to regret in the future.”

„The course and circumstances of our individual lives are, with respect to their true meaning and context, like the cruder works of mosaic. As long as we stand right up against them, we cannot quite recognize the objects portrayed and we neither perceive their significance nor beauty; both of these only appear at some distance. Likewise we often do not understand the true context of important events in our own lives during their unfolding, nor soon thereafter, but only after much time has passed.* Is this so because we need the magnifying lens of imagination?a Or because the whole can only be surveyed from a distance? Or because the passions must have cooled? Or because only the school of experience makes us ripe for judgement? – Perhaps it is all this together; but what is certain is that often we do not properly see the light regarding the actions of others, and occasionally our own, until many years later. – And just as it is in our own lives, so it is in history also.”

„*We do not easily recognize the significance of events and persons in the present; only when they lie in the past do they emerge in their significance, elevated by memory, stories, and descriptions.”

„The states of human happiness are often like certain stands of trees which look wondrously beautiful from afar, but when we approach and enter them, this beauty disappears; we don’t know where it went, and we simply find ourselves standing among trees. This is why we so often envy the situation of others.”

„Why is it that, in spite of all mirrors, we really do not know how we look and therefore cannot picture our own persona like that of any acquaintance? This difficulty confronts the ‘know thyself!’b already at the outset.Without doubt this is due partly to the fact that in the mirror we always look at ourselves facing straight forward and without moving our gaze, so that the significant play of our eyes and along with it the genuinely characteristic features of our gaze are for the most part lost. But alongside this physical impossibility an ethical one analogous to it is at work. We are not capable of gazing with the look of a stranger at our own image in the mirror, which is the condition for the objectivity of its perception, because ultimately this look rests on moral egoism with its deeply felt not-I (cf. The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, p. 275c); these are required in order to perceive all faults purely objectively and without exception, and only then can the image manifest itself faithfully and truly. Instead of this, when someone sees himself in the mirror that same egoism always whispers a precautionary ‘that is not the not-I, but I’, which functions like a ‘touch me not’d and prevents the purely objective apprehension which does not appear capable of emerging without the ferment of a grain of malice.”

„No one knows which forcese for suffering or acting he bears within himself until an occasion sets them in motion”

„Existence without consciousness has reality only for other beings in whose consciousness it manifests itself; immediate reality is conditioned by its own consciousness. Thus the individually real existence of a human being also lies chiefly in one’s consciousness. But as such this is necessarily a representing thing, therefore conditioned by the intellect and by the sphere and substance of its activity. Accordingly the degrees of clarity of consciousness and consequently of soundness of mind could be regarded as the degrees of the reality of existence. Now in the human race itself the degrees of soundness of mind or of the clear consciousness of our own and others’ existence are manifoldly gradated indeed, according to the measure of a mind’s natural powers, of their cultivation and of the leisure for reflection. “As concerns the actual and original diversity of mental powers, a comparison of them cannot be conducted as long as we do not focus on the individuals, but stay with the general, because this diversity cannot be surveyed from afar and is not so easily and externally recognizable as differences in education, leisure and occupation. But even proceeding on 631 the basis of these alone we have to admit that many a human being has at least a tenfold higher degree of existence than that of another – exists ten times as much.”

„whereas animals have only the character of the species, mankind alone is granted the real individual character. Yet in most people there is only little of an actual individual nature; they can be almost entirely sorted according to class. ‘They are specimens.’g Their willing and thinking, like their physiognomy, is that of the whole species or in any case that class of people to which they belong, and for just this reason it is trivial, mundane, common and exists by the thousands. Usually what they say and do can also be predicted rather accurately. They have no characteristic stamp: they are factory productions.”

„Everyone regards the limit of his field of vision as that of the world; in intellectual matters this is as unavoidable as in physical seeing the illusion that the sky touches the earth at the horizon. But among the things based on this is the notion that everyone measures us with their own yardstick, which is usually that of a mere tailor, and we have to put up with this; also that everyone falsely ascribes their own pettiness to us, a fiction that gets conceded once and for all.”

„‘Wisdom’a to me connotes not merely theoretical but also practical perfection. I would define it as the completed and correct cognition of things on the whole and in general, which has so utterly permeated someone that it now appears even in his actions, such that it guides his activity everywhere.”

„Everything original and therefore genuine in mankind acts as such unconsciously, like the forces of nature. Whatever has passed through consciousness became a representation in so doing; consequently its expression is to a certain extent the communication of a representation. Accordingly then, all genuine and proven qualities of character and intellect are originally unconscious, and they make a profound impression only as such. Everything conscious of this kind has already been revised and is intentional, and therefore it switches over to affectation, i.e., to deceit. What someone has accomplished unconsciously costs him no effort, but by the 638 same token no effort is able to replace it; original concepts arise in this manner, as they are the foundation of all genuine achievements and constitute their core. Therefore only what is inborn is genuine and sound, and anyone who wishes to achieve something in the realm of conduct, writing or cultivation, in anything really, must follow the rules without knowing them.”

„Many a man reliably owes the happiness of his life merely to the circumstance that he possesses a pleasant smile, with which he wins over hearts. – Nevertheless the hearts would do better to take care and to note from Hamlet’s memorial ‘that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain’.”

„People with great and brilliant qualities think little of admitting their flaws and weaknesses, or letting them be seen. They regard them as something they have already paid for, or probably think that their weaknesses do not so much bring shame upon them, rather they bring honour to their weaknesses. This will especially be the case with flaws that are directly associated with their great qualities, as ‘indispensable conditions’,a in accordance with the above cited observation of George Sand: ‘Everyone has the failings of his virtues. On the other hand there are people of good character and irreproachable mind who never admit their few minor weaknesses, but rather carefully conceal them and are also very sensitive to any reference to them, precisely because their whole merit consists in the absence of flaws and defects and this merit is simply diminished by every flaw that comes to light.”

„Modesty with mediocre qualities is merely honesty; with great talents it is hypocrisy. Therefore openly expressed self-esteem and undisguised awareness of extraordinary powers is as becoming in the latter as modesty is in the former; very nice examples of this are provided by Valerius Maximus in the chapter ‘On self-confidence’.”

„Mankind surpasses all animals even in his capacity for training. Muslims are trained to pray five times a day facing Mecca, and they do it inviolably. Christians are trained to make the sign of the cross in certain situations, to genuflect and so on, just as religion generally is the true masterpiece of training, namely the training of our capacity to think. This is why, as is well known, it is never too early to start this. There is no absurdity, no matter how palpable, that could not be firmly implanted in the mind of all people if only we were to begin to impress it before their sixth birthday, by ceaselessly repeating it to them with solemn earnest. For just like the training of animals, so too that of humans succeeds perfectly only in early youth.”

„A physician sees people in all their weakness; a lawyer in all their wickedness; a theologian in all their stupidity.”

„Much power of imaginationb is possessed by him whose intuitive brain activity is strong enough not to need the stimulation of the senses each time in order to become active. Accordingly the power of imagination is the more active the less external intuition is directed to us by the senses. Long solitude in prison, or in a sick-room, quiet, twilight and darkness are beneficial to its activity; under their influence it spontaneously begins its play. Conversely, when intuition is given much real material from outside, as on journeys, in the tumult of the world, or in broad daylight, then the power of imagination quits working and does not become active, even when prompted; it sees that it is not its time. Nevertheless in order to be fruitful the power of imagination must have received much material from the external world, for this alone fills its storeroom. But it is the same with the nourishment of the imagination as it is with the body; when it has recently been fuelled with much outside nourishment, which it now has to digest, then it is least capable of 641 performing any work and tends to quit; and yet it is to this same nourishment that it owes all its powers, which it will afterwards manifest at the right time.”

„Opinion obeys the law of oscillation; if on one side it has gone beyond the centre of gravity, then it has to do so just as far on the other side. Only with time does it find its right resting point and stand still.”

„In space distance makes everything smaller by contracting it, so that its flaws and drawbacks disappear, which is why in a convex mirror or in a camera obscura everything seems much more beautiful than in reality – this is exactly how the past acts in time; the scenes and events that lie far in the past, along with the persons participating in them, assume an exceedingly charming appearance in our memory, which leaves behind everything inessential and disturbing. The present, lacking such an advantage, always seems defective. And just as in space small objects appear large up close, and when very close even occupy our entire field of vision then become small and insignificant as soon as we have distanced ourselves somewhat, likewise in time the small incidents, accidents and events that occur in our daily lives and dealings appear large, significant and important as long as they are presently right before us, and accordingly they arouse our affects, care, annoyance and passion; but as soon as the indefatigable current of time has removed them only slightly, they are insignificant, unworthy of attention and soon forgotten, since their magnitude was based merely on their proximity”

„Because joy and sorrow are not representations but affections of the will, they are not in the realm of memory and we are not able to recall them specifically, which would amount to renewing them; instead, we can only visualize the representations by which they were accompanied, but especially recall the expressions provoked by them at the time, in order to gauge from them what the affections were. Therefore our recollection of joys and sufferings is always imperfect and when they are gone they are indifferent to us.”

„As a rule people of very great capabilities will get along better with extremely limited minds than with ordinary ones, for the same reason that the despot and the plebeians, the grandparents and the grandchildren are natural allies.”

„People need outside activities because they have none on the inside. Conversely, where the latter takes place, the former is instead a very unwelcome, even an execrated disturbance and hindrance, and what prevails is a desire for quiet and rest from the outside, and for idleness. – The former also explains the restlessness and aimless travel mania of those who are without occupations. What chases them through the countries is the same boredom that drives and herds them together in droves at home, such that it is fun to watch them”

„boredom is the source of the gravest ills: gambling, drinking, spending, intrigues and so on have their source in boredom, when we get to the bottom of the matter.”

„Whoever does not go to the theatre resembles the man who dresses without a mirror – but even worse is the man who makes his decisions without asking the advice of a friend. For someone can have the most correct and fitting judgement in all things, only not in those of his own affairs, because here the will immediately distorts the intellect’s conception. Therefore we should seek advice for the same reason that a physician cures everyone but himself, for which he instead calls a colleague.”

„Everyday natural gesticulation as it accompanies any conversation of some liveliness is its own language, and indeed a much more universal one than that of words, since it is independent of them and the same in all nations;”

„these standing and universally observed forms of gesticulation certainly are not based on any preapproved agreement, but are natural and original, a true natural language, even though they may become established through imitation and habit. As is well known, it is incumbent on actors and in a more limited sense public speakers to engage in detailed study of gestures, but this has to consist mainly of observation and imitation, for the matter cannot be reduced to abstract rules, with the exception of a few general guiding principles such as e.g. that the gesture must not follow the word but instead closely precede it, thereby announcing and drawing attention to it.”

„Better in my opinion than Schiller’s well-considered poem ‘Women’s Dignity’,a which uses antithesis and contrast for its effect, are these few words of Jouy for expressing the true praise of women: ‘Without women our lives would be deprived of help in the beginning, of joy in the middle and of consolation in the end.”

„Women are suited to be nurses and governesses of our earliest childhood precisely by the fact that they themselves are childish, silly and short-sighted, in a word, big children their whole life long, a sort of intermediate stage between a child and a man, who is the actual human being. Just look at a girl as she dawdles, dances around with and sings to a child for days, and then imagine what a man doing his utmost could achieve in her stead!”

„nature has equipped woman, as every other creature, with the weapons and tools she needs for securing her existence and for as much time as she needs them, and it has done so with its usual frugality. For just as the female ant after copulation loses its now superfluous wings, which are even dangerous for purposes of breeding, so too woman loses her beauty after one or two births, probably even for the same reason.Accordingly in their hearts young girls consider their domestic or business affairs secondary, and indeed mere fun; they consider love, conquests and whatever is associated with them, such as cosmetics, dancing and so on, to be their sole serious occupation.”

„The nobler and more perfect a thing, the later and slower it reaches maturity. A man obtains the maturity of his reason and mental powers scarcely before his twenty-eighth year, a woman with her eighteenth. But it is also a reason in kind in her case, one measured quite sparingly. Therefore women remain children their whole life long, see only what is closest, cling to the present, take the appearance of things for the things themselves and prefer trivialities to the most important situations.”

„In their hearts women think the destiny of men is to earn money, whereas theirs is to spend it if possible already during the man’s lifetime, but at least after his death. They are strengthened in this belief by the fact that the man turns over to them his earnings for the household. – As many disadvantages as all this surely brings with it, still it has the benefit that the woman is more absorbed in the present than we are, and enjoys it more if only it is bearable, which gives rise to woman’s peculiar cheerfulness which suits her for the recreation and if necessary the consolation of the man who is burdened with cares. It is by no means objectionable also to seek the counsel of women in difficult matters, in the manner of the ancient Germans, for their way of interpreting things is entirely different from ours and indeed especially insofar as they focus on the shortest route to their goal and generally on what lies closest to them, which we usually overlook precisely because it is right in front of our noses; then we need to be guided back to it in order to regain the proximate and simple view. To this we should add that women are decisively more sober than we are, in that they do not see into things more than actually exists, whereas when our passions are aroused we readily magnify what is present or add something imaginary”

„lion with claws and jaws, the elephant and boar with tusks, the bull with horns and the cuttlefish with ink that clouds the water, so too nature has endowed woman with the art of dissimulation for her protection and defence, and has dedicated to woman in the form of this gift all the force that it granted to men as physical strength and reason. Dissimulation is therefore inborn to her, and is thus possessed by stupid almost as much as by clever women. It is therefore as natural for woman to immediately make use of this gift at every opportunity as for those animals to use their weapons when attacked, and she perceives it to a certain extent as an exercising of her rights. For this reason a completely truthful and undissembling woman is perhaps impossible. This is precisely why they so easily see through another’s dissimulation that it is not advisable to attempt it on them.”

„Young, strong and handsome men are by nature called upon to see to the propagation of the human race, so that the race does not degenerate. In this is nature’s firm will, and it is expressed in the passions of women. This law supersedes all others in longevity and force. Therefore woe to him who would arrange his rights and interests to stand in the way of this law; whatever he may say or do, at the first significant opportunity he will be mercilessly crushed. For the secret, unspoken and indeed unconscious but inborn morality of women is: ‘We are justified in deceiving those who presume to have a right over the species by barely providing for us individuals. The constitution and consequently the welfare of the species has been placed in our hands and entrusted to our care by the next generation emanating from us; we will administer this conscientiously. But in no way are women aware of this supreme principle in the abstract,a but only concretely,b and they have no other expression for it when the time comes but their manner of acting, in which their conscience generally grants them more peace than we suspect, since in the darkest depth of their hearts they are aware that in violating their duty to the individual they have 655 all the better fulfilled their duty to the species, whose rights are infinitely greater. My main work provides the detailed explanation of this matter in chapter 44 of volume 2.Because at bottom women exist solely for the propagation of the species and their destiny is absorbed by this, they live generally more in the species than in the individuals, and in their hearts they take more seriously the affairs of the species than those of individuals. This imparts a certain frivolity to their entire nature and doings and generally a direction that is fundamentally different from that of a man, from which springs the discord that is so frequent and almost normal in marriage”

„Among men by nature there is merely indifference, but among women there is already hostility by nature. It probably stems from ‘professional jealousy’, which with men is limited to their particular guild, but with women encompasses the entire sex, since they all have only one profession. Even in chance encounters on the street they size one another up like Guelphs and Ghibellines. Two women upon first becoming acquainted also approach each other with noticeably more forced politeness and dissimulation than two men in the same situation, which is also why compliments between two women look much more ridiculous than between men. Furthermore, whereas a man as a rule still speaks with a certain consideration and humanity even to those who stand far below him socially, it is unbearable to watch how proudly and disdainfully a woman of high society behaves towards one of the lower classes (who is not in her service) in speaking with her. This may stem from the fact that with women all differences of rank are much more precarious than with us, and can change and disappear much more rapidly, because while in our case a hundred things weigh in the balance, with them only one thing is decisive, namely which man they have pleased; likewise it may stem from that fact that because of the one-sidedness of their profession they are much closer to one another than are men, which is why they try to accentuate class differences.”

„The undersized, narrow-shouldered, wide-hipped and short-legged sex could only be called the fair sex by a male intellect clouded by its sexual drive;a its entire beauty resides in this drive.8 We would be more justified in calling the female sex the unaesthetic. They really and truly have feeling and receptivity neither for music, nor poetry, nor the plastic arts, but it is mere aping for the sake of their desire to please when they affect and pretend in these matters. This is why they are incapable of a purely objective interest in anything, and I think the reason for this is as follows. A man strives in everything for a direct mastery over things, either through understanding or subduing them. But a woman is always and everywhere reliant on a merely indirect mastery, namely by means of a man who alone has to be directly mastered by her. This is why it is in a woman’s nature to regard everything only as a means to attain a man, and her interest in anything else is always only simulated, a mere detour that amounts to coquetry and aping”

„Isolated and partial exceptions do not change the matter, but women taken on the whole are and remain the most thorough and incurable philistines, which is why, given the extremely absurd arrangement whereby they share the position and title of the man, they are the constant goads of his ignoble ambitions, and furthermore, on account of the same quality, their predominance and tone- setting are the ruin of modern society.”

„In our monogamous continent marrying means halving our rights and doubling our responsibilities. Yet when the laws conceded to women equal rights with men they should have also endowed them with masculine reason.”

„That woman is by nature destined to obedience can be recognized by the fact that every one of them who is placed in a position of complete independence, which is unnatural to them, immediately attaches herself to some man by whom she allows herself to be guided and ruled; because she needs a master. If she is young, then he will be a lover; if she is old, a father confessor.”

„Whoever makes a point of checking will discover that the right or the clear understanding of many a rather simple thing and circumstance only occurred to him at a very old age and sometimes suddenly.”

„Even children most of the time have the fatal tendency of sufficing themselves with words and learning them by rote instead of trying to understand the thing, in order to extricate themselves if the occasion should arise. This tendency remains afterwards and is the reason why the knowledge of many scholars is merely verbal rubbish.”

„The main thing should remain, however, that intuitions are to precede concepts and not vice versa, as is usually but just as unfortunately the case, as if a child were to come into the world feet-first or a verse rhyme-first. Thus whereas the mind of a child is still quite poor in intuitions, concepts and judgements are being impressed on it, or prejudices actually; this ready-made apparatus he then later brings into his perceptions and experience, instead of the former arising and settling from the latter as they should. Intuition is multifaceted and rich, and therefore cannot match the brevity and speed of an abstract concept which quickly finishes everything; this is why it will only correct such preconceived notions late or never at all.”

„Generally speaking children should not become acquainted with life in any respect from the copy before the original. Therefore instead of rushing only to put books in their hands, we should be gradually introducing them to things and human circumstances. Above all we should see to it that they are guided to a pure apprehension of reality and bring them to the point where they draw their concepts always directly from the real world and form them according to reality; but they should not draw them from other sources, from books, fairy tales or the speeches of others, and then later apply such concepts ready- made to reality, for inasmuch as their heads are already filled with chimeras, they will falsely interpret reality on the one hand, and on the other strive in vain to remodel it in accordance with the chimeras, and thus go astray on theoretical or even practical dead ends. Indeed it is amazing how much adversity is caused by the early planting of chimeras and the prejudices stemming from them; the subsequent education given to us by the world and real life must then be applied mainly to their eradication. On this also rests the answer of Antisthenes as reported by Diogenes Laertius (VI, 7): ‘In answering the question, what is the most necessary thing to learn, he responded: “To unlearn what is bad.”

„Precisely because most early acquired errors are indelible and the power of judgement is the latest to mature, children should be kept free until their sixteenth year from all teachings in which there could be major errors, hence from philosophy, religion and general views of any kind, and they should be allowed to pursue only those things in which either no errors are possible, as in mathematics, or in which they aren’t very dangerous as in languages, natural science, history and so on; but generally at every age they should pursue only those sciences which are accessible and intelligible to them. Childhood is the time to collect data and learn to know individual things specially and thoroughly; on the other hand judgement in general must still be suspended and ultimate explanations deferred. The power of judgement should be allowed to rest, since it presupposes maturity and experience, and we should beware of anticipating it by inculcating prejudices, which will paralyse it forever. Conversely memory should be especially called on, since in youth it has its greatest strength and tenacity, yet with the most cautious selectivity proceeding from scrupulous deliberation. For, inasmuch as what is well learned in youth sticks forever, this precious facility should be used for the greatest possible gain. When we call to mind how deeply engraved in our memories are those persons we knew in the first twelve years of our lives, and how even the events of that period and generally most of what we then experienced, heard and learned is indelibly impressed on us, then it is a very natural idea to ground education on this receptivity and tenacity of the youthful mind by guiding all impressions to it in a strictly methodical and systematic way, according to precepts and rules. However, since human beings are allotted only a few years of youth and the capacity for memory as such, and even more so in the individual, is always limited, everything would depend on filling it with the most essential and important things in any branch of knowledge, to the exclusion of everything else. This selection should be made with the most thorough deliberation by the most capable minds and masters in every discipline, and its results firmly established. It would have to be based on a screening of what is necessary and important for anyone generally to know, and for every special profession or discipline. Knowledge of the first kind would have to be organized into a series of graduated courses or encyclopaedias according to the level of general education intended for everyone based on the standard of their external circumstances, ranging all the way from limitation to the barest essentials of primary instruction to the epitome of all subjects taught by the philosophy faculty. But knowledge of the second kind will be left to the selection of the true masters in every discipline. The whole thing would yield a specially executed canon of intellectual education, which of course would require revision every ten years. Thus by means of such facilities the youthful power of memory would be used to its fullest advantage and provide exquisite material for the power of judgement which appears later.”

„Maturity of knowledge,a i.e., the perfection this can reach in every individual, consists in the fact that an exact connection has been brought about between all of his abstract concepts and his intuitive apprehension, so that each of his concepts directly or indirectly rests on an intuitive basis, which is the only way such concepts have real value, and likewise that he is able to subsume every intuition coming before him under its correct and suitable concept. This maturity is the work of experience alone and consequently of time. Since we acquire most of our intuitive and our abstract concepts separately, the former naturally and the latter through good or bad instruction and information from others, in youth there is often little correspondence and connection between our concepts established through mere words and our real knowledge acquired through intuition. Both only approach and mutually correct one another gradually, but only when they have completely grown together does maturity of knowledge exist. This maturity is entirely independent of the remaining greater or lesser perfection of anyone’s capabilities, which does not rest on the relationship between abstract and intuitive knowledge but on the intensive degree of both.”

„For the practical human being the most necessary study is the attainment of an exact and thorough knowledge of what really goes on in the world; but it is also the most protracted in that it lasts into advanced old age without his having finished learning, whereas in the sciences he has already mastered the most important things in his youth.”

„Through novels a completely false view of life is foisted on them and expectations are aroused which could never be fulfilled”

„That the exteriora of a human being graphically reproduces his interiorb and the face expresses and reveals his whole essencec is an assumption whose a priori nature and thus certainty are demonstrated by the universal desire, which appears at every opportunity, to see someone who has distinguished himself in any way, bad or good, or who has produced an extraordinary work or, failing this, at least to learn from others what he looks like. Hence, on the one hand, the rush to those places where he is expected to be, and on the other the efforts of the daily newspapers, especially in England, to describe him minutely and strikingly, until soon thereafter painters and engravers give us graphic portrayals and finally Daguerre’s invention,d so highly valued for precisely this reason, satisfies our need most perfectly. Likewise in ordinary life everyone examines the physiognomy of everyone they meet and tries secretly to ascertain his moral and intellectual nature in advance from his facial features. All this could not be the case if, as some fools imagine, the appearance of a man were of no significance, as if the soul were indeed one thing and the body another, relating to the former as a coat to the man himself. On the contrary each human face is a hieroglyph which truly can be deciphered, indeed whose alphabet we bear within us ready-made. A human being’s face even says more and is more interesting, as a rule, than his mouth, for it is the compendium of everything that he will ever say, being the monogram of all this human being’s thinking and striving. It is also the case that the mouth expresses only the thoughts of a man, while the face expresses a thought of nature. Therefore everyone is worthy of being carefully observed, even if everyone is not worth talking to. “Now if each individual is worth observing as an individual thought of nature, then so too in the highest degree is beauty, for it is a higher, more universal concept of nature: it is nature’s thought of the species. This is why it compels our gaze so powerfully; it is nature’s fundamental and main thought, whereas the individual is only a secondary thought, a corollary. Everyone tacitly proceeds from the principle that everyone is as they appear, which is a correct principle; but the difficulty lies in the application, the capacity for which is partly innate and partly to be gained by experience and which no one completely masters, so that even the most practised individual catches himself in mistakes. Nevertheless the face does not lie – regardless of what Figaro may saya – but it is we who read from it what is not there. To be sure, the deciphering of a face is a great and difficult art. Its principles can never be learned in the abstract. The first condition for it is that we perceive our man with a purely objective look, which is not so easy. For at the faintest hint of dislike, affection, fear, hope or even the thought of what kind of impression we are now making on him, in short, as soon as anything subjective gets mixed in, the hieroglyph becomes confused and falsified. Just as the sound of a language is heard only by someone who does not understand it, because otherwise the signified immediately displaces the sign from consciousness, so too the only one who sees a person’s physiognomy is someone to whom that person is still a stranger, i.e., who has not become accustomed to his face through frequently seeing or even speaking with him. Therefore, strictly speaking, it is only at first glance that we have the pure objective impression of a face and thus the possibility of deciphering it. Just as odours affect us only when they first set in and we notice the taste of a wine really only with the first glass, so faces also make their full impression only the first time. This is why we should pay careful attention to it and make note of it, indeed, with individuals who are important to us personally, we should write down our impression, that is, if we are to trust our own physiognomical feelings. Our subsequent acquaintance and socializing will efface that impression, but the sequel will someday confirm it. Meanwhile we do not want to deny that the first sight is often extremely unpleasant – but then most people do not count for much! – With the exception of beautiful, good-natured and intelligent faces – and these are extremely few and rare – I believe the sight of every new face will generally arouse a sensation related to shock in a person of refined feelings, inasmuch as it presents something unpleasant in a new and surprising combination. It really is, as a rule, a gloomy sight (a sorry sight).c Indeed there are some whose faces display such a naïve coarseness and baseness of character, accompanied by such an animalistic limitation of the understanding, that we have to wonder how they even go about with such a face and do not wear a mask instead. Indeed, there are faces the mere sight of which makes us feel sullied. Therefore we cannot blame those whose privileged circumstances allow them the luxury of withdrawing and buffering themselves so that they remain entirely removed from the painful sensation of ‘seeing new faces’. In the metaphysical explanation of this matter we have to consider that everyone’s individuality is precisely that from which he will be reclaimed and corrected by his existence itself. If on the other hand the psychological explanation suffices for us, then we must ask ourselves what kind of physiognomy is to be expected from those in whose hearts very rarely anything has stirred throughout their lives but petty, lowly, miserable thoughts, and crude, selfish, jealous, bad and malicious desires. Each of these has carved its impression on the face for as long as it has lasted; over time and through frequent repetition, all these traces have furrowed deeply and become like wagon ruts, so to speak. This is why the sight of most people causes us to be startled at first and we only gradually become accustomed to their faces, that is, become so deadened to their impression that it no longer has an effect on us.”

„Another cause for the alleged gain from closer acquaintance is that the man whose first glance warned us of him no longer shows merely his own nature and character once we converse with him, but also his education, i.e., not merely what he really is by nature, but also what he has acquired as shared property with the whole human race; three-quarters of what he says does not belong to him but has entered him from outside,4 then we are often surprised to hear such a minotaur speaking so humanely. But if we proceed from the ‘closer acquaintance’ to an even closer one, then ‘the bestiality’ promised by the face will ‘soon be splendidly revealed’.a – Thus whoever is gifted with physiognomical acumen should pay careful attention to the expressions which preceded all closer acquaintance and were therefore unfalsified. For the face of a human being says precisely what he is, and if it deceives us, then it is our fault, not his. Conversely, the words of a human being say merely what he thinks, and more often only what he learned or even what he merely pretends to think. To this must be added that when we speak with him, or even hear him speak to others, we abstract from his actual physiognomy by setting it aside as the substratum, the strictly given, and pay attention only to its pathognomical dimension, the play of facial expressions while he is speaking; but he arranges this in such a way that he puts forward only the good side.”

„in order to comprehend the true physiognomy of a man purely and deeply, we must observe him when he is alone and left to himself. Any socializing and conversation with others already cast a foreign reflection on him, mostly to his advantage, since he is set in motion by action and reaction and elevated by them. On the other hand, alone and left to himself, stewing in his own thoughts and sensations – only then is he completely and utterly himself. Then a deeply penetrating physiognomical glance can comprehend his entire nature in general at once. For on his face, in and of itself, the fundamental tone of all his thoughts and strivings is impressed, the irrevocable decreea of what he has to be and what he only completely senses himself when he is alone.”

„One more thing I need to point out is that generally it is much easier physiognomically to discover a man’s intellectual abilities than his moral character, since the former tend to display outwardly and have their expression not only in the face and its play of expressions, but also in the gait, indeed in every movement no matter how small. Perhaps one could even distinguish from behind a dummkopf, a fool, and a man of intellect. The dummkopf is characterized by the leaden sluggishness of all his movements; foolishness stamps its imprint on every gesture; intellect and reflection do the same thing. This is the basis of Labruyère’s observation: ‘There is nothing so subtle, so simple and so imperceptible that it does not contain a mannerism that betrays us. A dummkopf cannot enter, exit, sit down, stand up, keep silent or stand on his feet like a man of intellect.’ The matter itself is based first of all on the fact that the larger and more developed the brain and the thinner the spinal cord and nerves in relation to it, the greater are not only intelligence but at the same time the mobility and suppleness of the limbs, because they are then more directly and decisively controlled by the brain and consequently everything is pulled more by one string, such that every movement expresses its precise purpose. But the whole affair is analogous to and indeed connected with the fact that the higher an animal is on the scale of beings, the more easily it can be killed by an injury to a single spot. Take for instance the batrachia; just as they are sluggish, lethargic and slow in their movements, so too are they unintelligent and yet extremely tenacious of life, all of which can be explained by the fact that they have very thick spinal cord and nerves despite a tiny brain. Generally speaking, gait and arm movement are mainly functions of the brain, because the outer limbs receive their movement and every modification thereof, no matter how small, from the brain by means of the spinal cord nerves. This is also precisely why voluntary movements exhaust us, and this exhaustion, like pain, has its seat in the brain and not, as we imagine, in the limbs, and therefore it induces sleep; whereas those not stimulated by the brain, that is the involuntary movements of organic life such as the heart, lungs and so on proceed tirelessly. Now since the same brain is responsible both for thinking and controlling the limbs, the character of its activity is expressed in the one as in the other according to the constitution of an individual; stupid people move like automata, while in intelligent people every joint is expressive. Nevertheless, intellectual qualities are much better recognized from the face than from gestures and movements, from the shape and size of the brow, the tension and mobility of the facial features and above all from the eyes – ranging from the small, cloudy, dull and dim eyes of a pig through all the intermediate stages up to the radiant and flashing eyes of a genius. – The look of cleverness,a even of the finest, differs from that of genius in that it bears the stamp of service to the will; the latter, on the other hand, is free of it. And so the anecdote taken from Petrarch’s contemporary Joseph Brivius and related by Squarzafichi in his life of Petrarch is quite credible, namely that once at the court of the Visconti, as Petrarch stood among many gentlemen and nobles, Galeazzo Visconti instructed his son, who was at that time still a boy and later would become the first Duke of Milan, to pick the wisest man among all those present. The boy looked at all of them for a while, but then took Petrarch by the hand and led him to his father to the great admiration of all who were present. For nature presses the stamp of its dignity so clearly on the privileged of our species that a child can recognize it. Therefore I would advise my perspicacious countrymen that if they ever again get the urge to trumpet an ordinary brain for thirty years as a great mind, they at least do not select such a tavern keeper’s physiognomy as Hegel’s, on whose all too familiar face nature had written ‘ordinary fellow’a in her most legible handwriting. But things are different from the intellectual when it comes to morals, to the character of a human being; this is much more difficult to recognize physiognomically because, as something metaphysical, it lies incomparably deeper and while it is indeed also associated with corporality or the organism, this only indirectly and not in connection with a specific part and system of it, like the intellect. We must add that whereas everyone is generally very satisfied with their understanding and strives openly to display it at every opportunity, morals are very rarely exposed to the light of day and are in fact for the most part deliberately concealed, the long practice of which brings about great mastery. Meanwhile, as detailed above, bad thoughts and worthless aspirations gradually leave their mark on the face, especially the eyes. Accordingly when judging physiognomically it is easy for us to guarantee that a man will never produce an immortal work, but not that he will never commit a major crime.”

„just as a large diamond cut into pieces is equal in value only to so many small ones, or an army shattered to pieces and dissolved into small units is no longer capable of anything, so too a great mind is no more capable than an ordinary one as soon as it is interrupted, disturbed, distracted and diverted, because its superiority is conditioned by concentrating all its powers on one point and object, as a concave mirror does all of its rays, and precisely this is prevented by the noisy interruption. This is why eminent minds have always abhorred every kind of disturbance, interruption and diversion, especially those of a violent nature through noise, whereas others are not especially bothered by this. The most sensible and intelligent of all European nations has even called the rule ‘never interrupt’b its eleventh commandment. But noise is the most impertinent of all interruptions, since it breaks up and indeed breaks down even our own thoughts. But where there is nothing to interrupt, noise is of course not particularly sensed. – Occasionally I am tormented and bothered by a moderate and constant noise before I am clearly aware of it, in that I sense it merely as a constant hindrance to my thinking, like dragging a weight with my foot, until I realize what it is. But transitioning now from the genus to the species, I have to denounce as the most irresponsible and scandalous noise the truly infernal whip-cracking in the echoing streets of the cities, which robs life of all peace and all pensiveness. Nothing provides me with a clearer notion of the obtuseness and thoughtlessness of mankind than the condoning of this whip-cracking.2 This sudden, sharp, brain-numbing crack, which cuts to pieces all contemplation and murders every thought, has to be painfully felt by everyone who bears anything resembling a thought in his head; therefore each of those cracks must disturb hundreds in their mental activity, however inferior it may be in quality, but they chop through a thinker’s meditations as painfully and disastrously as the executioner’s blade severs the head from the body.”

„Meanwhile, Thomas Hood (Up the Rhine) says of them: ‘For a musical people, they are the most noisy I ever met with.’b But that they are so is not based on the fact that they are more inclined to noise-making than others, but on the insensitivity stemming from the obtuseness of those who have to hear it, who are not disturbed in any thinking or reading simply because they are not thinking, but merely smoking instead, which is their surrogate for thinking. The universal toleration of unnecessary noise, for instance of the extremely ill- mannered and vulgar slamming of doors, is nothing short of a sign of the general obtuseness and thought vacuum of their minds.”

„A city with architectural embellishments, monuments, obelisks, fountains and so on, but then with the miserable pavement that is customary in Germany, resembles a woman who is adorned with gold and jewels but is wearing a dirty, ragged dress. If you want to embellish your cities like the Italians’, then first pave them like Italian cities. And incidentally, do not set statues on pedestals as tall as houses, but do as the Italians do.”

„Flies should be taken as the symbol of shamelessness and impudence. For whereas all animals fear humans above all and flee us already at a distance, they land on our noses.”

„Two men from China went to the theatre in Europe for the first time. One occupied himself with understanding the mechanism of the machinery, at which he also succeeded. The other tried despite his ignorance of the language to decipher the meaning of the play. – The astronomer resembles the former, the philosopher the latter.”

„I stood at the mercury trough of a pneumatic apparatus and scooped a few drops with an iron ladle, tossed them in the air and caught them with the ladle; if I failed, then they fell back into the trough and nothing was lost but their momentary form, which is why success and failure left me rather indifferent. – This is how creating nature, or the inner essence of all things, relates to the living and dying of individuals.”

„I found a wild flower, admired its beauty, its perfection in all its parts, and exclaimed: “But all this, in the flower and in thousands like it, blossoms and wilts unobserved by anyone, indeed not even seen by any eye.”

„You fool! Do you think I blossom in order to be seen? I blossom for my own sake and not for the sake of others, because I like it: my delight and my joy consist in my blossoming and my being.”

„At the time when the earth’s surface still consisted of a uniform, even granite crust and there was still no basis for the origin of any living thing, the sun rose one morning. Iris, the messenger of the gods, who was just flying by on a mission for Juno, cried out to the sun as she hurried past: “Why do you even bother to rise? There are no eyes to see you, and no pillar of Memnon to resound!”

„But I am the sun, and I rise because that is what I am: let whoever can see me!”

„A beautiful, verdant and blooming oasis looked around and saw nothing but the surrounding desert; in vain it looked for something like itself, then it broke out lamenting: “Oh wretched, forsaken oasis that I am! I must remain alone! Nowhere are my kind! Indeed, nowhere is there even an eye to see me and delight in my meadows, springs, palm trees and shrubs! Nothing but sad, sandy, rocky and lifeless desert surrounds me. What good to me are all my merits, beauties and riches in this forsakenness!”

„My child, if it were otherwise, if I were not the sad, arid desert but blossoming, green and vivacious, then you would be no oasis, no favoured spot of which the wanderer speaks glowingly even from a distance; instead you would simply be a small part of me and as such vanishing and unnoticed. Therefore bear with patience the condition of your distinction and your glory.”

„Whoever ascends in a balloon does not see himself rising, but the earth sinking lower and lower. – What does this mean? A mystery understood only by those who share this view.”

„With respect to the estimation of a human being’s size, the opposite law applies to the physical and the mental: the former is diminished by distance, the latter magnified.”

„A mother gave her children Aesop’s fables to read for their education and improvement. But very soon they returned the book to her, and the eldest who was quite precocious expressed himself thus: “This is no book for us! It is much too childish and stupid. That foxes, wolves and ravens can speak is something you can no longer foist on us; we have long since passed beyond such pranks!”

„On a cold winter’s day a community of porcupines huddled very close together to protect themselves from freezing through their mutual warmth. However, they soon felt one another’s quills, which then forced them apart. Now when the need for warmth brought them closer together again, that second drawback repeated itself so that they were tossed back and forth between both kinds of suffering until they discovered a moderate distance from one another, at which they could best endure the situation. – This is how the need for society, arising from the emptiness and monotony of our own inner selves, drives people together; but their numerous repulsive qualities and unbearable flaws push them apart once again. The middle distance they finally discover and at which a 691 coexistence is possible is courtesy and good manners. In England, anyone who does not stay at this distance is told: ‘Keep your distance!’a – Of course by means of this the need for mutual warmth is only partially satisfied, but in exchange the prick of the quills is not felt. – Yet whoever has a lot of his own inner warmth prefers to stay away from society in order neither to cause trouble nor to receive it.”

„one cannot be poet and philosopher at the same time”

„Publishing verse is to literature what singing solo is to society, namely an act of personal devotion – to which only the foregoing considerations have been able to motivate me.”

„Exhausted now I stand, my race is run, The weary brow can scarcely bear its laurels: Yet I look fondly on what I have done, Forever unperturbed by others’ quarrels.”