“Oh, for a spot of old-fashioned misanthropy in this unhappy world of notional positivities, of personal and home improvement, of progress that is less than half believed in, of universal fellowship and respect that never seem to work out. . .”
If we were not all so excessively interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.
He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom.
Everybody’s friend is nobody’s.
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every re-meeting a foretaste of the resurrection. That is why even people who are indifferent to each other rejoice so much if they meet again after twenty or thirty years of separation.
When dealing with fools and blockheads there is but one way of showing your intelligence – by having nothing to do with them.
We have not so much to find a correct mean between the two views as rather gain the higher standpoint from which such views disappear of themselves.
Excluding those faces which are beautiful, good-natured, or intellectual – and these are few and far between – I believe that a person of any sensibility hardly ever sees a new face without a sensation akin to shock at encountering a new and surprising combination of unedifying elements.
humour . . . to do honour to which in the midst of this mercilessly ambiguous existence of ours hardly a single page could be too serious. . .
All truth passes through three phases. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
The animals are the damned of this earth and human beings their devilish tormentors.
The inexhaustible activity of thought! finding ever new material to work upon in the multifarious phenomena of self and nature, and able and ready to form new combinations of them, - there you have something that invigorates the mind, and apart from moments of relaxation, sets if far above the reach of boredom.
In solitude, where everyone is thrown back upon his own resources, what a man has in himself comes to light; the fool in fine raiment groans under the burden of his miserable personality, a burden which he can never throw off, whilst the man of talent peoples the waste places with his animating thoughts.
By a peculiar weakness of human nature, people generally think too much about the opinion which others form of them; although the slightest reflection will show that this opinion, whatever it may be, is not essential to happiness. Therefore it is hard to understand why everybody feels so very pleased when he sees that other people have a good opinion of him, or say anything flattering to his vanity. If you stroke a cat, it will purr; and, as inevitably, if you praise a man, a sweet expression of delight will appear on his face; and even though the praise is a palpable lie, it will be welcome, if the matter is one on which he prides himself. If only other people will applaud him, a man may console himself for downright misfortune or for the pittance he gets from the two sources of human happiness already discussed [what he is in himself; what he possesses]: and conversely, it is astonishing how infallibly a man will be annoyed, and in some cases deeply pained, by any wrong done to his feeling of self-importance, whatever be the nature, degree, or circumstances of the injury, or by any depreciation, slight, or disregards.
The world as representation, if we consider it in isolation, by tearing ourselves from willing, and letting it alone take possession of our consciousness, is the most delightful, and the only innocent, side of life. We have to regard art as the greater enhancement, the more perfect development, of all this; for essentially it achieves just the same thing as is achieved by the visible world itself, only with greater concentration, perfection, intention and intelligence; and therefore, in the full sense of the word, it may be called the flower of life. If the whole world as representation is only the visibility of the will, then art is the elucidation of this visibility, the camera obscura which shows the objects more purely, and enables us to survey and comprehend them better. It is the play within the play, the stage on the stage in Hamlet.
Ah, the life of a professor of philosophy is indeed a hard one! First he must dance to the tune of ministers and, when he has done so really well, he can still be assailed from without by those ferocious man-eaters, the real philosophers.
There still exists the old fundamentally false contrast between spirit and matter among the philosophically untutored who include all who have not studied the Kantian philosophy and consequently most foreigners and likewise many present-day medical men and others in Germany who confidently philosophise on the basis of their catechism. But in particular, the Hegelians, in consequence of their egregious ignorance and philosophical crudeness, have recently introduced that contrast under the name “spirit and nature” which has been resuscitated from pre-Kantian times. Under this title they serve it up quite as naively as if there had never been a Kant and we were still going about in full-bottomed wigs between clipped hedges and philosophising, like Leibniz in the garden at Herrenhausen, on “spirit and nature” with princesses and maids of honour, understanding by “nature” the clipped hedges and by “spirit” the contents of the periwigs. On the assumption of this false contrast, we then have spiritualists and materialists. The latter assert that, through its form and combination, matter produces everything and consequently the thinking and willing in man, whereat the former then raise a great outcry.
Not fame, but that which deserves to be famous, is what a man should hold in esteem.
Light is not visible unless it meets with something to reflect it and talent is sure of itself only when its fame is noised abroad.
He who deserves fame without getting it possesses by far the more important element of happiness, which should console him for the loss of the other.
When modesty was made a virtue it was a very advantageous thing for the fools, for everybody is expected to speak of himself as if he were one.
The present alone is true and actual; it is the only time which possesses full reality, and our existence lies in it exclusively. Therefore we should always be glad of it and give it the welcome it deserves, and enjoy every hour that is bearable by its freedom from pain and annoyance with a full consciousness of its value.
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