The benefit in publishing.-- The only benefit in publishing a book is that one can finally ignore his readers. With unpublished writing one has only potential readers, which are much harder to ignore than actual ones.
Different wines.-- There is the wine that makes the clear obscure, and the wine that makes the obscure clear.
Stronger than destiny.-- Love is stronger than destiny, because the mystery of love runs deeper than that of destiny.
Ashes.-- If the dreams of the next generation are born in our failures, then it is in our fears that they will find their beauties, and in our ashes that our sons will find us, for it is in our ashes that they will find our love.
Fit to judge.-- The cold and solemn philosophers should learn that life is wine, as the old Persians say, and to abstain from it is only to become drunken.
The logic of habit.-- Habit makes the unpleasant pleasurable, and makes our pleasures unpleasant.
Bad artists.-- Bad artists become inspired only when they succeed in interrupting their habitual life, and proceed to make habits out of the inspiration they lack the genius to make use of. A bottle of wine, visitations by women, music, all compensate by sensible impressions for that internal fervor which could not be provided with any outlet.
Plato’s wisdom.-- The dictum of Plato, that nothing human is worth taking seriously, is both the greatest consolation as well as the highest tragedy in life.
Limits.-- Everything has a limit, even doubt.
What men can do without.-- Ideas need not be either a fact, a point, a belief, or even an opinion. Men consequently get on very easily without them.
In need of hope.-- Everyone needs hope, save for the hopeless.
Closest to beauty.-- When it comes to depicting beauty, nature has no imagination, but a steady hand. The hands of man tremble, though he has much imagination. Perhaps the philosophers after all, who dwell wholly in the theoretical and the hypothetical, are the closest among us to beauty.
The curious heart.-- The heart is a curious thing. It can be pierced with a thorn but never an arrow. It is the rather modest blunders in life that wound our heart, while the truly terrible experiences only turn it into stone.
Art and nature.-- The artist cannot redeem nature, but he can at least be her Melampus, her interpreter.
The weakness of pleasures.-- There is no pleasure so great that could not be ruined by the thought of people.
Impotent.-- The more impotent our desire, the more perfection we demand in the thing desired, rather this is a woman or a piece of music. We are thereby spared the necessity of acting.
Poets and love-- What is a poet, but an unhappy lover? And what is a lover, but an unhappy poet?
The blind spot.-- The greatest philosophers are connected with the history of philosophy by their one blind spot.
Sainthood.-- If beauty could understand itself, then Narcissus would have been a saint.
Boredom and indolence.-- Boredom is the destruction of our sense for beauty by our sense for worldly concerns; indolence is the destruction of our sense for worldly concerns by our sense for beauty.
The graceful and the vulgar.-- When the soul shares the pain of the body, we produce art or think. When the body shares the pain of the soul, we drink wine. Grace and vulgarity are divided thereby.
Life and fiction.-- When people remind us of literary figures and fictional characters, we praise them as having a remarkable personality. But when a literary figure or fictional character reminds us of a person we know, we cannot help but interpret this character as unimaginative. When the living remind us of the fictional, they are most alive, and when the fiction reminds us of life, it is most unlifelike.
Mothers.-- Habit is the mother of virtue and vice, but it is novelty that is the mother of good and evil.
A contradiction at the heart of things.-- Life is absolutely contradictory to everything of genuine importance; namely, music, books, and souls. While life gives us youth and beauty in the beginning, the best that it has, these later things require time to develop their beauty within us and open up like flowers; first the bud, then the petals, and only then the wonderful odor. It seems as though the things we love reach for their moment of perfection while everything around us is withering; death has always been the complimenting scene for the works of the soul.
Worthy of our attention.–Men generally notice things only when they possess a name, and even more often men only notice the names of things.
The dawn.-- Any genius can work late into the night, but it requires true passion to pick up on one’s work in the morning.
Lethe.-- Fear, shame, passion; opium seems to be capable of doing away with everything save for physical pain.
Joy and suffering.-- Joy makes quicksilver of our thoughts and diversifies our mental impressions, but suffering deepens and makes them precise.
The greatest temptation.-- There is an intoxication so great that God himself even felt compelled to taste it. It is called self-sacrifice. He even went so far as to become a man to taste this wine.
Purpose.-- It is amusing that it is very rarely the philosophers who ask for a purpose in living and much more often it is the public who asks for the purpose in philosophy.
Luminaries of conscience.-- Unlike the sun, the luminaries of our conscience; namely, our acts, bestow warmth only after they have set.
The want of eloquence.-- All men complain about their inability to speak with eloquence, yet no man complains about his inability to speak with honesty, which is the basis of eloquence.
The truth in art.-- The heart blesses the objects of our contemplation, beauty, and even people with a small mithridate and extract of itself so that we can rarely discern rather it is the good or the evil within us that we nourish with their image. That we never know our greatest iniquities and triumphs is a fine piece of understanding, and beauty may accomplish nothing besides widening the scope of conscience, deepening the springs of passion, and enriching human nature if only in the same instance making it more volatile. Yet, the truth of a piece of art is very different from the impression which it leaves upon us or the effect which it works within us; it consists in a passion, a will, a hunger forced to withdraw into its own heart; the internal recognized as a law presiding within the external form. The vulgar artist attempts to reflect in the external the internal and this produces, at best, a moral and, at worst, a meaning. It is this vulgarity which stains much of European art, and even music from such geniuses as Bach and Mozart are not free of it. The great artists- Raphael and Michelangelo, or in the domain of music, Scriabin and Alkan, illuminate their figures and melodies after the same fashion that the sun illuminates the body of the ocean. They establish neither a depth that oppresses or a clarity that liberates, but a depth rather that one can see through, that one can see within; a pure depth, to use the words of Ruskin, like the darkness of the pure unsearchable sea. The internal is visible in their art as a law, as natura naturans to use the language of the Scholastic philosophers. It is not the effect of an exertion, but the exertion itself. It is living, and therefor communicates nothing but life.
The teaching of art.-- The fruits upon the tree of life, though they assuage man with a supple relish just as they quell hunger, do not satisfy us eternally. One must keep returning to that garden in paradise, harvesting more fruits and again harvesting more. The fruits upon the tree of knowledge, though they are very bitter, quell hunger forever, once they are consumed but once. This is the essential doctrine of art.
Vanity.-- Thought without action is vanity, but action without thought is brutality; and virtue, though she may be asleep in the dreams of the philosophers, is dead in the hearts of the brutal.
Love or genius.-- If a man does not possess genius he may do well to possess love. Love strengthens everything to which it attaches itself, be this an emotion, a virtue, a vice, or a disease. Love and genius both aim toward exalting the entirety of man’s organism, and practically are indistinguishable.
The chief obstacle.-- Shame is the chief obstacle along the path to self knowledge.
A delicate balance.-- A certain amount of pain breaks the will, and a certain amount of pain renews the will.
A superior art.-- An artist, if I had to venture a conception of such a being, I would say is a man with that “power to reform as by some superior art that which within him art has destroyed.” [size=85]1[/size]
[size=85]1. A phrase of Schiller’s.[/size]
Not enough.-- Those for whom the world is not enough, according to Joubert: saints, conquerors, and lovers. But one must add: that nature in which all of these three are joined, the poet.
God and the philosopher.-- Gregorius says of God, “Cum exterius mutari videtur sententia, interius consilium non mutatur.” [size=85]1[/size] I say of the philosopher: “Cum exterius mutari videtur consilium, interius sententia non mutatur.” [size=85]2[/size]
[size=85]
- God may change his sentence upon the world, but not his counsel in the heart.
- The philosopher may change his counsel with the world, but not the sentence in his heart.[/size]
Simplicity.-- It is not complexity that is the opposite of simplicity, but rather chaos, disorder.
The hidden wound.-- We each possess a wound that no one can see save for the person capable of healing it. This is the meaning of love.
The audacity of beauty.-- The audacity with which you look upon beauty is not your own, but that of beauty.
Beasts and angels.-- Music is a crying, dumb, inarticulate, and hopeless- but not of a beast, of an angel.
With a song.-- Not with a bowed head, but with a song should we approach life, as the angels were said to have approached God before the day of creation.
[size=85]* Before the day of Creation it was said that the angels, one by one, endlessly, would appear before God to recite a poem after which they would vanish, forever.[/size]
The heart’s confession.– Amare et sapere Jovi ipsi non datur [size=85]1[/size] is inscribed on many hearts, but upon just as many one might read Selena non sapere et non amare.[size=85] 2[/size]
[size=85]1. Jove cannot love without knowing.
2. Selene cannot know without loving.[/size]
The perfect judge of character.-- When a man is placed into proximity with the beautiful, true, or noble, he betrays his sediment. If one wants to know what kind of a person someone is, merely read him a line of verse or a sentence from the lips of one of the philosophers. His defensiveness, apathy, vulgarity, or his nobility will instantly be brought to the fore.