Human, All-Too-Human: A Book For Free Spirits; Part II

358

Never in Vain. – In the mountains of truth you never climb in vain. Either you already reach a higher point to-day, or you exercise your strength in order to be able to climb higher to-morrow.

359

Through Grey Window-Panes. – Is what you see through this window of the world so beautiful that you do not wish to look through any other window – ay, and even try to prevent others from so doing?

360

A Sign of Radical Changes. – When we dream of persons long forgotten or dead, it is a sign that we have suffered radical changes, and that the soil on which we live has been completely undermined. The dead rise again, and our antiquity becomes modernity.

361

Medicine of the Soul. – To lie still and think little is the cheapest medicine for all diseases of the soul, and, with the aid of good-will, becomes pleasanter every hour that it is used.

362

Intellectual Order of Precedence. – You rank far below others when you try to establish the exception and they the rule.

363

The Fatalist. – You must believe in fate – science can compel you thereto. All that develops in you out of that belief – cowardice, devotion or loftiness, and uprightness – bears witness to the soil in which the grain was sown, but not to the grain itself, for from that seed anything and everything can grow.

364

The Reason for Much Fretfulness. – He that prefers the beautiful to the useful in life will undoubtedly, like children who prefer sweetmeats to bread, destroy his digestion and acquire a very fretful outlook on the world.

365

Excess as a Remedy. – We can make our own talent once more acceptable to ourselves by honouring and enjoying the opposite talent for some time to excess. – Using excess as a remedy is one of the more refined devices in the art of life.

366

“Will a Self.” – Active, successful natures act, not according to the maxim, “Know thyself,” but as if always confronted with the command, “Will a self, so you will become a self.” – Fate seems always to have left them a choice. Inactive, contemplative natures, on the other hand, reflect on how they have chosen their self “once for all” at their entry into life.

367

To Live as Far as Possible without a Following. – How small is the importance of followers we first grasp when we have ceased to be the followers of our followers.

368

Obscuring Oneself. – We must understand how to obscure ourselves in order to get rid of the gnat-swarms of pestering admirers.

369

Ennui. – There is an ennui of the most subtle and cultured brains, to which the best that the world can offer has become stale. Accustomed to eat ever more and more recherché fare and to feel disgust at coarser diet, they are in danger of dying of hunger. For the very best exists but in small quantities, and has sometimes become inaccessible or hard as stone, so that even good teeth can no longer bite it.

370

The Danger in Admiration. – The admiration of a quality or of an art may be so strong as to deter us from aspiring to possess that quality or art.

371

What is Required of Art. – One man wants to enjoy himself by means of art, another for a time to get out of or above himself. – To meet both requirements there exists a twofold species of artists.

372

Secessions. – Whoever secedes from us offends not us, perhaps, but certainly our adherents.

373

After Death. – It is only long after the death of a man that we find it inconceivable that he should be missed – in the case of really great men, only after decades. Those who are honest usually think when any one dies that he is not much missed, and that the pompous funeral oration is a piece of hypocrisy. Necessity first teaches the necessariness of an individual, and the proper epitaph is a belated sigh.

374

Leaving in Hades. – We must leave many things in the Hades of half-conscious feeling, and not try to release them from their shadow-existence, or else they will become, as thoughts and words, our demoniacal tyrants, with cruel lust after our blood.

375

Near to Beggary. – Even the richest intellect sometimes mislays the key to the room in which his hoarded treasures repose. He is then like the poorest of the poor, who must beg to get a living.

376

Chain-Thinkers. – To him who has thought a great deal, every new thought that he hears or reads at once assumes the form of a chain.

377

Pity. – In the gilded sheath of pity is sometimes hidden the dagger of envy.

378

What is Genius? – To aspire to a lofty aim and to will the means to that aim.

379

Vanity of Combatants. – He who has no hope of victory in a combat, or who is obviously worsted, is all the more desirous that his style of fighting should be admired.

380

The Philosophic Life Misinterpreted. – At the moment when one is beginning to take philosophy seriously, the whole world fancies that one is doing the reverse.

381

Imitation. – By imitation, the bad gains, the good loses credit – especially in art.

382

Final Teaching of History. – “Oh that I had but lived in those times!” is the exclamation of foolish and frivolous men. At every period of history that we seriously review, even if it be the most belauded era of the past, we shall rather cry out at the end, “Anything but a return to that! The spirit of that age would oppress you with the weight of a hundred atmospheres, the good and beautiful in it you would not enjoy, its evil you could not digest.” Depend upon it, posterity will pass the same verdict on our own epoch, and say that it was unbearable, that life under such conditions was intolerable. “And yet every one can endure his own times?” Yes, because the spirit of his age not only lies upon him but is in him. The spirit of the age offers resistance to itself and can bear itself.