I never found anything in the company of people, however I tried, and I did try; at least all my peers, all my comrades to a man, proved to be inferior to me in thinking; I don’t remember a single exception.
Everything is dead, the dead are everywhere. There are only people, and all around them is silence – that’s the earth.
I’ve already warned you that the simplest ideas are the hardest to understand; I’ll now add that they are also the hardest to explain.
The enthusiasm of today’s youth is as pure and bright as it was in our time. Only one thing has happened: a shift of goals, the replacement of one beauty with another! The entire misunderstanding lies merely in the question of which is more beautiful: Shakespeare or a pair of boots, Raphael or petroleum?
Man likes to make roads and to create, that is a fact beyond dispute. But why has he such a passionate love for destruction and chaos also?
Compassion was the principal and, perhaps, the only law of existence for the whole of mankind.
Dreams, as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without noticing them at all, as, for instance, through space and time. Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams, what utterly incomprehensible things happen to it!
The first thing is to lower the level of education, science and accomplishment.1 A high level of science and accomplishment is accessible only to people of high ability, and there’s no need for high ability! People of high ability have always seized power and been despots. People of high ability can’t help but be despots and have always corrupted more than they have brought benefit; they are sent into exile or executed.
My wretched passions were acute, smarting, from my continual, sickly irritability I had hysterical impulses, with tears and convulsions. I had no resource except reading, that is, there was nothing in my surroundings which I could respect and which attracted me. I was overwhelmed with depression, too; I had an hysterical craving for incongruity and for contrast, and so I took to vice.
Or perhaps it is because it is so NECESSARY for you to win. It is like a drowning man catching at a straw. You yourself will agree that, unless he were drowning he would not mistake a straw for the trunk of a tree.
I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I.
In every man’s memories there are such things as he will reveal not to everyone, but perhaps only to friends. There are also such as he will reveal not even to friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. Then, finally, there are such as a man is afraid to reveal even to himself, and every decent man will have accumulated quite a few things of this sort.
I was not only not a spiteful but not even an embittered man, that I was simply scaring sparrows at random and amusing myself by it. I.
Here is the world to which I am condemned, in which, despite myself, I must somehow live.′ I said.
We’ve all grown unaccustomed to life, we’re all lame, each of us more or less. We’ve even grown so unaccustomed that at times we feel a sort of loathing for real “living life,” and therefore cannot bear to be reminded of it. For we’ve reached a point where we regard real “living life” almost as a labor, almost as a service, and we all agree in ourselves that it’s better from a book.
Don’t be surprised that I value prejudice, observe certain conventions, seek power – it’s because I know I live in an empty society.
It remained inaccessible to my mind, even though my heart unconsciously became increasingly suffused with it.
Truly,′ I answered him, ‘all things are good and fair, because all is truth. Look,’ said I, ’at the horse, that great beast that is so near to man; or the lowly, pensive ox, which feeds him and works for him; look at their faces, what meekness, what devotion to man, who often beats them mercilessly. What gentleness, what confidence and what beauty! It’s touching to know that there’s no sin in them, for all, all except man, is sinless, and Christ has been with them before us.
What does it matter if it’s an illness, then?’ he decided, at last, ’what does it matter that it’s an abnormal tension, if the result itself, if the moment of sensation, recalled and examined in a condition of health, turns out to be the highest degree of harmony and beauty, yields a hitherto unheard-of and undreamed-of sense of completeness, proportion, reconciliation and an ecstatic, prayerful fusion with the highest synthesis of life?
There exists no greater or more painful anxiety for a man who has freed himself from all religious bias, than how he shall soonest find a new object or idea to worship.