We often feel that we lack something, and seem to see that very quality in someone else, promptly attributing all our own qualities to him too, and a kind of ideal contentment as well. And so the happy mortal is a model of complete perfection – which we have ourselves created.
Wild dreams torment me as I lie. And though a god lives in my heart, though all my power waken at his word, though he can move my every inmost part – yet nothing in the outer world is stirred. thus by existence tortured and oppressed I crave for death, I long for rest.
Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint! Und das mit Recht; denn alles, was entsteht, ist wert, dass es zugrunde geht.
It is in vain that a man of sound mind and cool temper understands the condition of such a wretched being... He can no more communicate his own wisdom to him than a healthy man can instil his strength into the invalid by whose bedside he is seated.
No doubt you are right... there would be far less suffering amongst mankind if men... did not employ their imaginations so assiduously in recalling the memory of past sorrow, instead of bearing their present lot with equanimity.
And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.
Tolerance should really only be a passing attitude: it should lead to appreciation. To tolerate is to offend.
Would you require a wretched being, whose life is slowly wasting under a lingering disease, to despatch himself at once by the stroke of a dagger? Does not the very disorder which consumes his strength deprive him of the courage to effect his deliverance?
I call architecture frozen music.
Does not man lack the force at the very point where he needs it most? And when he soars upward in joy, or sinks down in suffering, is not checked in both, is he not returned again to the dull, cold sphere of awareness, just when he was longing to lose himself in the fullness of the infinite.
Ich habe so viel, und die Empfindung an ihr verschlingt alles; ich habe so viel, und ohne sie wird mir alles zu Nichts.
Whatever truths or fables you may find in a thousand books, it is all a tower of Babel unless love holds it together.
If we put ourselves in the place of other people, the jealousy and hatred we so often feel about them would disappear, and if we put others in our place, pride and conceit would greatly diminish.
All is like, all unlike; all is useful and harmful, eloquent and dumb, reasonable and unreasonable. And what people profess about individual matters is often contradictory.
A man’s name is not like a mantle which merely hangs about him, and which one perchance may safely twitch and pull, but a perfectly fitting garment, which, like the skin, has grown over and over him, at which one cannot rake and scrape without injuring the man himself.
For in music there is no material to be deducted.
There are people who make no mistakes because they never wish to do anything worth doing.
No one should desire to live in irregular circumstances; but if by chance a man falls into them, they test his character and show of how much determination he is capable.
Entbehren sollst du – sollst entbehren. Thou shalt forego, shalt do without.
He only earns his freedom and existence who daily conquers them anew.