If we cannot become what we want to become, we resort to another person – inevitably the person closest to us – and make of him what we have been unable to make of ourselves.
But simple people don’t understand complicated ones and thrust the latter back on themselves, more ruthlessly than any others, I thought. The biggest mistake is to think that one can be rescued by so-called simple people. A person goes to them in an extremely needy condition and begs desperately to be rescued and they thrust this person even more deeply into his own despair. And how are they supposed to save the extravagant one in his extravagance, I thought. Wertheimer.
Our libraries are so to speak prisons where we’ve locked up our intellectual giants, naturally Kant has been put in solitary confinement, like Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, like Pascal, like Voltaire, like Montaigne, all the real giants have been put in solitary confinement, all the others in mass confinement, but everyone for ever and ever, my friend, for all time and unto eternity, that’s the truth.
The forest, the virgin forest, the life of a woodcutter – that has always been my ideal.
Again and again we try to escape ourselves, but we fail in our efforts, constantly run our heads into the wall because we don’t want to recognize that we can’t escape ourselves, except in death.
Jede Existenz ist ein Milderungsgrund, geehrter Herr.
We fill our mental strong-room with these great minds and old masters and resort to them at the crucial moment in our lives;.
And you realize that it was not those great minds and not those old masters which kept you alive for decades but that it was this one single person whom you loved more than anyone else.
It is not necessary to read all of Goethe or all of Kant, it is not necessary to read all of Schopenhauer; a few pages of Werther, a few pages of Elective Affinities and we know more in the end about the two books than if we had read them from beginning to end, which would anyway deprive us of the purest enjoyment.
Children are begotten by their parents out of sheer malice and dragged into the world out of the greatest imaginable inconsiderateness.
Reading is still the most bearable of all forms of disgust.
We always look for everything in the immediate proximity, that is a mistake.
Years later the world confirmed my judgment, but this only pained me, like everything confirmed by the newspapers. We exist, we don’t have any other choice, Glenn.
Whoever can’t laugh doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously...
On the one hand we can’t be alone, people like us; on the other we can’t stand company. We can’t stand male company, which bores us to death, or female company either. I gave up male company for years because it’s totally unprofitable, and female company gets on my nerves in no time.
He wanted to be an artist, an artist of life wasn’t enough for him, although precisely this concept provides everything we need to be happy if we think about it.
But we don’t always have to be studying something, I thought, it’s perfectly enough merely to think, to do nothing but think and give our thoughts free rein. To give in to our philosophical worldview, simply submit to our philosophical worldview, but that’s the hardest thing, I thought. Wertheimer.
When we meet the very best, we have to give up, I thought.
For a long time we see only one side of a person’s personality, because for reasons of self-preservation we do not wish to see any other, I thought, then suddenly we see all sides of their personality and are disgusted by them, I thought.
To our horror, the very neighbor whom we had for decades thought of as the best natured and hardest working and, we always thought, the most contented of all our neighbors has turned out to be a murderer.