to greet them thus?”
To survive a destructive book is no less painful for the reader than for the author.
We must be in a state of receptivity — that is, of physical weakness — for words to touch us, to insinuate themselves into us and there begin a sort of career.
To be called a deicide is the most flattering insult that can be addressed to an individual or to a people.
Orgasm is a paroxysm; despair, too. One lasts an instant; the other, a lifetime.
She had the profile of Cleopatra. Seven years later, she might just as well be begging on the street. Enough to cure you forever of idolatry, of any craving to seek the unfathomable in a pair of eyes, in a smile, etc.
Let us be reasonable. No one can see through everything completely. Nor, without universal disillusion, can there be universal knowledge, either.
What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music.
Brahms represents “die Melancholie des Unvermögens.” the melancholy of impotence, according to Nietzsche. This judgment, passed on the brink of the philosopher’s collapse, forever dims its luster.
To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.
Those imbecilic people one passes —how have they come to this? And how to imagine such a spectacle in antiquity — in Athens, for example? One moment of acute lucidity among these damned souls, and all illusions collapse.
The more you loathe humanity, the riper you are for God, for a dialogue with no one.
Extreme fatigue goes quite as far as ecstasy, except that with fatigue you descend toward the extremities of knowledge.
Just as the advent of the Crucified One has cut history in two, in the same way this night has severed my life.
Everything seems debased and futile once the music stops. You understand that music can be hated, and one is tempted to identify its absolute status with fraudulence. This is because we must react at any cost against it when we love it too much . No one has realized this danger better than Tolstoy, for he knew that music could do with him as it liked. Hence he began execrating it out of fear of becoming its plaything.
Renunciation is the only kind of action that is not degrading.
Can we imagine a city dweller who does not have the soul of a murderer?
To love only the indefinite thought that never reaches words, and the instantaneous thought that lives by words alone: divagation and boutade.
A young German asks me for one franc. I begin a conversation with him and learn that he has traveled round the world, that he has been to India, whose beggars he likes to think he resembles. Yet one does not belong with impunity to a didactic nation. I watch him solicit: he looks as if he had taken courses in mendicancy.
Nature, in search of a formula likely to content everyone, let her choice fall on deaths which — as was to be expected — has satisfied no one.
Heraclitus has a Delphic side and a textbook side, a mixture of lightning-bolt perceptions and the primer: a man of inspiration and a schoolteacher. A pity he did not drop learnings did not always think outside learning!
I have so often stormed against any form of action that to manifest myself in any way at all seems an imposture, even a betrayal.
— Yet you go on breathing.
— Yes, I do everything that is done. But . . .
What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!
While he described his projects to me, I listened to him without being able to forget that he would not survive the week. What madness on his part to speak of the future, of his future! But once I had left, once I was outside, how to avoid thinking that after all, the difference was not so great between the mortal and the moribund? The absurdity of making plans is only a little more obvious in the second case.
We always date ourselves by our admirations. As soon as we cite anyone but Homer or Shakespeare, we risk seeming old-fashioned or dotty.
It is
To survive a destructive book is no less painful for the reader than for the author.
We must be in a state of receptivity — that is, of physical weakness — for words to touch us, to insinuate themselves into us and there begin a sort of career.
To be called a deicide is the most flattering insult that can be addressed to an individual or to a people.
Orgasm is a paroxysm; despair, too. One lasts an instant; the other, a lifetime.
She had the profile of Cleopatra. Seven years later, she might just as well be begging on the street. Enough to cure you forever of idolatry, of any craving to seek the unfathomable in a pair of eyes, in a smile, etc.
Let us be reasonable. No one can see through everything completely. Nor, without universal disillusion, can there be universal knowledge, either.
What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music.
Brahms represents “die Melancholie des Unvermögens.” the melancholy of impotence, according to Nietzsche. This judgment, passed on the brink of the philosopher’s collapse, forever dims its luster.
To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.
Those imbecilic people one passes —how have they come to this? And how to imagine such a spectacle in antiquity — in Athens, for example? One moment of acute lucidity among these damned souls, and all illusions collapse.
The more you loathe humanity, the riper you are for God, for a dialogue with no one.
Extreme fatigue goes quite as far as ecstasy, except that with fatigue you descend toward the extremities of knowledge.
Just as the advent of the Crucified One has cut history in two, in the same way this night has severed my life.
Everything seems debased and futile once the music stops. You understand that music can be hated, and one is tempted to identify its absolute status with fraudulence. This is because we must react at any cost against it when we love it too much . No one has realized this danger better than Tolstoy, for he knew that music could do with him as it liked. Hence he began execrating it out of fear of becoming its plaything.
Renunciation is the only kind of action that is not degrading.
Can we imagine a city dweller who does not have the soul of a murderer?
To love only the indefinite thought that never reaches words, and the instantaneous thought that lives by words alone: divagation and boutade.
A young German asks me for one franc. I begin a conversation with him and learn that he has traveled round the world, that he has been to India, whose beggars he likes to think he resembles. Yet one does not belong with impunity to a didactic nation. I watch him solicit: he looks as if he had taken courses in mendicancy.
Nature, in search of a formula likely to content everyone, let her choice fall on deaths which — as was to be expected — has satisfied no one.
Heraclitus has a Delphic side and a textbook side, a mixture of lightning-bolt perceptions and the primer: a man of inspiration and a schoolteacher. A pity he did not drop learnings did not always think outside learning!
I have so often stormed against any form of action that to manifest myself in any way at all seems an imposture, even a betrayal.
— Yet you go on breathing.
— Yes, I do everything that is done. But . . .
What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!
While he described his projects to me, I listened to him without being able to forget that he would not survive the week. What madness on his part to speak of the future, of his future! But once I had left, once I was outside, how to avoid thinking that after all, the difference was not so great between the mortal and the moribund? The absurdity of making plans is only a little more obvious in the second case.
We always date ourselves by our admirations. As soon as we cite anyone but Homer or Shakespeare, we risk seeming old-fashioned or dotty.
It is
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