257 Words present in us. -We always express our thoughts with the words that lie to hand. Or, to express my whole suspicion: we have at any moment only the thought for which we have to hand the words.
254 Anticipators. -The distinguishing, but also perilous quality in poetic natures is their exhaustive imagination: they anticipate, enjoy and suffer in advance that which is to come or could come, so that when it finally does come they are already tired of it. Lord Byron, who was only too familiar with all this, wrote in his diary: ‘If I have a son he shall become something quite prosaic- a lawyer or a pirate.’
249 Who is ever alone? – The timid man does not know what it is to be alone: an enemy is always standing behind his chair.- Oh, if there were someone who could tell us the history of that subtle feeling called solitude!
250 Night and music. – The ear, the organ of fear, could have evolved as greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods, in accordance with the mode of life of the age of timidity, that is to say the longest human age there has ever been: in bright daylight the ear is less necessary. That is how music acquired the character of an art of night and twilight.
251 Stoical. -There is a cheerfulness peculiar to the Stoic: he experiences it whenever he feels hemmed in by the formalities he himself has prescribed for his conduct; he then enjoys the sensation of himself as dominator.
243 The two directions. -When we try to examine the mirror in itself we discover in the end nothing but things upon it. If we want to grasp the things we finally get hold of nothing but the mirror.- This, in the most general terms, is the history of knowledge.
232 From a disputation. – A: Friend, you have talked yourself hoarse! – B: Then I am refuted. Let us speak of it no more!
219 Deception in self-humiliation. -Through your irrational behaviour you have done your neighbour great harm and destroyed an irrecoverable happiness – and then you subdue your vanity sufficiently to go to him, expose your irrationality to his contempt and believe that after this painful and to you very difficult scene everything has again been put to rights- that your voluntary loss ofhonour compensates for his involuntary loss of happiness: suffused with this feeling you go away uplifted and restored in your virtue. But your neighbour is still as unhappy as he was before, he derives no consolation from the fact that you are irrational and have admitted it, he even remembers the
painful sight ofyou pouring contempt upon yourselfbefore him as a fresh injury for which he has to thank you- but he has no thought of revenge and cannot grasp how you could in any way compensate him. At bottom that scene you performed was performed before yourself and for the sake of yourself: you invited in a witness of it, again for
your own sake and not for his – do not deceive yourself.
My dear Friend: — Your letters arrive of late at some special festive occasion. Thus, when, not too long ago, I moved to my new residence in Leipzig, your letter which our friend Roscher had correctly dispatched here, was lying on the table. Soon thereafter I addressed the first part of my Laertianum to you so I may not be accused again of being ungrateful to my friends and through continuous silence create the impression as if I were dead. Nay, I live and, what’s more, live well and wish that you would sometime personally convince yourself of it, especially to realize that ϕιλοσοϕε (to philosophize) and being sick are not really identical concepts, but that, on the contrary, there is a certain “health,” the eternal foe of profound philosophy which, as you know, nowadays has become the nickname of certain kinds of border heroes and historians.
4 The error of imaginary causes . – To start from the dream: on to a certain sensation, the result for example of a distant cannon – shot, a cause is subsequently foisted (often a whole little novel in which precisely the dreamer is the chief character). The sensation, meanwhile, continues to persist, as a kind of resonance: it waits, as it were, until the cause – creating drive permits it to step into the foreground – now no longer as a chance occurrence but as ‘meaning’. The cannon – shot enters in a causal way, in an apparent inversion of time. That which comes later, the motivation, is experienced first, often with a hundred details which pass like lightning, the shot follows .… What has happened? The ideas engendered by a certain condition have been misunderstood as the cause of that condition. – We do just the same thing, in fact, when we are awake. Most of our general feelings – every sort of restraint, pressure, tension, explosion in the play and counter – play of our organs, likewise and especially the condition of the nervus sympathicus – excite our cause – creating drive: we want to have a reason for feeling as we do – for feeling well or for feeling ill. It never suffices us simply to establish the mere fact that we feel as we do: we acknowledge this fact – become conscious of it – only when we have furnished it with a motivation of some kind. – The memory, which in such a case becomes active without our being aware of it, calls up earlier states of a similar kind and the causal interpretations which have grown out of them – not their causality. To be sure, the belief that these ideas, the accompanying occurrences in the consciousness, were causes is also brought up by the memory. Thus there arises an habituation to a certain causal interpretation which in truth obstructs and even prohibits an investigation of the cause.
230 Esprit fort. – Compared with him who has tradition on his side and requires no reasons for his actions, the free spirit is always weak, especially in actions; for he is aware of too many motives and points of view and therefore possesses an uncertain and unpractised hand. What means are there of nonetheless rendering him relatively strong, so that he shall at least make his way and not ineffectually perish? How does the strong spirit (esprit fort) come into being? This is in the individual case the question how genius is produced. Whence comes the energy, the inflexible strength, the endurance with which the individual thinks, in opposition to tradition, to attain to a wholly individual perception of the world?
Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.
I am an anarchist because contemporary society is divided into two opposing classes: the impoverished and dispossessed workers and peasants who have created with their own hands and their own enormous toil all the riches of this earth; and the rich men, kings and presidents who have confiscated all these riches for themselves. Towards these parasitic capitalists and ruling kings and presidents there rose in me a feeling of outrage, indignation, and loathing, while at the same time I felt sorrow and compassion for the labouring proletariat who have been eternal slaves in the vice- like grip of the world wide bourgeoisie.
I am an anarchist because I scorn and detest all authority, since all authority is founded on injustice, exploitation and compulsion over the human personality. Authority dehumanises the individual and makes him a slave.
370 Discharging ill humor.-Any person who fails at something prefers to attribute this failure to the ill will of someone else, rather than to chance. His stimulated sensibility is relieved by thinking of a person and not of a thing as the reason for his failure; for we can revenge ourselves on people, but we have to choke down the injuries of chance. Therefore, when a prince has failed at something, his circle tends to designate some individual as the ostensible cause and to sacrifice that person in the interest of all the courtiers; for otherwise, the ill humor of the
prince would be vented on all of them, since he cannot take any revenge on the goddess of fate herself.
351 Pangs of conscience after social gatherings. -Why do we have pangs of conscience after ordinary social gatherings? Because we have taken important things lightly, because in speaking of other people we have not spoken with complete truthfulness, or because we have kept silent where we ought to have said something, because we did not take an occasion to spring to our feet and run away, in short, because we have behaved in society as if we belonged to it.
632 Anyone who has not made his way through various convictions, but has instead remained attached to the belief in whose net he first became entangled, is at all events a representative of backward cultures precisely because of this constancy; in accordance with this lack of cultivation (which always presupposes cultivatability), he is hard, injudicious, unteachable, without gentleness, always suspicious, an unscrupulous person who seizes upon every means for making his opinion prevail because he simply cannot comprehend that there have to be any other opinions; in this regard, he may perhaps be a source of strength and even salutary in cultures that have become all too free and flaccid, yet only because he forcibly stimulates opposition to himself: for in this way, the more delicate creations of the new culture, which are forced to struggle with him, become strong themselves.
627 Living and experiencing. -If we consider how some individuals know how to manage their experiences – their insignificant daily experiences – so that these become a field that bears fruit three times a year; while others – and how many they are ! – though driven through the pounding waves of the most stimulating destinies and the most varied currents of ages and peoples, still remain like a cork, ever buoyant, ever on the surface: we are finally tempted to divide humanity into a minority (a minimality) of those who understand how to make a great deal out of very little and a majority of those who understand how to make very little out of a great deal; indeed, we encounter those reverse wizards who, instead of creating the world out of nothing, create a nothing out of the world.
To be aware
To be aware means to be sensitive, alive to the things about one, to nature, to people, to colour, to trees, to the environment, to the social structure, the whole thing; to be aware outwardly of all that’s happening and to be aware of what is happening inside. Krishnamurti
Nochrisis 