293 Benevolent dissembling. In interaction with people, a benevolent dissembling is often required, as if we did not see through the motives for their behavior.
149 The slow arrow of beauty. -The noblest sort of beauty does not sweep us away all at once, does not make stormy and intoxicating assaults (such beauty easily awakens disgust), but is instead the slowly penetrating sort that we carry around with us almost unnoticed and that we encounter again at times in a dream, but that finally, after it has laid discreetly upon our heart for a long time, takes full possession of us and fills our eyes with tears, our hearts with yearning. -What do we yearn for at the sight of beauty? To be beautiful: we imagine that there must be much happiness bound up in this. -But that is an error.
4 1 The unchangeable character. In the strict sense, it is not true that one’s character is unchangeable; rather, this popular tenet means only that during a man’s short lifetime the motives affecting him cannot normally cut deeply enough to destroy the imprinted writing of many millennia. If a man eighty thousand years old were conceivable, his character would in fact be absolutely variable, so that out of him little by little an abundance of different individuals would develop. The brevity of human life misleads us to many an erroneous assertion about the qualities of man.
59 Intellect and morality. One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one has given. One must have strong powers of imagination to be able to have pity. So closely is morality bound to the quality of the intellect.
82 The skin of the soul. Just as the bones, flesh, intestines, and blood vessels are enclosed by skin, which makes the sight of a man bearable, so the stirrings and passions of the soul are covered up by vanity: it is the skin of the soul.
70 Executions. How is it that every execution offends us more than a murder? It is the coldness of the judges, the painful preparations, the understanding that a man is here being used as a means to deter others. For guilt is not being punished, even if there were guilt; guilt lies in the educators, the parents, the environment, in us, not in the murderer, I am talking about the motivating circumstances.
586 Of the hour hand ef /life. -Life consists of rare individual moments of the highest significance and countless intervals of time in which at best the shadowy images of those moments hover around us. Love, spring, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea – only once do all those things speak fully to the heart: if in fact they ever do find their way completely into words. For many people do not have any such moments and are themselves intervals and pauses in the symphony of real life.
148 Poets as the easers of life. -The poets, insofar as they, too, want to make our lives easier, either turn our gaze away from the toilsome present or help the present acquire new colors by shining light upon it from the past. To be capable of this, they must themselves be turned back toward the past in many respects: so that we can use them as bridges to far away times and ideas, to dying or deceased religions and cultures. They are, in fact, always and necessarily epigones. Admittedly, we can say some unfavorable things about the means that they use to make life easier: they soothe and heal only temporarily, only for the moment; they even keep people from working toward genuine improvement of their circumstances, because they suspend and, by palliating it, discharge the passion that impels dissatisfied people toward action.
281 Doors. -Like the man, the child sees doors in everything that it experiences or learns: but for the former they are entrances, for the latter always only passageways.
If people set out towards their opinion, what they believe or think to know, do they know where to go? Or do you believe that your opinion comes from within you, arising from somewhere deep?
Some observations
Understanding where our knowledge comes from is important in our highly opinionated world. When and when not to trust our knowledge, opinions, and beliefs is important, in my opinion.
We all can live with our truths and go as far as to say that we all have “a right to our own truths.” If you say that the sky is blue, you will be right because most of us will agree, but if you say that that particular person is the best person for that job, you might find out that others disagree. You still have your truth, but it might be wise to find out what qualities you rank high and which ones the others do. If you like the character and attitude of the person you prefer, but the others point out the lack of qualification, you might have a starting point from where you can find out what is more important instead of just stating your opinion. It is often not enough to state your opinion, so finding out the reason why you have these opinions can also be important.
There is a possibility that you end up endlessly questioning your beliefs. If the question is, like in the example above, if personality or adjudication is more important, you might have anecdotal stories where an uneducated new employee lifted a company’s morals. Still, the other might use common sense that education is usually used to decide who to hire. Anecdotal evidence needs more scrutiny, but what is expected is not always the road to follow, especially when change is needed. In this example, the two sides might have discovered that one side thought that change was needed, and the other just wanted a new employee. Now you’re on the road to finding out what the reasons are that part of the company wants to change and the other part does not. From here, you can only go deeper, and maybe you will find out that you didn’t even know what you wanted or what the question was.
You say the sky is blue, but it is more correct to say that the sky looks blue. This is what my friendly AI minion says about it: The sky appears blue due to a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering. When sunlight enters the Earth’s atmosphere, it collides with molecules and small particles, scattering the shorter blue wavelengths of light more than the longer red wavelengths. This scattering causes us to perceive the sky as blue during the day.
This is what NASA’s Space Place tells us: Sunlight reaches Earth’s atmosphere and is scattered in all directions by all the gases and particles in the air. Blue light is scattered more than the other colors because it travels as shorter, smaller waves. This is why we see a blue sky most of the time.
And here is a Quote from the scientist who wrote all of this down for the first time in 1871, John William strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh:
This was just a 10-minute search on the internet to “debunk” something that most of us take for granted. It is, of course, enough to say that the sky is blue, but say at least to the younger people that there is a but after you stated the obvious because for young people, there is still hope.
6 Against visionaries. -The visionary denies the truth to himself, the liar only to others.
261 One weapon twice as good as two. -It is an unequal battle when one person speaks for his position with head and heart, the other only with his head: the first has the sun and wind against him, as it were, and his two weapons interfere with each other: he loses the prize-in the eyes of truth. Admittedly, the victory of the second with his one weapon is seldom a victory according to the heart of all the other spectators and costs him his popularity among them.
270 The eternal child. -We believe that fairy tales and games belong to childhood: shortsighted as we are! As if we would like to live without fairy tales and games at any age! Admittedly, we call it something else and experience it differently, but this is precisely what speaks for it being exactly the same thing – for the child, too, feels that games are his work and fairy tales his truth. The brevity of life should preserve us from pedantically separating the ages oflife – as if each one brought something new – and a poet should sometime present to us a human being two hundred years old who really does live without fairy tales and games.
373 Arrogance. -There is nothing against which we should guard more carefully than against the growth of the weed that is called arrogance and that spoils all we reap; for there is an arrogance in affection, in signs of respect, in benevolent familiarity, in caresses, in friendly advice, in admission of errors, in pity for others, and all these beautiful things arouse repugnance if that weed sprouts among them. An arrogant person, that is, anyone who wants to seem more important than he is or is considered to be, always miscalculates. To be sure, he has a momentary success in his favor, insofar as those people in whose presence he behaves arrogantly generally pay him the degree of honor that he demands, whether out of fear or indolence; but they take a terrible revenge for this by subtracting exactly as much from the value that they previously ascribed to him as there is excess in the amount that he has demanded. There is nothing for which people make us pay more dearly than humiliating them. An arrogant person can make his genuinely great merit so suspect and so small in the eyes of others that they trample it into the dust.-Even a proud demeanor is something that we should allow ourselves only where we can be quite certain not to be misunderstood or to be considered arrogant, in front of friends or wives, for example. For there is no greater folly in our relations with other people than acquiring a reputation for being arrogant; it is even worse than not having learned how to tell lies politely.
487 The passion for things. -Anyone who directs his passion toward things (sciences, the public welfare, cultural interests, arts) takes much of the fire away from his passion for people (even when they are representatives of those things, as statesmen, philosophers, artists are the representatives of their creations).
65 Whither honesty can lead. – Someone had the bad habit of occasionally examining the motives of his actions, which were as good and bad as the motives of everyone else, and honestly saying what they were. He excited at first revulsion, then suspicion, gradually became altogether proscribed and declared an outlaw in society, until finally the law took notice of this infamous being on occasions when usually it closed its eyes. Lack of ability to keep silent about the universal secret, and the irresponsible tendency to see what no one wants to see – himself – brought him to prison and a premature death.
491 Self-observation. – Man is very well defended against himself, against being reconnoitred and besieged by himself, he is usually able to perceive of himself only his outer walls. The actual fortress is inaccessible, even invisible to him, unless his friends and enemies play the traitor and conduct him in by a secret path.
349 In a dispute. -If we simultaneously contradict an opinion and lay out our own, our continual consideration of that other opinion generally disturbs the natural delivery of our own: it appears more purposeful, more severe, perhaps somewhat exaggerated.
485 Full of character. – A man appears full of character much more often because he always obeys his temperament than because he always obeys his principles.
85 Wickedness is rare. – Most people are much too much occupied with themselves to be wicked.
183 Getting angry and punishing have their time. -Getting angry and punishing are our gifts from the animal world. Humans first come of age when they return this gift from the cradle to the animals. -Herein lies buried one of the greatest thoughts that humans can have, the thought of344 an advance upon all advancements. -Let us go forward a few millennia with one another, my friends! There is a great deal of joy still reserved for humans, the scent of which has not yet blown as far as our contemporaries! And indeed, we might expect to have this joy, even promise it to ourselves and testify to it as something necessary, if only the development of human reason does not stand still! Some day, we will no longer have the heart for the logical sin that lies concealed in anger and punishment, whether practiced individually or socially: some day, when heart and head have learned to dwell as closely to each other as they now still stand apart. That they no longer stand as far apart as they originally did becomes fairly visible by gazing upon the whole path of humanity; and the individual who surveys a life of inward work will become aware with a proud joy of the distance that has been overcome, the approach that has been accomplished and he can, upon this basis, risk having even greater hopes.
Nochrisis 