As you bear the weight of your own body without noticing it, so you do not notice your own vices or defects, seeing only those of strangers. For this, everyone finds a mirror in another man, a mirror in which he can clearly see his own vices, shortcomings and all kinds of other evils.
A playing card is obvious evidence of the bankruptcy of reason. Unable to exchange thoughts, people exchange books.
When you are possessed by a selfish feeling - joy, triumph, pleasure, hope or terrible pain, anger, anger, fear, suspicion, jealousy - then know that you are in the clutches of the devil. It doesn't matter how you got there. You must escape. How? Anyway.
If worries and sufferings disturb us, then inspiration is impossible. Only with the disappearance of concerns and desires does freedom appear; only then does genius cast off its chains and become a pure contemplative subject. Therefore, let him who is visited by inspiration avoid suffering, cares, and lusts, and those desires which cannot be suppressed, let him satisfactorily fulfill them. Only then can the genius use his rare existence, for his own joy and for the common good.
When I listen to music, it often seems to me that the lives of all people, like my life, are the dreams of an eternal spirit and death is an awakening.
He to whom men and things do not sometimes seem ghosts or apparitions, is not capable of practicing philosophy; this difference comes from the contrast between a certain thing and its idea, which manifests itself in the thing as a phenomenon. And the idea is accessible only to a higher consciousness.
The ultimate goal of all knowledge is that the intelligence must perceive all manifestations of the will not only by visual contemplation (since they are perceived thus and implicitly), but also by means of abstract knowledge, in the sense that everything that exists in the will, to exist and in its representation. Every rational activity, like science, tends towards this.
Kings and servants are called only by their first names, and not by their surnames. These are the two extreme rungs of the social ladder.
Beauty is an open letter of recommendation that wins the heart before anything else.
He who reasons a lot finds it naturally difficult to put arguments aside and pass from the rapid flow of concepts to the quiet fountain of contemplation. But this is necessary; for the light of concepts, like the light of the moon, is not original, but borrowed from another.
It is better to discover your mind in silence than in conversation.
Magic is considered evil and is far from the idea of holiness and goodness, because, relying, like goodness and love, on the metaphysical unity of the will, instead of knowing itself in others, it takes advantage of this unity to spread the influence of the individual will far beyond its natural limits.
Between a genius and a madman there is a similarity: both live in a world totally different from everyone else's.
The world was not created but existed from ancient times, for time is conditioned by knowing beings and therefore by the world, and the world is conditioned by time. The world without time is not possible, but neither is time possible without the world. Both are therefore inseparable, and just as time is inconceivable without the world, so the world is inconceivable apart from time.
A wise man, throughout his whole life, knows what others know only on his deathbed, knowing therefore that all life is death. Media vita sumus in morte (in the middle of life we are already close to death).
To the torments of our existence is greatly contributed by the fact that we are always oppressed by time, which does not allow us to catch our breath and is behind everyone like a torturer armed with a whip. Time only leaves in peace the one who gave in to boredom.
We have lived and we will live again. Life is like a night unfolding in deep sleep, sleep that often turns into a nightmare.
The true dignity of a man of genius is that which raises him above others and makes him respectable, and consists in the predominance of the intellect—that bright and pure part of human nature. Ordinary people possess only a sinful will mixed with a shred of intellect, which they need only for guidance in life, as it is given to each.
Everyone can study science - one, harder another, easier. But from art everyone receives only as much as he himself is able to give. What, for example, will the works of Mozart give to a man who does not understand music? What do most people see in Raphael's Madonna? And do many people appreciate Goethe's "Faust"? Art does not, like science, deal only with the mind; it deals with the deepest essence of man, and therefore everyone understands in art only as much as the value he carries in himself allows him. The same applies to my philosophy, which is philosophy as art. Everyone will understand in it exactly as much as they deserve. In general, this philosophy will be accessible only to some and will be the philosophy of the paucorum hominum (those few). It seems to me that after the failure suffered for 3000 years by philosophy as a science, built i.e. according to the laws of the ground, it is already seen that, from a historical point of view, this is a wrong way. He who only knows how to find connections between ideas, to draw consequences from causes, may be a great scientist, but he will be as little a philosopher as he can be a painter, a poet or a musician. For an artist and a philosopher know things in themselves, Platonic ideas; and a scientist knows only the phenomenon, that is, the law of causality as such, because a phenomenon is nothing but the law of causality itself. Plato's expression is thus fully justified: the crowd is not capable of philosophy.
To find contradictions in the world is to lack true criticism and to be often mistaken.
The beginning of theology is fear. And the beginning of philosophy is nothing but pure and disinterested thinking. If people were happy, then there would be no need for theology. On the contrary, philosophy would be a necessity for minds of genius, even if there were no suffering and death in the world. From this, however, it does not follow that pure thinking is a necessary characteristic of the intellect in general; on the contrary, it is found only in monstrum per excessum, i.e. in a genius.
Don't tell your friend what your enemy doesn't need to know.
Does not genius depend on the perfection of a living memory? For it is only through memory, which links individual life events into an integral whole, that a wider and deeper understanding of life than that of ordinary people is possible.
Don't challenge anyone's opinions; just realize that if you will reject all the absurdities that people believe in, then you can live to the age of Methuselah and still not be done with them.
Will not humanity lose qualitatively as it increases quantitatively? An illustration of this supposition may be served by the fact (see Shnurer's History of Plague Injuries) that in the 14th century, after the plague, women became extremely fertile, so that cases of twin births were a common phenomenon, but in all newborns were later observed to be missing two teeth. Further, if we compare the ancient Greeks and Romans with our contemporary peoples, if we compare the age of the Vedas with the misery of the present age, and consider the fact that, despite the quantitative increase of mankind, the number of great minds has not increased - then the hypothesis above will not seem unfounded.
The Germans are reproached for having always and in everything imitated the French and English; but they forget that this was the most intelligent thing they as a nation could do, because they would have done nothing useful and good in their own power. Despite the enormous difference between the eminent and the common people, however, this difference was not enough to form two types of people. This, in the opinion of some, might seem strange, even offensive.
There is no better way to refresh your mind than reading the ancient classics; if you read one of these even for half an hour, you immediately feel rested, relieved and purified, uplifted and strengthened, as if you had bathed in a pure spring.
No one has lived in the past, no one will live in the future; only the present is life.
Nothing explains the indispensable unity of the primordial essence of our Ego with the essence of the outer world so well as the dream. For even in dreams the objects are different from ourselves, they are distinguished by their perfect objectivity and their enigmatic specificity, which is foreign to our properties; dreams inspire wonder, confusion, anxiety, etc. But all this is ourselves. So it is also with the will which carries the whole external world within itself, animating it, being shut up within us, where we perceive its immediate presence. But for all these wonders, we are indebted to the intellect, to this fantastic and wonderful workshop, to this unsurpassed magician, who decomposes his own nature into cognitive and knowable.
You have to live long and grow old to understand how short life is.