December 2011
31 posts
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“When a man is seriously engaged upon liberating himself spiritually his desires and passions as well hope to derive some advantage from it.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §542.
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“He who has publicly set himself great objectives and afterwards realizes he is too weak for them is usually also too weak to repudiate them, and then he unavoidably becomes a hypocrite.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §540.
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“Youth is unpleasant; for in youth it is not possible or not sensible to be productive, in any sense of the word.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §539.
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“The talent of many a man appears less than it is because he has always set himself too great tasks.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §538.
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“A profession makes one thoughtless. Therein lies its greatest blessing, for it is a rampart behind which one can lawfully retreat when one is assailed by commonplace cares and scruples.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §537.
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“Sometimes one stays faithful to a cause only because its opponents are unfailingly tasteless.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §536.
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“The chimera of fear is that evil, apish kobold who leaps on to the back of man at precisely the moment he is already bearing the heaviest burden.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §535.
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“We value services anyone renders us according to the worth he places upon them, not according to the value they possess for us.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §533.
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“One takes an obscure and inexplicable thing more seriously than a clear and explicable one.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §532.
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“He who lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in seeing that his enemy stays alive.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §531.
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“One person retains an opinion because he flatters himself with his own discovery, another because he acquired it with effort and is proud of having grasped it: thus both do so out of vanity.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §527.
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“He who thinks a great deal, and thinks objectively, can easily forget his own experiences, but not the thoughts these experiences called forth.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §526.
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“He who has raised men up in rage against him has always gained a party in his favor too.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §525.
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“The demand to be loved is the greatest of all pieces of presumption.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §523.
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“We belong to an age whose culture is in danger of perishing through the means to culture.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §520.
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“He who considers more deeply knows that, whatever his acts and judgments may be, he is always wrong.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §518.
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“There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §517.
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“The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §515.
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“No matter how far a man may extend himself with his knowledge, no matter how objectively he may come to view himself, in the end it can yield to him nothing but his own biography.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §513.
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“One man’s morality is higher compared with another’s often only because its goals are quantitatively greater. The latter is drawn down by his narrowly bounded occupation with the petty.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §512.
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“He who has much to do preserves his general opinions and points of view almost unaltered. Likewise, anyone who works in the service of an idea will cease to examine even the idea itself, for he has no time for that.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §511 (edited).
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“Not when it is dangerous to tell the truth does truth lack advocates, but when it is boring to do so.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §506.
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“Envy and jealousy are the privy parts of the human soul. The comparison can perhaps be extended.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §503.
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“One says ‘pleasure in a thing,’ but in reality it is pleasure in oneself by means of a thing.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §501.
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“To the ends of knowledge, one must know how to employ that internal current that draws us to a thing and then that other current that after a time draws us away from it.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §500.
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“Fellow rejoicing, not suffering, makes the friend.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §499.
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“If a man wants to become a hero, the serpent must first have become a dragon; otherwise, he will lack his proper enemy.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §498.
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“Man involuntarily conducts himself nobly when he has become accustomed to desiring nothing of men and always bestowing gifts upon them.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §497.
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“It is the privilege of greatness to give great delight with meager gifts.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §496.
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“Many are obstinate with regard to the path once they have entered upon it; few with regard to the goal.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §494.
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“Nobility of mind consists to a great degree in good-naturedness and absence of distrust, and thus contains precisely that which successful and money-hungry people are so fond of looking down on and laughing at.”
—Human, All Too Human: Vol. 1, §493.