Marriage as a long conversation. When marrying, one should ask
oneself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to
converse well with this woman into your old age? Everything else in
marriage is transitory, but the most time during the association
belongs to conversation.
Poets treat their experiences shamelessly: they exploit them.
Punishment.
-A strange thing, our punishment! It does not cleanse the criminal,
it is no atonement; on the contrary, it pollutes worse than the
crime does.
Women's friendships.- Women can enter into friendship with a man
perfectly well; but in order to maintain it the aid of a little
physical antipathy is perhaps required.
Shedding one's skin. The snake that cannot shed its skin perishes.
So do the spirits who are prevented from changing their opinions;
they cease to be spirit.
Proteus-Nature.- Through love women actually become what they
appear to be in the imagination of their lovers.
Never in vain.- In the mountains of truth you never climb in vain.
Either you already reach a higher point to-day, or you exercise
your strength in order to be able to climb higher to-morrow.
Unintentionally noble.- A person behaves with unintentional
nobleness when he has accustomed himself to seek naught from others
and always to give to them.
Against mediators.
-Those who wish to be mediators between two resolute thinkers are
marked as mediocre: they lack eyes to see the unparalleled; seeing
things as similar and making them the same is the mark of weak
eyes.
The equilibrium of friendship.- The right equilibrium of friendship
in our relation to other men is sometimes restored when we put a
few grains of wrong on our own side of the scales.
What is the seal of attained freedom?
-No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.
The conditions are lacking.- Many people wait all their lives for
the opportunity to be good in their own way.
Sensuality often hastens the growth of love so much that the roots
remain weak and are easily torn up.
A gauge for wisdom.- The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by
the diminution of ill-temper.
If one has character one also has one's typical experience, which
recurs repeatedly.
What? Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of
man's?
Shadows in the flame.- The flame is not so bright to itself as to
those whom it illuminates, so also the wise man.
Once the decision has been made, close your ear even to the best
counter argument: sign of a strong character. Thus an occasional
will to stupidity.
Why one contradicts. One often contradicts an opinion when it is
really only the way in which it has been presented that is
unsympathetic.
In the end one loves one's desire and not what is desired.
