The most ideal way to be rid of an enemy is to recognise and to elicit the friend in him.
There is quite literally no vexation out of whose cause a reasonable helping of wit and guile cannot extricate a man who can clearly and distinctly think for himself.
It is absurd to believe that we should do something which we cannot in fact do.
When consorting with idiots and people disposed to bad and intemperate reactions, sense is most useful and important in knowing what to reject; whereas, in all other matters it is best to know what to cherish.
People who focus too much on your failings, and introduce at every turn the most adversarial notions, are to be dismissed without courtesy.
Especially for the independent thinker and man of culture, reading should only be undertaken either for pure leisure or as a stimulus to conception, and not so much as a way of merely expanding knowledge, which is largely misguided.
A full course of despair is an essential element of any complete education.
Once you have conceived a very general idea it is well to run through the various meanings of the terms and see how they may be differently construed. The better the idea, the more you will find that, all things considered, it applies to everything that it penetrates. But then of course there are always contradictions.
Opinions are to be appreciated in the degree that they are novel.
We judge the character of a man so as to weigh up the appropriate import of his words. Ideally then reputation is the collected residue of such judgements and a useful guide for encounters; however, in practice, it is more like the shadow of a man than the man himself. We should be careful and guarded about the sincerity of our emotional investments in unsound views. It is well to remember that if we must involve ourselves with idiocy, then naturally it can be tactfully humoured but not allowed to infect our thought. The best strategy for subverting the invasion of stupidity into our minds is in fact not to ignore it, but to respond to it with the full force of our wits, even and especially if this is done only in the mind. In this way intelligence may be cultivated equally well in the squalid trenches of ignorance and misunderstanding as in the esteemed company of learned men. In the former case, for an intelligent man, it is only that one may have less of a fitting audience for one’s captivating assurances. Ignorance and misunderstanding tend to re-announce themselves in men of culture merely in more subtle ways; but they are arguably equally present there. It is not, however, that one must hopelessly argue with bloodyminded fools; no, what we want is to delicately preserve the beating heart of conception through encounters that would otherwise destroy it, that would seek to suffocate it with an unthinking commonplace that overpowers us through the strength of the crowd. Ultimately it is the shaky and provisional nature of our assessments that forms the necessary basis for the delight of being surprised by a well-aimed thought. Such thoughts are indeed rooted in ourselves in the same way that we are rooted in the world; and in order for them to reach their destinations, to hit their targets, we must navigate them, and fire them with a sure hand.
Nothing more is required for genuine thought than the leisurely exercise of intuition, the inward discerning of whole ideas and their interrelations.
A certain youthful competitiveness for knowledge is well at the beginning of one’s education, but soon the avid and restless zeal becomes barbaric, and alienates all repose. Drink deep, yes, but go leisurely, too. Knowledge acquired purely for the sake of out-knowing others is no contribution to wisdom.
The first step to true leisure is not to feel that you absolutely must enjoy it.
The discipline of writing is to be recommended inasmuch as it spells the discipline of emotional bridling. It summons up one’s passions in clear and distinct forms more governable thereby. The written word has really always been a conduit to self-mastery, and those who strongly feel the compunction not to become enslaved by their own irrational inclinations and so on will intuitively take up the advantages it offers.
If you think your life should be improved, do you not lack in gratitude, but abound in ambitious hope?
If you want to live the good life, seek out the wisest men who can teach you it.
What we want is excitement, sufficiently but not necessarily.
Love what is right and honourable, for that is the sustenance of the good life.
Taking it easy is the last refuge of those who are shy of challenge.
It is a truth, rarely appreciated, that to adequately engage with the pressing dilemmas of one’s life, one must become a philosopher (“a lover of wisdom” in the etymological sense). For only in this way can one become a practical handyman of all that is ethical.
Every single thing we do or say returns to us through the inherency of its consequential registration.
Talent and especially genius oblige a man to be industrious. Everyone else should only be obliged to labour inasmuch as it is necessary for the fulfillment of worthwhile desires.
The power of your deeds should be so great that others are increased to become auxiliaries of your words.
What you give the world is formed by how well you can steal what it lacks only to give it back once it is born.
If you are virtuous enough to help someone who doesn’t wish to be helped, start by endangering them with your anxiously indeterminate desire.
If I could pass down just one simple principle to my readers and heirs, it would be this: always go to what is most nourishing.
Attend with depth to where your mind wanders when it meets a stimulus; take heed, then connect your impression to an idea.
It is impossible to make a felicitous conception without extending associative thoughts to reach its cause.
The eyes of your soul pass over all that is immaterial to your destiny, but retain much that may be usefully employed in reaching it.
There is never any real objection to be made against throwing oneself headlong into the great struggle. One is either going to sink or swim—and if one sinks, one still swims, only underwater!
Do not bother seeking sentimental praise, but only mimetically reproduce the deserving; so that you become deserving yourself.
Normalise spiritual servitude in the interests of that power of the greatest interest being served for serving all in turn; so that all may be availed of the truth of their self-interest!
The ego is a kind of enslavement; true freedom annihilates vanity.
We would act well to avoid competition with those who play an inferior version of the same game that we imagine ourselves playing, much as we should shun any other game inferior to our own. An inferior game is merely one unsuited to our nature, or in which our triumphs of effective agency are less rewarding.
The height of satisfaction is found in the capacity to subdue all passion, in the chill mathematics of dealing with obstacles purely by reason and cleverness.
The most unhelpful kind of fault lies in the stubborn refusal to recognise a man’s evident rectification of his sinful ways; i.e., in the insistence upon castigating errors he has long since mended and allowed to pass away.
Virtue is a serviceable substitute for what is falsely called riches, but what is falsely called riches is not a serviceable substitute for virtue.
Especially on those occasions when we are clouded about with crippling doubts and grave hesitations, is it well to remember that to act generally and unavoidably means to offend some carefully nurtured piety or other. But the knowledge that this fact is indeed an ironclad truth greatly unburdens us of fears invariably misplaced. Anyway, it is perfectly well to upset some insufferable bourgeois or other!
Sometimes there is greater result to be had in emulating a teacher than merely imbibing his knowledge.
Titanic hesitations.—The depths are what will haunt you. To stay at the surface is already to have survived. In appearances one stays afloat; it is only by sinking that one goes below.
To attain mastery make reflection a default, from which all attempts at self-correction should improve with still more reflection.
The thing about a shorter attention span is that you can get to your next thought quicker.
One valorous war cry the full range of whose rolling thunder drowns out every creeping note and sound of infirmity. This is all you need!
It is the true understanding of a thing’s necessity that renders it sufferable.
Theorising your subject position is much easier if you take it by the lapel, throw it against the wall, and demand that it speak in tongues.
I regret to inform you that information is mostly regrettable.
Amounting to nothing is amounting to most of the universe.
If you are not prepared to be considered a talentless hack or indeed utterly insane by those up to whom you hold a mirror, abandon your pursuit of culture.
Never refrain from using the most extreme terms of distinguishing salience if you wish to say anything whatever once in your life that doesn’t make you want to shout at clouds, immediately fall asleep from boredom, or constitute a line that might actually be remembered.
Tell your story. If you don’t, someone else will. Worse, they may get it right!
There are no sins against oneself. To be ruined by one’s own hand is a sacred right.
Everything that brightens with the merry-making power of the comic is nothing less than an inviolable right, much as Spinoza wisely counsels that cheerfulness can never be excessive. Those who can laugh, and who can laugh at themselves, bond most delightedly with others.
You either die before you die or you live long enough to realise that you never truly lived.
A man is either happy in spite of it all or he should think himself out of sadness.
Commanding reason is a step on the path at whose end lies reason to command.
More than anything else, man should learn that what he needs is to continue learning.
You are only free to do what is necessary.
If you would have others be at ease with you, be at ease with yourself.
Necessary servitude is the better part of the education of one’s soul.
We may console ourselves that it is a virtue perfectly unselfish to feel lonely.
If the ideas aren’t naturally connected, and therefore simply waiting to be discovered, then it is up to the thinker to skilfully fuse them together in an act of creation.
An active interest in the guidance of another is ten times better than painful pity at his misfortune. For it is better to help than to commiserate, just as it is rather better for one man to suffer than two.
Sanity, a species of mildness, as well as a form of latent madness hushed away in stable convention, is often also a matter of restoring our credulity to balance where delusion has reigned.
Your perceptions channel who you are; are you perhaps capable of channelling yourself back into your perceptions?
Take hold of the underlying thought by the first cluster of words that come to mind. Unravel it by free association. You may be surprised how intelligent your formulation ends up if only you simply allow it to speak!
Do not make the personal your basis of power. The appropriate basis is personality.
We shed tears at what we cannot change partly because what we cannot change are the meanings of tears, slices of eternal ruination.
The secret to creativity is not so much knowing how to hide your sources as knowing how to chemically react them.
Self-belief is mostly inadvisable. Unless of course it is all that you have, in which case you may be a solipsist. Also inadvisable.
Never let your sense of what is wrong with something prevent you from exploring it.
An awareness of the blanks in one’s sensibility immediately creates such affectivity as begins to fill them in.
Fatigued impoverishment of spirit descends to its ultimate depth and is badly tormented by its incapacity to extricate itself; but who among us would not suggest that it bravely go yet deeper?
Reading many books is a distraction from facing one’s own intelligence.
If you want a clear-cut understanding of the meaning of death, consult the Christian God, who suffered it for an eternity of three whole days!