An excess of passion breeds wayward behaviour.
He is an artist indeed who has made his passions into a palette and the world into his canvas.
No man can outsource the production of his virtue.
Condescension irritates us because the superior man who relates to us with downward-gazing belittlement neglects the proper task suitable to him, which is to nurture the growth of others. On the other hand, the condescension of an inferior man is even more objectionable, obviously because it implies the absurd assumption that a man who cannot offer us anything can indeed offer us something for which he is also to be thanked.
Woman, the superior beauty of the sexes who knows this fact and sometimes wields it mercilessly, is the ultimate seducer. She holds the key of temptation to the secrets of darkness. Only upon woman‘s recognition does man begin to see the depths at which her light shines into the abyssal night of his soul.
Egoism is only repellant in those who are unworthy and thus dispossessed of its magnetic charm, the confidence that it may inspire in another who—at its message of perfect self-assurance—feels their own power stir through identification with such self-approval.
A man who constantly takes pains to be casual does not live.
A certain repugnance in man can be hidden away, but it can never be absolutely denied.
Bad conscience is to a lack of wit closely allied.
It is the work of psychoanalysis to realise the true reasons behind all that we say.
“Authenticity” is typically the excuse whereby a lack of talent takes cover behind the familiarity of such lack.
The man who attains liberation from corporate dominance may soon become unrecognisable, subtly revisited by oppression in the wilful failure of his peers to understand him.
All sin is wounding. All virtue is the strength not to be wounded.
It is through both introjection and universals assimilated to a dense piloting core of the personality that one achieves the harmony of elements that composes any successful breadth of subjectivity.
There should really be no discipline but self-discipline.
Compelling honesty is only achieved once the emotions have been reconciled with reality.
Virtue is driven by the most rational ideals.
Only that conscience which is saddened to commit wrong and joyed to act well can truly be called good.
What distinguishes a superior man is always something gravitational: he pulls others into orbit, and his virtues have about them a sense of enormous mass.
Being overly conflicted shows a certain depth of feeling while also meaning that one perhaps lacks the courage of one’s convictions, that one hasn’t the readiness of instinctual vehemence, or the fierce stridency of a dominant desire with which to muscle out lesser inclinations. But ultimately it means that one hasn’t thought enough, that one still needs to wrestle with the implications of each particular avenue of subscription to this or that notion. Then again, what are emotions if not mixed?
Sufficiently robust purity can withstand many indiscretions.
Forgiveness or generosity is the mark of the educated man in that it consoles rather than accuses our brethren. And more than anyone, the educated man is aware that we do indeed need consolation. For suffering is the deepest lesson: it is the object of endless reminding that binds people together in desperately tender sympathy. More than this, it is the greatest moral urgency of all and thus the thing that, oddly enough, true education needs to drive itself. Indeed, suffering, which requires answering more than (and before) anything else in the whole wide world, is naturally the object of efforts to cure and dispel it. If successful, such efforts would render all education beyond, say, the mere acquisition of a motor skill or the memorisation of facts not only unnecessary but even impossible, too. For misery is the surest tonality of human experience itself, a steady pulsation beneath all exertion, and a thread weaved into a blindfold that might, upon a gentle touch, nonetheless wipe away the very tears it causes.
If someone you respect hates a given thing, then you are liable to subscribe to that hatred.
So hopelessly unable to love, the bigot himself is driven to secretly hate the curse of his inferior soul.
My position on human nature is that we are basically bad. Still, it is important to treat everyone as if they were good, which should make us not so bad after all.
He who contends with great danger is reckoned either a fool or a hero—an example of the inherent subjectivity of all our assessments.
The advantage of an enemy is that we grow more virtuous by overcoming his resistance to us; whereas, the disadvantage of a friend is that we are lulled into complacency by his openness to our vices.
Calling others out on their prejudice and misunderstanding is not nearly so important as calling oneself out on them. For the latter amounts to good-spirited social invitation, the closing of alienating distance, empowering humility; whereas, the former amounts merely to presumptuous discourtesy, brash impertinence, and the overblown pride of thinking oneself well-positioned to dish out unwelcome remedies for ailments that the other doesn’t recognise.
Only the virtuous can truly be helpful.
Men are distinguished, and ranked as in a ladder, according to the height at which their own inner demons compel them.
Man reckons with the unsure possibility of his redemption, and forgets to reckon with the glorious fact of his criminal instincts.
The rapidity and impenetrability with which a woman’s mood flits across her profile fills the silence of man’s mostly ponderous bewilderment at her.
Parents expect their children not to make the same mistakes they did while being powerless to stop furnishing an example of those mistakes.
We are liable to confuse the surface beliefs and opinions, the merest attitudes and tastes, of an admired person, for the inborn essence of their virtue.
Humanity is a fictional category. It represents a zenith of salutary illusion, a make-believe umbrella for the storms of passion, and the storehouse of many sacred ideals.
They leap at your every mistake, which is not a mistake.
Strength without overblown pride is like a mountainous peak clouded over, a careful omission of the glaring.
The soul is the theatre of the mind’s dramatic performance, in which thoughts are the actors, passions the responses of the audience, conscience the critic, and the unconscious the playwright.
It is the virtue of charm to make a great and captivating disjunction between fancy and feeling. In this way, the passions lead us to the precipice whereupon the intellect takes flight.
A quick wit merely affirms that we compete; a deeper one answers why.
Ridden with a fear that leaves us totally ill-disposed to pilot ourselves lucidly, our hysterical cries exceed the hurrah of the jungle’s stir or else we cower in silences, and find ourselves embroiled in a bewildering disarray of external causes in its sum evil for inflicting such of our emotions, any emotion!
There is no virtue whatever in punishing but a desire to rehabilitate those qualities which in a rogue are virtues.
Character begins and ends with the use of language. There is no hero who does not speak his name for the ears of tomorrow.
A man who genuinely regrets his own ostensible insufferability is like a shark who thinks he should stop eating on account of getting meat in his teeth.
The unconscious is the repository of language as ghost, whose reverberations we feel as haunting question marks.
It is as natural to be heckled by differently voiced perspectives within oneself as it is to have a flourishing ecosystem that speciates.
True pride is pleased to subtly nod with humility.
Concern, as Graham Greene says, is cruel. It is almost nothing but the unconscious imposition of so many insidious social control mechanisms. It is a devil in angel’s garb, and has all the disciplinary whiff of the principal’s office. People who idly busy themselves with concern for others merely wish to be a saviour but are always a raging tyrant for those others. A person is concerned for another only when that other is not acting as they themselves are falsely supposed to act. And so the whole affair is nothing but a failure of love.
The effectiveness of a desire for ability depends upon the ability of one’s desire.
As rainforest trees and vines snake up to the canopy to reach sunlight so too are our virtues educated.
Recognition is the stuff of human battlefields.
A great parade of ability is liable to make one keel over with sleepiness. Talent applied lightly hints at stores of which we could only dream.
To be successful, according to the vulgar standard of success, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain grotesque banality, the total absence of human ideals, and a high regard for the latest glittering novelty in an endless procession of the irrelevant.
A bloke is a man who buys a showcase of his gender at the price of a potshot at sophistication.
An idealist is a person seduced by the infiltration of dreams into his desires, whereupon he is unswayable that life is an unfulfilled wish.
It is only as something other than its true unadorned self that criminal excellence (such as it is) can be recognized in the world; hence the perennial image of the criminal element as an underbelly, mired in secrecy.
Energy, discharge, frequency, gravity, transmission, conductivity, digestion, growth, reactivity, reverberation, amplification—all such notions not only describe features of the natural world, but are also actions and properties of the human soul.
Over-exertion is barbarity. What is so graceful about that one whose veins burst from his temples as he furiously invents another useless miracle?
Most people are simply themselves. They have no breadth of subjectivity, possess but a single voice, and fail to reach the stars upon the shoulders of giants.
The accurate interpretation of our faults is called an acute knowledge of human nature.
A woman’s wiliness is her perfectly amoral delight; whereas, a man’s morality is his vain pleasure of reprimand.
Inventive self-deception reaches up to the highest peaks of objective reason.
Good conscience is a home and guilt is feeling homesick.
Incurable pessimism, a prophylactic against many pleasures, bemoans its lack of reconciliation with all that it hates in the world.
Madness cut in the figure of spiritual predation encircled him to fear with reverence—but what? Is this so mad?
A hero is one who must first agree with you on the right goals, or else he fashions them for you, if only to then save you from them.
Gossip provides the familiar warmth of a certain social insulation; whereas, rationality represents truth beyond the merely anecdotal.
The troubles we endure in madness are not our own.
Insofar as a man constructs suitable reasons to act and then indeed follows them, he takes his destiny into his own hands.
He is simple, meaning that he wishes others to think for him.
Even sublime self-discipline is but a concession to the raging tyrant in us.
Woman is a natural actress, besotted of the drama and intrigue that she constantly chronicles, and man vainly imagines that he writes the script.
The repellent stench of modern celebrity appeals only to those without nostrils.
Longing for some annihilating release from the world in order that he might finally be alone, he went so far as to destroy his own shadow.
The good humour of some vulgarity may show up the mere arbitrariness, the flimsy lie of the social veil. In this way we break through what is customarily said and done to instinctively perceive a more real form of social intercourse. Coarseness is soon equated with good earthly vigor. Too much ensconced in merely outward social forms, the bourgeois loses the feeling and drive of that inner impulse, which should otherwise be his guide. The disavowed neuroses of his being trapped by the very web which is supposed to connect him are smoothed over and relegated to the status of acceptably repressed inconsistencies. Said bourgeois takes refuge in the most threadbare inferences from everything that outwardly appears to be so, and in this he fails to explore the full depth and breadth of his own experience. The blame for this last he promptly discharges upon whatever triviality of exchange presently meets him, a tendency whose upshot is an unfortunate reduction to all that is low in irrationality. In the general tension between outwards and inwards he falls as if down a ravine.
Fundamentally we do not even know that of which a soul is capable.
Man’s wisdom stands in direct proportion to woman’s lack of need for it.
There are two things wrong with wanting to be something when you grow up. The first is wanting to be something. The second is growing up.
A person in whom the warlike passions have not flourished through their natural course is hardly going to feel real tenderness.
One who cultivates enough breadth of subjectivity is likely to end up being mistaken for himself.
We have egos so as not to listen.
The difference between a martyr and an archaic revivalist is that one dies for a cause and the other’s cause is dead.
The good, the true, and the beautiful are only accessible as that for which we have developed a taste.
Nothing unleashes a person’s cunning more than a vice that wishes to stay hidden.
Fear and hope represent the middle class of the passions, in that they long for the quiet respite of some ultimate holiday and escape from the world that rouses them to dreams and departures for some perfect safety, some eternal suburbia of life. They are excess baggage for the philosopher who travels light in order to flit sun-drenched and with great upward striving across a melting conceptual landscape.
Virtue is a serviceable substitute for what is falsely called riches, but what is falsely called riches is not a serviceable substitute for virtue.
We must be inspired to be capable of inspiring.
A huge and proper life that seeks out more than the world is a forge for the most fantastical imagination that steals away from earthly wounds, and reaches to the outermost limits of transcendence rendered into a thing graspable by prayer.
Style is never a random signature, but dresses the passions in the attire they need for expression, cutting now this, now that figure from a wretched, burning heart.
He was the kingdom of celestial glory incarnate. Through him all things to their native fruition awoke, and like unto the music of the spheres was his immeasurable heaven of poesy enchanted.
The projective utterance or belief, though essentially a hallucination, does not lie about the psyche of its author.
“Who cares?” is now a question shorn of the possibility of an actual answer. Those who care do not matter and those who matter do not care. Fit secundum regulam. According as each higher rung in the chain of command corresponds to the increasing absence of a functioning conscience, responsibility is deferred up the ladder. Since not even a thousand several tongues can nowadays assail one’s deluded sense of injured innocence, those in the top jobs sparkle with the unruffled calm befitting the sheen of the half-empty petrol barrels of their minds: they are full only of the stench of decomposed life.
The danger of personal qualities simply lies with their colliding.
A malady of inflated and parading barbarity, disciplined tediousness, strangling vines over the aperture of consciousness—this is the usual aftermath of an ill-serving education.
Everything spiritualised belongs to the one who inspires.
When we consider the invariable discrepancy between one’s own self-conception and the view of one’s detractor, we can only conclude that every argument concerning personal identity is conducted against what is to oneself a straw-man. And who knows one better than oneself?
Full many a person escapes the pressing question of individual character simply through being normal, which is nothing more than to flee into the mouth of a statistical shadow.
Modern man is far too comfortable with having his desires shaped by the demeaning spirit of the times, the objective social tendency, the culture industry—especially given all the noise he makes about “being true to oneself!”
Who is to condemn or trouble the happy madman who disturbs nobody? Is he not the perfect image of a reasonable response to widespread unreason? For his existence bears the scandalous meaning of jubilant defecation upon the world. Ha, ha! The world! A thing of middling significance and almost no value whatever, a malodorous swamp of accidental tragicomedy, this one, absolute, consummate mistake into which we are thrown like scraps to a dog kennel, kicking and screaming at such confounded fate!
A good piece of advice is a dangerous thing, and when unignorable it is absolutely fatal.
Nowadays genuine humanity, the ability that a person may have to be universally recognisable, is a rare, indeed almost an occult phenomenon.
Virtue may be nothing but the depth of meaning with which one paints one’s deeds as absolutely necessary.
To be different is to be alone, but to be alone is not to be different.
It is the highest type of man whose sacred burden is to do nothing at all. For his idleness represents the squandering characteristic of all art. He takes to the leisurely pursuit of divination in the grove of his paradoxically overactive mind, where the heedless wind imprisons him as one destined to walk in loneliness and dreams.
Cultivating virtue is for some not so much a matter of growing single qualities one at a time as it is of getting a bunch of them into the right equilibrium, and understanding their higher laws of motion.