Quote collection
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"Whoever knows he is deep tries to be clear, but whoever wants to seem deep to the crowd tries to be obscure. For the crowd supposes that anything it cannot see to the bottom must be deep: it is so timid and goes so unwillingly into the water."
"You must await your thirst and allow it to become complete: otherwise you will never discover your spring, which can never be anyone else's!"
"The vain.- We are like shop windows in which we are continually arranging, concealing or illuminating the supposed qualities other ascribe to us - in order to deceive ourselves."
"With one more talent one frequently stands with greater instability than with one less, as a table stands better on three legs than on four."
"Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared — this must some day become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth."
"The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head."
"One is healthy when one can laugh at the earnestness and zeal with which one has been hypnotized by any single detail of one's life."
"Even the bravest only rarely have courage for what they really know."
"A man of genius is unbearable, unless he possesses at least two things besides: gratitude and purity."
"In everything one thing is impossible: rationality."
"Let them like the Tibetans, chew the cud of their "om mane padme hum" innumerable times, or, as in Benares, count the name of the God Ram-Ram-Ram (etc. with or without charm) on their fingers; or honour Vishnu with his thousand names of invocation, Allah with his ninety-nine; or they may make use of the prayer-wheels and the rosary: the main thing is that they are settled down for a time at this work and are tolerable to look at. This kind of prayer has been invented for the benefit of the pious who have thought and elevations of their own."
"I condemn Christianity; I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible of all accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worse possible corruption. The Christian Church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul."
"One never dives into the water to save a drowning man more eagerly than when there are others present who dare not take the risk."
"There are two types of genius; one which above all begets and wants to beget, and another which prefers being fertilized and giving birth."
"Rendering oneself unarmed when one had been the best-armed, out of a height of feeling-that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a peace of mind."
"When I seek another word for 'music', I never find any other word than 'Venice'"
"How can a man know himself? He is a thing dark and veiled; and if the hare has seven skins, man can slough off seventy times seven and still not be able to say: "this is really you, this is no longer outer shell."
"Woman understands children better than man does, but man is more childlike than woman."
"Intoxicating joy is it for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and forget himself. Intoxicating joy and self-forgetting, did the world once seem to me."
"But not to perish from internal distress and doubt when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of suffering : that is great, that belongs to greatness."