An Unqualified Philosopher

In all cases, what matters is taking up an extreme position, standing at a corner of the triangle - raw, rotten, or ruthless - to show how you've retreated from the peasants in its middle, who've made much blander choices.

Which of us indeed would be a free spirit if there were no church? The church, not its poison, repels us...Leaving the church aside, we, too, love the poison...

I lost confidence in doing anything for myself. I was unsettled, full of doubts. The older I got, the more evidence you could hold against me as proof of my uselessness; in some sense, gradually, you actually came to be right in the end.

And there's nothing like having the crutch of the ideal snatched away for making you plunge into reality in all its bracing nudity. Not only will you see things for what they are, unadorned but all the more intense for it, but you'll no longer be cowed by some ideal to which you feel you ought to conform.

The meaninglessness of suffering, not the suffering itself, was the curse that thus far lay stretched out over humanity.

Why are we embarrassed by silence? What comfort do we find in all the noise?

I weigh my past against my future and discover that both are excellent; I cannot give precedence to either, and the only fault I can find is in the injustice of Fate, which has favoured me so greatly.

Incidentally, let one beware from the outset of taking these concepts "pure" and "impure" too seriously, too broadly, or even too symbolically: rather all of earlier humanity's concepts were initially understood in a coarse, crude, superficial, narrow, straightforward, and above all unsymbolic manner, to an extent that we can hardly imagine.

What if I went on sleeping for a while and forgot all these idiocies?

[Socrates] submits to death, longs for it, lives for it and dies entirely on his own terms, and yet does not commit suicide.

Only thought resembles. It resembles by being what it sees, hears or knows; it becomes what the world offers it.