#self overcoming

"The artist must leave the world to understand it, and return to it to be understood."

Balance

When I find myself at that point, in the position of someone who would change something — at that point I don’t change it, I change myself. It’s for that reason that I have said that instead of self-expression, I’m involved in self-alteration.

This is the mistake that I perpetually make: that I imagine the suffering of others to be much greater that it is. From my childhood on, the proposition ‘my greatest dangers lie in pitying’ has confirmed itself again and again…It will be enough if, through the bad experiences I have had with pitying, I am stimulated to make a theoretically interesting alteration in the esteem that pitying enjoys.

Pitying: my weakness, which I am learning to overcome. It is good if the most detestable  abuse of my sympathy and indulgence eventually teaches me that I have nothing to do in this area.

Faith in Oneself. - Few people have faith in themselves - and of these few, some posses it as a useful blindness or partial eclipse of the mind (what they would behold if they could see to the bottom of themselves!), while the rest have to acquire it. Everything good, fine, or great they do is first of all an argument against the skeptic inside them. They have to convince or persuade him, and that almost requires genius. These are the great self-dissatisfied people.

I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know where it will end.