…The Stoic, taught by experience and ruling himself by ideas! He who otherwise only looks for uprightness, truth, freedom from deceptions and shelter from ensnaring and sudden attack, in his misfortune performs the masterpiece of dissimilation; he shows no twitching mobile face but as it were a mask with dignified, harmonious features; he does…
There are ages, when the rational and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one full of fear of the intuition and the other full of fear of the abstraction; the latter just as irrational as the former is inartistic. Both desire to rule over life; the one knowing how to meet the…
That enormous framework and hoarding of ideas, by clinging to which the needy man saves himself through life, is to the freed intellect only a scaffolding and a toy for Its most daring feats, and when it smashes It to pieces, throws it into confusion, and then puts it together ironically, paring the strangest,…
The wide-awake day of a people mystically excitable, let us say the earlier Greeks, is in fact through the continually-working wonder which mythos presupposes, more akin to a dream than to the day of the thinker sobered by science. If every tree may at some time talk as a nymph, or a god under…
…waking man per se is only clear about his being awake through the rigid and orderly woof of ideas, and it is for this very reason that he sometimes comes to believe that he was dreaming when the woof of his ideas has for a moment been torn by Art. Pascal is quite right,…
It is language which has worked originally in the construction of ideas; in later times it is science. Just as the bee works at the same time at the cells and fills them with honey, thus science works irresistibly at that great columbarium of ideas, the cemetery of perceptions, builds ever newer and higher…
Only by forgetting the primitive world of metaphors, only by congelation and coagulation of an original mass of similes pouring forth as a fiery liquid out of the primal faculty of human fancy, only by the invincible faith, that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself: in short only by…
…the Romans and Etrusceans for their benefit cut up the sky by means of strong mathematical lines and banned a god as it were into a templum, into a space limited in this fashion, so every nation has above its head such a sky of ideas divided up mathematically, and it understands the demand…
What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations, which become poetically and rhetorically intensified, transposed, and embellished, and which after long use seem firm, canonic, and binding to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that they are illusions;…
In some remote corner of the universe, effused into innumerable solar-systems, there was once a star upon which clever animals invented cognition. It was the haughtiest, most mendacious moment in the history of this world, but yet only a moment. After Nature had taken breath awhile the star congealed and the clever animals had…
