Wherever primitive man put up a word, he believed he had made a discovery. How utterly mistaken he really was! He had touched a problem, and while supposing he had solved it, he had created and obstacle to its solution. Now, with every new knowledge we stumble over flint-like and petrified words and, in so doing, break a leg sooner than a word.
The craving for equality can express itself either as a desire to pull everyone down to our own level (by belittling them, excluding them, tripping them up) or as a desire to raise ourselves up along with everyone else (by acknowledging them, helping them, and rejoicing in their success).
THE SUFFERING OF GENIUS AND ITS VALUE. The artistic genius desires to give pleasure, but if his mind is on a very high plane he does not easily find anyone to share his pleasure; he offers entertainment but nobody accepts it. That gives him, in certain circumstances, a comically touching pathos; for he has no right to force pleasure on men. He pipes, but none will dance: can that be tragic?
Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation - but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped?