If it is true to say of the lazy that they kill time, then it is greatly to be feared that an era which sees its salvation in public opinion, this is to say private laziness, is a time that really will be killed: I mean that it will be struck out of the history of the true liberation of life. How reluctant later generations will be to have anything to do with the relics of an era ruled, not by living men, but by pseudo-men dominated by public opinion.
Everyone who enjoys supposes that the tree was concerned with the fruit, but it was really concerned with the seed. -In this lies the difference between all those who create and those who enjoy.
Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing.
Do you believe then that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great if there had not before hand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers and wizards, who thirsted and hungered after abscondite and forbidden powers?
Logic, too, also rests on assumptions that do not correspond to anything in the real world, e.g., on the assumption that there areequal things, that the same thing is identical at different points in time: but this science arose as a result of the opposite belief (that such things actually exist in the real world). And it is the same with mathematics, which would certainly never have arisen if it had been understood from the beginning that there is no such thing in nature as a perfectly straight line, a true circle, and absolute measure.
Everyone carries within himself an image of womanliness derived from his mother: it is this that determines whether, on the whole,he will revere women, or despise them, or remain generally indifferent to them.
When one has finished building one's house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way - before one began.
We grow hostile to many an artist or writer, not because we finally come to see he has deceived us, but because he thought no subtler means were required to ensnare us.