I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark cloud that lowereth over man: they herald the coming of the lightning, and succumb as heralds.
All parties attempt to represent important things that have developed outside themselves as unimportant, and where they fail in this they assail those things all the more bitterly the more admirable they are.
Faith, indeed, has up to the present not been able to move real mountains, although I do not know who assumed that it could. But it can put mountains where there are none.
Verily, I do not like them, the merciful who feel blessed in their pity: they are lacking too much in shame. If I must pity, at least I do not want it known; and if I do pity, it is preferably from a distance.
The good four. Honest with ourselves and with whatever is friend to us; courageous toward the enemy; generous toward the vanquished; polite-always that is how the four cardinal virtues want us.
It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.
A vocation makes us unthinking; that is its greatest blessing. For it is a bulwark behind which we are permitted to withdraw whencommonplace doubts and cares assail us.
If God had wanted to become an object of love, he would first of all have had to forgo judging and justice : a judge, and even a gracious judge, is no object of love.
Having become conscious of the truth he once perceived, man now sees only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence, he now understands the symbolic element in Ophelia's fate, he now recognizes the wisdom of the woodland god, Silenus: it nauseates him.