I see tragedy and comedy and pain and irony and all that stuff. But in the end I think life is fascinating, and I think people are more good than bad, and I think that the possibilities of progress are real.
The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain… Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves.
...and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.
Many are poets, but without the name;For what is Poesy but to createFrom overfeeling Good or Ill; and aimAt an external life beyond our fate,And be the new Prometheus of new men,Bestowing fire from Heaven, and then, too late,Finding the pleasure given repaid with pain
The vast majority of the race whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind at heart and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves.
Life is both pleasure and pain, is it not? But why should we cling to pleasure and avoid pain? Why not merely live with both? If you cling to pleasure what happens? You get attached, do you not?
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.
When I come to be united to thee with all my being, then there will be no more pain and toil for me, and my life shall be a real life, being wholly filled by thee.
The ridiculous is produced by any defect that is unattended by pain, or fatal consequences; thus, an ugly and deformed countenance does not fail to cause laughter, if it is not occasioned by pain.
Good deeds shun the light as anxiously as evil deeds: the latter fear that disclosure will bring on pain (as punishment), while the former fear that disclosure will take away pleasure (that pure pleasure, that pleasure per se, which immediately ceases once the vanity's satisfaction is added).