Conspicuousness

“ Then, finally, look at the poet or the philosopher, in whom reflection has reached such a height, that, instead of being drawn on to investigate any one particular phenomenon of existence, he stands in amazement before existence itself, this great sphinx, and makes it his problem. ”

“ But what after all is the character of these pleasures upon which there is such a high estimate placed? They are all vain and empty as a bubble on the wave. They are like a dream which assumes all the appearance of reality, till we awake from our slumber and discover the deception. ”

“ And so I entered this world: a being, sliding obscurely in among human beings. But whence, or whither? Those questions belong among the gigantic, terrible ones, insoluble, silent,—the unanswering primeval sphinxes of the mind. We can sit and stare at such questions, and wonder; but staring and wondering are not thought. ”

“ How do you know that you really exist? Here you are at the end of doubt, and here a still, small voice cries to you, 'I, I am, for I think, I doubt my being; I, the thought, the doubt within me, I exist, even if all around me disappear in illusion and shadow.' Begin with doubt and you can stop at no arbitrary resting-place. ”

“ It was the sad confession, and continual exemplification, of the short-comings of the composite man—the spirit burthened with clay and working in matter; and of the despair that assails the higher nature, at finding itself so miserably thwarted by the earthly part. ”

“ It is a note of crumbling and confusion, of change and seemingly aimless swelling, of a bubbling up and medley of futile loves and sorrows. But through the confusion sounds another note. Through the confusion something drives, something that is at once human achievement and the most inhuman of all existing things. Something comes out of it. ”

“ If we turn from contemplating the world as a whole, and, in particular, the generations of men as they live their little hour of mock-existence and then are swept away in rapid succession; if we turn from this, and look at life in its small details, as presented, say, in a comedy, how ridiculous it all seems! ”

“ For after all, in his own words, who can know exactly where fancies end and truths begin, and whether at times fancies are not the veritable truths in this universal mystery of which the individual life of each of us is so small a part? ”

“ The perplexity, confusion, and uneasiness, which we labour under in abstruse inquiries, philosophical, moral, and religious, ought, perhaps, to be referred to this head. Also the secondary perplexity which arises from our being subject to this perplexity, confusion, and uneasiness. ”

“ He stood and gazed, then, with his arms folded on his chest, while the people walking to and fro passed and repassed him, and many a one commented as they went, and assigned him a history and a character from their own imagination. How seldom is it, in the busy world with which we mingle, that any of the conjectures regarding our thoughts, our feelings, our state of existence, are correct! ”

“ The exciting question for real scepticism is whether we possess a past life. What is a minute ago, rationalistically considered, except a tradition and a picture? The darkness grew deeper from the road. ”

“ Trouble yourself no more about the matter. Once thoroughly recognize what you are, what your existence really is, namely, the universal will to live, and the whole question will seem to you childish, and most ridiculous! ”

“ Therefore we regard our craving with complacence, we feel the great aching of the Want, and we say, with conviction, “I know I exist, I know I am I, because I feel the divine discontent which is personal to me, and eternal, and present always in me.” ”

“ Faults she had once as she learnt to run and tumbled:
Faults of feature some see, beauty not complete.
Yet, good gossips, beauty that makes holy
Earth and air, may have faults from head to feet. ”

“ Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost as often as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at the bottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of life. ”

“ That mystery the tempest is ever accepting and executing some unknown change of real or apparent will. Poets in all ages have called the waves capricious; but there is no such thing as caprice. The disconcerting enigmas in Nature which we call caprice, and in human life chance, are the results of unseen and incomprehensible laws. ”

“ That impression, which at this moment makes all your pleasure or all your pain, will, it may be, slip off in an instant, being the mere drapery of an impression still more profound, will disappear before something older and higher. Thus our impressions grave themselves deeper and deeper on our souls, being ever unique, incomparable, unspeakably young, swift as the instant that brought them. ”

“ A pessimistic fatalism, depth within depth of impotence and indifference, reason and silliness united, not in a higher synthesis, but in the fact that whichever you choose it is all one,—this is the upshot of a revelation that began so rosy bright. ”

“ I would give the world, could I bury in the obscurity of time, every thing I have to say, and which, in spite of myself, I am obliged to relate. I am, at the same time, under the necessity of being mysterious and subtle, of endeavoring to impose and of descending to things the most foreign to my nature. ”

“ The point was that we moved so oddly and consistently—as it was our only form of consistency—over our limited pasture, never straying to nibble in the strange or the steep places. What was the matter with us under this spell, and what the moral might have been for our case, are issues of small moment, after all, in face of the fact of our mainly so brief duration. It was given to but few of us to be taught by the event, to be made to wonder with the last intensity what had been the matter. ”

“ But our scepticism is not an open negation; it is rather a sorrowful, anxious suspicion that perhaps there is nothing,—a dense fog around our minds that stifles the breath and hides from us the light. ”

“ That may be a true appellation, in view of the comfortable feeling which those years bring; but for all that the years of youth, when our consciousness is lively and open to every sort of impression, have this privilege—that then the seeds are sown and the buds come forth; it is the springtime of the mind. Deep truths may be perceived, but can never be excogitated—that is to say, the first knowledge of them is immediate, called forth by some momentary impression. ”

“ I have said elsewhere [3] that the world, considered as object,—in other words, as it is presented to us objectively,—wears in general a pleasing aspect; but that in the world, considered as subject,—that is, in regard to its inner nature, which is will,—pain and trouble predominate. I may be allowed to express the matter, briefly, thus: the world is glorious to look at, but dreadful in reality. ”

“ From my present advanced position I look back upon our ignorant simplicity, with smiling pity, as if I possessed a duplicate personality, and had, in my present self, no concern in any of those absurd fictions that then imposed themselves upon us for truth. ”

“ Everything has come as a sort of indistinguishable part of everything else. Your coming out belonged closely to my having come before you, and my having come was a result of our general state of mind. Our general state of mind had proceeded, on its side, from our funny ignorance, our funny misconceptions and confusions—from which, since then, an inexorable tide of light seems to have floated us into our perhaps still funnier knowledge. ”

“ Without one touch of pessimism or melancholic depression—the result of fitful failure—they can paint a work of realism that, hung side by side with their never-to-be-realised ideal, would make the latter the subject of scoff and mocking derision. ”

“ Is there a pessimism of the strong? An intellectual inclination for what in existence is hard, dreadful, angry, and problematic, emerging from what is healthy, from overflowing well being, from living existence to the full? ”

“ How “low, flat, stale, and unprofitable, seem all the uses of this world,” when the mind, boldly soaring beyond this lower sphere, indulges the idea that the pleasures which result from a life of innocence and virtue may be faintly analogous to the felicities of heaven! ”

“ These throw a revelatory light upon some of the most painful problems of our time, as well as upon the secret places of the human soul where lurks an ever eager hope, often frustrated, and alas, often deceived. ”

“ Apart from all that I have said, so much at least is clear. What appears under the forms of time, space, and casuality, and vanishes again, and in reality is nothing, and reveals its nothingness by death—this vicious and fatal appearance is the will. ”

“ He had entered by then the broad, human path of inconsistencies. ”

“ One talks lightly of coincidence and of chance; but who that has walked through life observingly has not been driven to pause with sad questioning before accidents and occurrences that seem as though some conscious malignity in things had arranged them? ”

“ But, Sir, does your old philosophy never suggest to you the idea that these new discoveries and emotions, with their consequent anticipations, may be referable to the mysterious action of a disturbed imagination, rather than the direct action of a supernatural power—what scepticism designates the flights of fancy? ”

“ Sufficiency shuts us in but till the man of the world—never prefigured, as I say, only welcomed on the spot—appears; when we see at once how much we have wanted him. When we fail of that acknowledgment, that sense as of a tension, an anxiety or an indigence relieved, it is of course but that the extraordinary set of circumstances, or above all the extraordinary time of life I speak of, has indeed intervened. ”

“ In theory you cannot indulge with consistency in an ultimate doubt. You are forced, willingly or not, at a certain point to assume infallibility. For, otherwise, how could you proceed to judge at all? ”

“ Always confess whatever thou perceivest to be true. The present obscurities will gradually become clear, and the unknown will be made known. Space itself, however, is not perceived; and thou canst not understand how thou hast obtained this conception, or why thou extendest throughout it this property of perceptibility? ”

“ Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. ”

“ Doubtless, nothing quite like them was ever pitched out headlong into the world as they were. The confusion, the clamour, the jar of words that half suffice and thoughts that half exist—all these and other more absolutely offensive qualities—audacity, monotony, bombast, obscure play of licence and tortuous growth of fancy—cannot quench or even wholly conceal the living purport and the imperishable beauty which are here latent. ”

“ With her most surely the final effect and impression rest upon powers of revelation—upon the ability to realise and to interpret the simplest and the subtlest phases of emotion, far more than upon those artifices of deception that make for the more obvious triumphs of disguise. ”

“ It would indeed be strange and lamentable if the divorce between feeling and conviction—to adopt a popular classification—was not simply incidental to change, but was also an inexpugnable part of fundamental aspects of human life. ”

“ Surprising, and past all ordinary belief, are those strange oversights and inconsistencies, into which the enthusiastic meditation upon unique or extreme resolves will sometimes beget in young and over-ardent souls. ”

“ Seriously, the interest of the most important cases to me was inexpressible. It is the reality which presses on one’s heart, and makes an impression far deeper than the utmost stretch of imaginary sorrow can ever produce. ”

“ Men who look no farther than the present scene, may, with less glaring inconsistency, vent their vexation in accusing the blindness and partiality of fate, which has held their eminent talents and their peculiar merits so long under the veil of obscurity; but those who acknowledge at once a disposing providence and a future life, might surely find considerations proper for imposing silence upon such murmurings of disappointed ambition. ”

“ Graces free and uncultivated were there likewise, and the honest outpourings of the heart, subjected to no dull sneer from the lips of false refinement, burst forth with the touching force of simplicity and truth. The universal weaknesses of our nature mingled with all the rest, and varied the drama through a thousand parts. ”

“ Melancholy, the subject of our present discourse, is either in disposition or habit. In disposition, is that transitory melancholy which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causeth anguish, dullness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike. ”