Life means to have something definite to do-a mission to fulfill-and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something, we make it empty. Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something.
And this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself to be on firm ground.
Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being.
We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.
Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.
The direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilisation. Not of this or that civilisation but from what we can judge today of any civilisation. The type of man dominant today is a primitive one, a Naturmensch rising up in the midst of a civilised world.
The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man
These are the only genuine ideas, the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.
Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us - by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige. 'To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and law.'
In these years we are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths, through not having anything to which to give themselves.
Every intellectual effort sets us apart from the commonplace, and leads us by hidden and difficult paths to secluded spots where we find ourselves amid unaccustomed thoughts.
If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man's inner destiny sets it.
The hero's will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism.
The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.
Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.
Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.
Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself.
Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that "falling in love"...is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility.
The common man, finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. Still less will he admit the notion that all these facilities still require the support of certain difficult human virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice.
The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.
We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself.
To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...
I am I plus my circumstances.
An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
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