Book Summary and Quotes: Human, All Too Human by Friedrich Nietzsche

ISBN: 0-8032-83687

My rating: 77/100

See Book Notes for other books I have read. If you like my notes, go buy it!

Key Points and Themes

“Strong belief proves only its own strength, not the truth of what is believed.”
“belief in freedom of the will is an initial error of all organic beings” – Nietzsche argues that our understanding of free will and responsibility are ultimately based on error. The process goes as follows: first, actions are judged by their outcomes alone as good or evil; second, good and evil are associated with the actions themselves; third, good and evil are assigned to the motives; fourth, the nature of people themselves are given this distinction. The mistake occurs when we assume people are responsible for the effects of their actions, their motives, and ultimately their nature.
Shame, guilt, remorse – these feelings are often the result of our mistaken belief that our experiencing negative consequences is precisely, solely our fault, as if we had perfect free will.
Force precedes morality; indeed, for a time morality itself is a force, to which others acquiesce to avoid unpleasure. Later it becomes custom, and still later free obedience and finally almost instinct: then it is coupled to pleasure, like all habitual and natural things, and is now called virtue.
The more the rule of religions and all narcotic arts decreases, the more squarely do men confront the real elimination of the misfortune. (My note: The greatest art, therefore, is art that shows us reality clearly and aids us in reinterpreting our misfortunes in new light.)
The meaning of religious worship is to direct nature, and cast a spell on her to human advantage.
artistic improvisation stands low in relation to artistic thoughts earnestly and laboriously chosen. All great men were great workers, untiring not only in invention but also in rejecting, sifting, reforming, arranging.
Whoever is a teacher is always at risk of becoming nothing more than a channel through which knowledge flows, and loses seriousness about himself. see aphorism 200
Against trusting people. People who give us their complete trust believe that they therefore have a right to our own. This conclusion is false: rights are not won by gifts. (My note: many have had their feelings hurt when a friend betrayed them, even in the slightest measure.)
No river is great and bounteous through itself alone, but rather because it takes up so many tributaries and carries them onwards: that makes it great. It is the same with all great minds.
Modesty. True modesty (that is, the knowledge that we are not our own creations) does exist, and it well suits the great mind, because he particularly can comprehend the thought of his complete lack of responsibility (even for whatever good he creates).

Intro: Beginning to Be Nietzsche by Arthur Danto

Wittgenstein was later to say, philosophy leaves the world as it found it. In truth it is not clear that Nietzsche saw Human All Too Human as a philosophical work.

“What’s that? Everything is only – human, all too human?” The consternation expressed is that morality itself is just another way of being human all-too-human when one would have hoped morality provides a remedy against precisely that.

Introduction by Marion Faber

Nietzsche rejects … Schopenhauer. This rejection led to both an acceptance and a transcendence of the conclusion reached by Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781): an acceptance, in that Nietzsche shared the view that any “real world” or “noumenon”- as opposed to the phenomena we know through our senses and our reason – is inaccessible to us.

oeuvre – the works of a writer, painter, or the like, taken as a whole.

The 638 aphorisms of Human, All Too Human range from a few words to a few pages, but most are short paragraphs. One critic has observed that they are designed to consternate the reader and expose him to a shock of recognition.

R. J. Hollingdale reading Human, All Too Human makes us feel as if we had “come out of a closed drawing room into a cold breeze.”

La Rochefoucauld – “La reconnaissance, dans la plupart des hommes, n’est qu’une forte et secrete envie de recevoir de plus grands bien-faits. (In the majority of men, gratitude is nothing but a strong and secret desire to receive even greater favors.) Compare with Nietzsche’s 44th aphorism.

The work is divided into nine books, which can be loosely grouped around certain key themes or ideas. Sections one to four are concerned, respectively, with metaphysics, morality, religion, and art. Nietzsche sets out to expose the erroneous assumptions that underlie men’s beliefs in all four areas.

Section Two anticipates his later genealogy of morals.

The third section analyses religious worship from a psychological viewpoint.

In the forth section, the aesthetic experience is taken to task.

In these four books, Nietzsche’s famous “philosophizing with a hammer” is anticipated, for his prime aim is not so much to construct new systems of values or beliefs as to shatter – with some regret for their loss – the old, erroneous ways of thinking.

bowdlerize – to expurgate by removing or modifying passages considered vulgar or objectionable.

The word Freigeist is central to the work, and its translation is problematic. It could be rendered either “free thinker” or “free spirit.” (Freigeisterei has no real alternative in English: it is “free-thinking.” … We have chosen to render Freigeist as “free spirit.”

Preface

With an evil laugh he overturns what he finds concealed, spared until then by some shame; he investigates how these things look if they are overturned. There is some arbitrariness and pleasure in arbitrariness to it, if he then perhaps direct his favor to that which previously stood in disrepute – if he creeps curiously and enticingly around what is most forbidden. Behind his ranging activity (for he is journeying restlessly and aimlessly, as in a desert) stands the question mark of an ever more dangerous curiosity, “Cannot all values be overturned? And is Good perhaps Evil? And God only an invention, a nicety of the devil? Is everything perhaps ultimately false? And if we are deceived are we not for that very reason also deceivers? Must we not be deceivers, too?” Such thoughts lead and mislead him, always further onward, always further away. Loneliness surrounds him, curls round him, ever more threatening, strangling, heart-constricting, that fearful goddess and mater saeva cupidinum – but who today knows what loneliness is?

Master of your own virtues.

Section One – Of First and Last Things

“last things” (die letzten Dinge) refers to eschatology.

No matter how well proven the existence of such a world [metaphysical] might be, it would still hold true that the knowledge of it would be the most inconsequential of all knowledge, even more inconsequential than the knowledge of the chemical analysis of water must be to the boatman facing a storm.

Language as an alleged science. The importance of language for the development of culture lies in the fact that, in language, man juxtaposed to the one world another world of his own, a place which he thought so sturdy that from it he could move the rest of the world from its foundations and make himself the lord over it. To the extent that he believed over long periods of time i the concepts and names of things as if they were aeternae vertates, man has acquired that pride by which he has raised himself above the animals: he really did believe that in language he had knowledge of the world.

So it is with mathematics, which would certainly not have originated if it had been known from the beginning that there is no exactly straight line in nature, no real circle, no absolute measure.

The first causa which occurred to the mind to explain something that needed explaining sufficed and was taken for truth.

The supposed cause is deduced from the effect and imagined after the effect.

They think that with deep feelings man penetrates deep into the inside, approaches the heart of nature. But these feelings are deep only to the extent that they regularly stimulate, almost imperceptibly, certain complicated groups of thoughts, which we call deep. … Strong belief proves only its own strength, not the truth of what is believed.

Even now, we believe fundamentally that all feelings and actions are acts of free will; when the feeling individual considers himself, he takes each feeling, each change, to be something isolated, that is, something unconditioned, without a context. It rises up out of us, with no connection to anything earlier or later. We are hungry, but do not think initially that the organism wants to be kept alive. Rather, that feeling seems to assert itself without reason or purpose; it isolates itself and takes itself to be arbitrary. Thus the belief in freedom of the will is an initial error of all organic beings, as old as the existence in them of stirrings of logic.

We are from the start illogical and therefore unfair beings, and this we can know: it is one of the greatest and most insoluble disharmonies of existence.

Section Two – On the History of Moral Feelings

Ce que le monde nomme vertu n’est d’ordinaire qu’un fantôme formé par nos passions, à qui on donne un nom honnête pour faire impunément ce qu’on veut.

“That which men call virtue is usually no more than a phantom formed by our passions, to which one gives an honest name in order to do with impunity whatever one wishes.” – La Rochefoucauld, Sentences et maximes morales

The origin and history of moral feelings. We can survey the consequences very clearly, many examples having proven how the errors of the greatest philosophers usually start from a false explanation of certain human actions and feelings, how an erroneous analysis of so-called selfless behavior, for example, can be the basis for false ethics, for whose sake religion and mythological confusion are then drawn in, and finally how the shadows of these sad spirits also fall upon physics and the entire contemplation of the world.

The fable of intelligible freedom. The history of those feelings by virtue of which we consider a person responsible, the so-called moral feelings, is divided into the following main phases. At first we call particular acts good or evil without any consideration of their motives, but simply on the basis of their beneficial or harmful consequences. Soon, however, we forget the origin of these terms and imagine that the quality “good” or “evil” is inherent in the actions themselves, without consideration of their consequences; this is the same error language makes when calling the stone itself hard, the tree itself green – that is, we take the effect to be the cause. Then we assign the goodness or evil to the motives, and regard the acts themselves as morally ambiguous. We go even further and cease to give to the particular motive the predicate good or evil, but give it rather to the whole nature of a man; the motive grows out of him as a plant grows out of the earth. So we make man responsible in turn for the effects of his actions, then for his actions, then for his motives and finally for his nature. Ultimately we discover that his nature cannot be responsible either, in that it is itself an inevitable consequence, an outgrowth of the elements and influences of past and present things; that is, man cannot be made responsible for anything, neither for his nature, nor his motives, nor his actions, nor the effects of his actions. And thus we come to understand that the history of moral feelings is the history of an error, an error called “responsibility,” which in turn rests on an error called “freedom of the will.”

My note: I’m confused here at the word “ambiguous”. I would have expected an almost inversion of the sentence that would have said, “Then we abstract the individual actions one level and assign the goodness or evil to motive, and regard the acts themselves as rooted in that motive.” A small distinction perhaps, considering the end goal of this passage is to show the roots of “man is sinful and requires redemption”.

… because he thinks he is free (but not because he is free), man feels remorse and the pangs of conscience.

No one is responsible for his deeds, no one for his nature; to judge is to be unjust. This is also true when the individual judges himself. The tenet is as bright as sunlight, and yet everyone prefers to walk back into the shadow and untruth – for fear of the consequences.

The beast in us wants to be lied to; morality is a white lie, to keep it from tearing us apart.

Gratitude and revenge. The powerful man feels gratitude for the following reason: through his good deed, his benefactor has, as it were violated the powerful man’s sphere and penetrated it. Now through his act of gratitude the powerful man requires himself by violating the sphere of the benefactor. It is a milder form of revenge. Without the satisfaction of gratitude, the powerful man would have shown himself to be unpowerful and henceforth would be considered such. For that reason, every society of good men (that is, originally, of powerful men) places gratitude among its first duties. PP Swift remarked that men are grateful in the same proportion as they cherish revenge.

Compare this aphorism with La Rochfoucauld quote earlier.

My note: Gratitude avoids any perception of powerlessness.

The man who has the power to requite goodness with goodness, evil with evil, and really does practice requital by being grateful and vengeful, is called “good.” The man who is unpowerful and cannot requite is taken for bad. … Good men are a caste; the bad men are a multitude.

Goodwill (my note: vs pity, charity, selflessness). Among the small but endlessly abundant and therefore very effective things that science ought to heed more than the great, rare things, is goodwill. … Especially within the narrowest circle, in the family, life sprouts and blossoms only by this goodwill.

Desire to arouse pity. … Observe how children weep and cry, so that they will be pitied, how they wait for the moment when their condition will be noticed. … The pity that the spectators then express consoles the weak and suffering, inasmuch as they [the pitied] see that, despite all their [the pitied] weakness, they [the pitied] still have at least one power: the power to hurt. When expressions of pity make the unfortunate man aware of this feeling of superiority, he gets a kind of pleasure from it; his self image revives; he is still important enough to inflict pain on the world.

Motives and intentions are seldom sufficiently clear and simple, and sometimes even memory seems to be dimmed by the success of a deed, so that one attributes false motives to his deed, or treats inessential motives as essential.

Force precedes morality; indeed, for a time morality itself is a force, to which others acquiesce to avoid unpleasure. Later it becomes custom, and still later free obedience and finally almost instinct: then it is coupled to pleasure, like all habitual and natural things, and is now called virtue.

101

Cruelty to animals, by children and Italians, stems from ignorance; namely, in the interests of its teachings, the church has placed the animal too far beneath man.

102

“Man always acts for the good.” We don’t accuse nature of immorality when it sends us a thunderstorm, and makes us wet: why do we call the injurious man immoral? Because in the first case, we assume necessity, and in the second a voluntarily governing free will. But this distinction is in error. Furthermore, even intentional injury is not called immoral in all circumstances: without hesitating, we intentionally kill a gnat, for example, simply because we do not like its buzz; we intentionally punish the criminal and do him harm, to protect ourselves and society. In the first case it is the individual who does harm intentionally, for self-preservation or simply to avoid discomfort; in the second case the state does the harm. All morality allows the intentional infliction of harm for self defense; that is, when it is a matter of self-preservation! But these two points of view are sufficient to explain all evil acts which men practice against other men; man wants to get pleasure or resist unpleasure; in some sense it is always a matter of self-preservation. Socrates and Plato are right: whatever man does, he always acts for the good; that is, in a way that seems to him good (useful) according to the degree of his intellect, the prevailing measure of his rationality.

103

Pity does not aim at the pleasure of others any more than malice aims at the pain of others, per se.

Section Three – Religious Life

Sections 106 and 107. These ideas are something I have not seen from Nietzsche before, and curious they are written this early in his life. I’m kind of surprised to see this level of determinism from him, and confused as I usually am at the logic of the concept. If we are the result of our circumstances with no free will or choice, then what is the point of writing philosophy at all? What is the point of attempting to consider right action and studying the ancient wisdoms? I do not disagree that we are the result of our environments, but I would not say that everything can be calculated and predicted as a mathematical equation. There is clearly some level of freedom in our choice, if even ever so small, and this changes the course of our lives in one direction or another.

108

The twofold struggle against misfortune. When a misfortune strikes us, we can overcome it either by removing its cause or else by changing the effect it has on our feelings, that is, by reinterpreting the misfortune as a good, whose benefit may only later become clear. Religion and art (as well as metaphysical philosophy) strive to effect a change in our feeling, in part by changing the way we judge experiences (for example, with the aid of the tent, “Whom the Lord loves, he chastens”) and in part by awakening a pleasure in pain, in emotion generally (which is where tragic art has its starting point). The more a person tends to reinterpret and justify, the less will he confront the causes of the misfortune and eliminate them; a momentary palliation and narcotization (as used, for example, for a toothache) is also enough for him in more serious suffering. The more the rule of religions and all narcotic arts decreases, the more squarely do men confront the real elimination of the misfortune – of course, this is bad for the tragic poets (there being less and less material for tragedy, because the realm of inexorable, invincible fate grows ever smaller) but it is even worse for the priests (for until now they fed on the narcotization of human misfortunes).

Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most / must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, / the tree of knowledge is not that of life. – Byron

quid aeternis minorem / consiliis animum fatigas? / cur non sub alta vel platano vel hac / pinu jacentes – Horace

Horace, Odes 2.11.13-14: “Why do you torture your poor reason for insight into the riddle of eternity? Why do we not simply lie down under the high plantane? or here under this pine tree?”

111

The main means of all magic is to gain power over something that belongs to the other.

The meaning of religious worship is to direct nature, and cast a spell on her to human advantage.

115

All men who have no expertise with any weapon (mouth and pen counting as weapons) become servile: for such men, religion is very useful, for here servility takes on the appearance of a Christian virtue and is surprisingly beautified.

141

If one goes through the individual moral statements of the documents of Christianity, one will find everywhere that the demands have been exaggerated so that man cannot satisfy them; the intention is not that he become more moral, but rather he feel as sinful as possible.

Section Four – From the Soul of Artists and Writers

155

artistic improvisation stands low in relation to artistic thoughts earnestly and laboriously chosen. All great men were great workers, untiring not only in invention but also in rejecting, sifting, reforming, arranging.

161

We all think that the goodness of a work of art or an artist is proven when it seizes and profoundly moves us. And yet our own goodness in judging and feeling would first have to be proven – which is not the case. … The blessings and raptures of a philosophy or a religion likewise prove nothing about their truth

164

It is useful for great minds to gain insight into their power and its origin, to grasp what purely human traits have flowed together in them, what fortunate circumstances played a part: persistent energy first of all, resolute attention to particular goals, great personal courage; and then the good fortune of an education that early on offered the best teachers, models, methods.

172

Making the audience forget the master. The pianist who performs the work of a master will have played best if he has made the audience forget the master, and if it has seemed that he were telling a tale from his own life, or experiencing something at that very moment.

188

Thinkers as stylists. Most thinkers write badly because they tell us not only their thoughts but also the thinking of their thoughts.

194

feuilleton – a part of a newspaper or magazine devoted to fiction, criticism, or light literature.

tintinnabulation – a ringing or tinkling sound

To think of writing as one’s life’s profession should by rights be considered a kind of madness.

200

Caution in writing and teaching. Whoever has once begun to write and felt the passion of writing in himself, learns from almost everything he does or experiences only what is communicable for a writer. He no longer thinks of himself but rather of the writer and his public. He wants insight, but not for his own use. Whoever is a teacher is usually incapable of doing anything of his own for his own good. He always thinks of the good of his pupils, and all new knowledge gladdens him only to the extent that he can teach it. Ultimately he regards himself as a thoroughfare of learning, and in general as a tool, so that he has lost seriousness about himself.

218

Originally everything about a Greek or Christian building meant something, and in reference to a higher order of things. This atmosphere of inexhaustible meaningfulness hung about the building like a magic veil. Beauty entered the system only secondarily, impairing the basic feeling of uncanny sublimity, of sanctification by magic or the gods’ nearness.

221

The revolution in poetry. The severe constraint which the French dramatists imposed upon themselves with respect to unity of action, place, and time, to style, versification and sentence structure, selection of words and of themes, was as important a training as counterpoint and the fugue in the development of modern music, or the Gorgian figures in Greek rhetoric. To restrict oneself so may appear absurd; nevertheless there is now way to get beyond realism other than to limit oneself at first most severely (perhaps most arbitrarily). In that way one gradually learns to step with grace, even on the small bridges that span dizzying abysses, and one takes as profit the greatest suppleness of movement, as everyone now alive can attest from the history of music.

My note: What arbitrary restrictions must you impose to further master your craft?

All poets must become experimenting imitators, daredevil copyists, however great their strength may be in the beginning.

Section Five – Signs of Higher and Lower Culture

224

Regarding the state, Machiavelli says that “the form of governments is of very slight importance, although semi-educated people think otherwise. The great goal of politics should be permanence, which outweighs anything else, being much more valuable than freedom

225

A man is called a free spirit if he thinks otherwise than would be expected, based on his origin, environment, class, and position, or based on prevailing contemporary views. He is the exception: bound spirits are the rule.

229

Bound spirit’s measure of things. Bound spirits say that four sorts of things are in the right: first, all things having permanence are in the right; second, all things that are no burden to us are in the right; third, all things that benefit us are in the right; fourth, all things for which we have made sacrifices are in the right.

#sunkcostfallacy

234

There will never again be a religiously defined horizon to life and culture.

The state is a clever institution for protecting individuals from one another; if one goes too far in ennobling it, the individual is ultimately weakened by it, even dissolved – and thus the original purpose of the state is most thoroughly thwarted.

237

Renaissance and Reformation. The Italian Renaissance contained within itself all the positive forces to which we owe modern culture: namely, liberation of thought, disdain for authority, the triumph of education over the arrogance of lineage, enthusiasm for science and men’s scientific past, the unshackling of the individual, an ardor for veracity and aversion to appearance and mere effect (which ardor blazed forth in a whole abundance of artistic natures who, with the highest moral purity, demanded perfection in their works and nothing but perfection).

By contrast, the German Reformation stands out as an energetic protest of backwards minds who had not yet had their fill of the medieval world view and perceived the signs of dissolution. … Luther survived at that time, and that his protest gathered strength, lay in the coincidence of an extraordinary political configuration: the Emperor protected him in order to use his innovation to apply pressure against the Pope, and likewise the Pope secretly favored him, in order to use the imperial Protestant princes as a counterweight against the Emperor. Without this strange concert of intent, Luther would have been burned like Huss – and the dawn of the Enlightenment would have risen a bit earlier, perhaps, and with a splendor more beautiful than we can now imagine.

251

To the man who works and searches in it, science gives much pleasure; to the man who learns its results, very little.

261

They [the Greeks] were tyrants, which is what every Greek wanted to be, and which each one was, if he was able.

Each great thinker, believing he possessed absolute truth, became a tyrant, so that Greek intellectual history has had the violent, rash, and dangerous character evident in its political history.

283

Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.

#freedom

Section Six – Man in Society

311

Against trusting people. People who give us their complete trust believe that they therefore have a right to our own. This conclusion is false: rights are not won by gifts.

322

Relatives of a suicide. The relatives of a suicide resent him for not having stayed alive out of consideration for their reputation.

My note: what a zinger!

327

The friend’s secret. There will be but few people who, when at a loss for topics of conversation, will not reveal the more secret affairs of their friends.

My note: Therefore, do not share your deepest secrets with anyone.

368

In many people the gift of having good friends is much greater than the gift of being a good friend.

370

The man who fails at something prefers to attribute the failure to the bad will of another rather than to chance.

372

salubrious – conducive or favorable to health or well-being

Section Seven – Woman and Child

427

Happiness of marriage. Everything habitual draws an ever tighter net of spiderwebs around us; then we notice that the fibers have become traps, and that we ourselves are sitting in the middle, like a spider that got caught there and must feed on its own blood. That is why the free spirit hates all habits and rules, everything enduring and definitive; that is why, again and again, he painfully tears apart the net around him, even through he will suffer as a consequence from countless large and small wounds – for he must tear those fibers away from himself, from his body, his soul. He must learn to love where he used to hate, and vice versa. Indeed, nothing may be possible for him, not even to sow dragons’ teeth on the same field where he previously emptied the cornucopias of his kindness. PP From this we can judge whether he is cut out for the happiness of marriage.

432

Dissonance of two consonants. Women want to serve, and therein lies their happiness; and the free spirit wants not to be served, and therein lies his happiness.

Section Eight – A Look at the State

“Quand la populace se mêle de raisonner, tout est perdu.” – Voltaire “Once the populace begins to reason, all is lost.”

“Jeder ist seines Glückes Schmied” – German saying, “Each man is the architect of his own fortune.”

448

Complaining too loudly. When the description of an emergency (the crimes of an administration, or bribery and favoritism in political or scholarly corporations, for example) is greatly exaggerated, it does of course have less of an effect on insightful people, but it has all the greater effect on the uninsightful (who would have remained indifferent to a careful, measured presentation). But since the uninsightful are considerably in the majority, and harbor within themselves greater strength of will and a more vehement desire for action, the exaggeration will lead to investigations, punishments, promises, and reorganizations. PP To that extent, it is useful to exaggerate when describing emergencies.

457

Slaves and workers. That we lay more value on satisfying our vanity than on all other comforts is revealed to us a ludicrous degree by the fact that everyone desires the abolition of slavery, and utterly abhors bringing men into this state.

463

A delusion in the theory of subversion. There are political and social visionaries who hotly end eloquently demand the overthrow of all orders, in the belief that the proudest temple of fair humanity would then immediately rise up on its own. In these dangerous dreams, there is still the echo of Rousseau’s superstition which believes in a wondrous, innate, but, as it were, repressed goodness of human nature, and attributes all the blame for that repression to the institutions of culture, in society, state, and education. Unfortunately, we know from historical experience that ever such overthrow once more resurrects the wildest energies, the long since buried horrors and extravagances of most distant times. An overthrow can well be a source of energy in an exhausted human race, but it can never be an organizer, architect, artist, perfecter of the human character.

472

recalcitrant – stubbornly resistant to or defiant of authority or guidance.

482

To say it again. Public opinions – private laziness.

Section Nine – Man Alone with Himself

484

Topsy-turvy world. We criticize a thinker more sharply when he proposes a tenet that is disagreeable to us; and yet it would be more reasonable to do this when we find his tenet agreeable.

491

Self-observation. Man is very well defended against himself, against his own spying and sieges; usually he is able to make out no more of himself than his outer fortifications. The actual stronghold is inaccessible to him, even invisible, unless friends and enemies turn traitor and lead him there by a secret path.

My thoughts: Include now therapists, as a well trained therapist will lead us straight into our own self through the open back door. It is a dangerous thing however, to be shown too much of one’s own thoughts without blinders or some dark tinted sunglasses. It can give way to complete dysphoria, and an inability to know how to proceed in a forward direction.

497

Unwittingly noble. A man’s behavior is unwittingly noble if he has grown accustomed never to want anything from men, and always to give to them.

503

pudenda – a person’s external genitals, esp. a woman’s.

508

Out in nature. We like to be out in nature so much because it has no opinion about us.

My note: Likewise, we enjoy the company of those humans who accept us for who we are now, without constantly trying to change us.

521

Greatness means: to give a direction. No river is great and bounteous through itself alone, but rather because it takes up so many tributaries and carries them onwards: that makes it great. It is the same with all great minds. All that matters is that one man give the direction, which many tributaries must then follow; it does not matter whether he is poorly or richly endowed in the beginning.

551

Trick of the prophet. In order to predict the behavior of ordinary men, we must assume that they always expend the least possible amount of intellect to free themselves from a disagreeable situation.

571

Our own opinions. The first opinion that occurs to us when we are suddenly asked about a matter is usually not our own, but only the customary one, appropriate to our caste, position, or parentage; our own opinions seldom swim near the surface.

587

To be sure, it takes a stronger gaze and a better will to further that which is evolving and imperfect, rather than to penetrate its imperfection and reject it.

588

Modesty. True modesty (that is, the knowledge that we are not our own creations) does exist, and it well suits the great mind, because he particularly can comprehend the thought of his complete lack of responsibility (even for whatever good he creates).

597

No one speaks more passionately about his rights than the man who, at the bottom of his heart, doubts them.

630

Conviction is the belief that in some point of knowledge one possesses absolute truth. Such a belief presumes, then, that absolute truth exists; likewise, that the perfect methods for arriving at them have been found; finally, that every man who has convictions makes use of these perfect methods. All three assertions prove at once that the man of convictions is not the man of scientific thinking; he stands before us still in the age of theoretical innocence, a child, however grownup he might be otherwise.