Tragic Sense of Life; Ch. 1 excerpts

From Spinoza:

"Everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its own being. [Also] the endeavour wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself. [...] The endeavour whereby each individual thing endeavours to persist involves no finite time but indefinite time. That is to say that you, I, and Spinoza wish never to die and that this longing of ours never to die is our actual essence."

"To propose to a man that he should be someone else, that he should become someone else, is to propose to him that he should cease to be himself."

"... for me the becoming other than I am, the breaking of the unity and continuity of any life, is to cease to be he who I am--that is to say, it is simply to cease to be. And that--no! Anything rather than that!"


"The values we are discussing are, as you see, values of the heart, and against values of the heart reasons do not avail. For reasons are only reasons--that is to say, they are not even truths. There is a class of pedantic label-mongers, pedants by nature and by grace, who remind me of that man who, purposing to console a father whose son has suddenly died in the flower of his years, says to him, "Patience, my friend, we all must die!" Would you think it strange if this father were offended at such an impertinence? For it is an impertinence. There are times when even an axiom can become an impertinence."

"Little can be hoped from a ruler... who has not at some time or other been preoccupied, even if only confusedly, with the first beginning and the ultimate end of all things, and above all of man, with the "why" of his origin and the "wherefore" of his destiny."

"It is not enough to think about our destiny: it must be felt."

"So far as I am concerned, I will never willingly yield myself, nor entrust my confidence, to any popular leader who is not penetrated with the feeling that he who orders a people orders men, men of flesh and bone, men who are born, suffer, and, although they do not wish to die, die; men who are ends in themselves, not merely means; men who must be themselves and not others; men, in fine, who seek that which we call happiness. It is inhuman, for example, to sacrifice one generation of men to the generation which follows, without having any feeling for the destiny of those who are sacrificed, without having any regard, not for their memory, not for their names, but for them themselves."

"The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common... Yes, we must learn to weep!"

"...man, by the very fact of being a man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease."