aphorisms190315 Ascolo Parodites 192. Unto man all speech is in vain. There the consultation of physicians is the best wisdom. Let folk ring the bells of physicians -- the physicians in the apothecary will outring them with the clanging of their pennies. 193. Faith often makes a liar of the most honest of men and of the liar an honest man. 194. You shall only be frightened, tried, and overburdened with the path of eternity- when you take it uphill. 195. To extenuate ones aesthetic- that is the ladder at the end of which one also extenuates his life. 196. 'I have been injured,' says the conscience. 'It is impossible for me to have been injured,' says envy, and remains incorrigible. Eventually, the conscience yields: but even this struggle is precisely mentis inops, a delusion of envy. 197. I flaunteth, thou covereth thy eyes. It is only when our pride performs badly, that a spectator is disposed to envy us. 198. A woman who knows that she is beautiful, but out of her conceit does not allow herself to be moved by anything beautiful outside of herself, betrays her miasma: [ an unwholesome atmosphere] all of the faults that we would otherwise overlook in her descend and return to her ground and fore: nihil in robustam sapientia mentem sirenes omnes posse. [... Democritum me putate, & tacita saltem cachinni censura mollissimos pros -- Erycius in Comus, Phagesiposia Cimmeria] 199. He who is a good listener takes things in jest only in relation to the speaker: more importantly, the same rule he applies to himself, so that he knows exactly when to leave a conversation. 200. The value of knowledge-- is not that the 'ante ferit, quam flamma micet' of morals in the first place? 201. The charm of wisdom would be a mere nugae canorae, were it not that so much of our pity spoils on the long trek towards it. 202. If a woman genuinely possesses elegance, this simply means that she keeps always her typical ambitions- and also the means to fulfilling them. 203. The nature of a man's courtship descends into the lowest chambers of his spirit, and determines it- for a man courts with even his shames and miseries. 204. Solitary men become risible precisely by what disgusts and makes others uncomfortable-- by everything which speaks to the inner life, which speaks to the things we do only when we are alone, commonly the objects of shame, the 'obscene.' Yet their little alienis mensibus aestas may be seen to bring a greater relief to them than the most mirthful summers. 205. Cum prima tentant praelia. [Marullus, Michael Tarchaniota: Epigrammata et Hymni. P. 49] One may only trust a deeply saracastic individual in moments of great humiliation: either of their own or of the sarcastic person. 206. It is the destiny of the human creature, that soon or a later every instinct will enounter its ennui- its truth. 207. One seeks a Cephissus for his shames, so that he may make them appear to be mere weaknesses: so that he may not betray himself of his desires in the way he talks, behaves, etc. around his partner, the other is just gracious enough to have no qualms over taking advantage of a weak creature: a successful affair thus originates. 208. The woman learns how to forgive a man in proportion as she- forgets what to expect of him. The riddle of woman-- what then is left to forgive? 209. Coelo adsimilis hominum fortuna videtur, nanque vices mutat, facieque est saepe serena. [Vadianus Joachim in Helvetii Aegloga] All philosophers suffer from the same deficiency, in that they think they can arrive at their goal of an honest and genuine life by analyzing their ideals, of 'truth,' 'justice,' or even more questionable- beauty. Instinctively they let their ideals hover before them as a laureum baculum gesto, a proof against all dangers, and a precaution against all spiritual corruptions. Yet, in precisely as this holds, it will be easy enough to make out the fact- that these noble 'analyses' of life are mere philosophical justifications of particular ways of living, philosophical confessions of particular ways of experiencing or receiving- life: like great suns do these ideals bestow verdure and solace, and do they relieve one of his dependence upon guilt and shame, or with a noble 'ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?' are all mortifications and disgrace even permitted to lay down unto the summer's flowerbeds. 210. Temptation sets bounds even to love. 211. Woman has hitherto been treated by men like butterflies, which, in their haphazard search for nectar, have come amidst them from an entirely different way of life: more delicate, gay, fragile, and sweet, where labor and toil are naturally absent-- but as something also which, though it may set to rest right upon your very hand, nonetheless can neither be touched or grasped. Prey that it comes to rest upon your hand, and when it does- hold your breath! 212. You can discover what a man genuinely desires by the means he uses to flatter you. Consequently- his baseness. 213. Every deep thinker is more afraid of being loved than of being neglected. The latter perhaps strikes his amour propre lame, and it may yet live for a number of years even with a limp-- but the former strikes his courage lame, his courage to live alone, to think, and like a noble horse, it must thereafter perish. 214. Lessons from childhood. All aestheticism begins in forgetfulness. What? Are all beauties- objects of the memory? 215. When the land is flooded one forgets even the hunt. Yes- but one recovers his food amongst the drowning beasts. 216. In the background of all their personal naivete, poets themselves still have their great, impersonal humor- for 'poetry.' 217. A rule for the lover: with respect to woman, insofar as she is out and about, or around her friends most especially- never assume you are being shown something. Always assume that you are merely observing this part in her hair, this exposed shoulder, this fold in her dress. 218. From a sermon. -- Possessed with the spirit of god, a member of the congress cries out: my good preacher, I have proclaimed for so long and so furiously that I have gone hoarse- I could not utter, much less sing, another word. The preacher answers him with his shame: Good! Then our God stands glorified. For now we may at last cease proclaiming his 'works!' 219. Beware: for he whom suffers you to censure him, there is nothing new you can teach him. 220. Reason immediately evaporates from all transient experiences and feelings- from all which, like insects, pass away in the course of a breath, so that their rational origins become improbable. After all, does not every scientific account of our origins, seem contradictory and ridiculous to our feelings? What? Has metaphysics survived on the basis of this mere antipathy to feelings? 221. For an artist to pretend to understand women- that is bad style; for him really to understand them it is a bad soul. 222. The eye of renunciation declares: "I watched for a mendicant and saw only those content to eat my scraps." 223. The danger in loneliness-- "All women now are beatified for me, I now love every atropos- which pretty girl now would like to be my atropos?" 224. There is an innocence in profound hatred of men: it is possessed by that solitary and lonesome man to whom it has not occurred, because he has not yet grown lonesome enough, has not spent quite enough time in solitude, that he is at the liberty to hate himself. 225. Even the least envious amongst us is still vain enough to envy in another what he has already attained himself. 226. What a person truly believes only begins to betray itself when his spirits, his happiness, decline- when he ceases to show to what degree he is willing to 'believe:' in the midst of great trial, when the esteem of his friends and family which he has earned by adopting those beliefs loses all significance. 227. Rule for diplomats. -- Nobility means to have re-discovered the dignity and innocent smile one, as a child, would present while being scolded for wrong doing. 228. The sense of comedy ebbs and flows with apprehension. A great witticism is but the ebb of a great tide of apprehensions: laughter breaks upon this crest. 229. That need for remorse which precedes a wrongdoing, in a tragic genius, seems almost laughable- like tender hands upon a Lamia. For it actually creates it. 230. Alcestis. -- It is only in receiving a gift that man is more humane than woman. 231. To praise a moralist for what he is lacking in, is a way of reprimanding him without the fear of provoking his conscience, that would deafen him to any censure. 232. One will rarely feel himself knowing if grand insights be ascribed to grace, mundane insights to simple gestation of concepts, and lurid insights to personal vice, to pathology... to psychology. 233. It is easy enough to become a despiser of truth. Merely share the truth with other men. 234. Ecnephia covereth a great many wells, and causes much thirst; but she also revealeth unto man secrets and hidden passages; verily, she upraiseth tombs and monuments alike. Guilt transforms us, it does what all medicine does that does not merely preserve: (as the physician knows) this is the essence of the Tragic genius and the riddle of all contradictions of Christian morality-- the riddle of 'redemption.' But in our ground, there is something genuinely unforgiveable, some igneum of spiritual fate, [kairos] some little scienza e pazzia of predetermined petitia and quaestia to the call and apprehension of certain courses of action, which appear to one and not another- purely on the basis of the determinsim of moral inertias. When an event is experienced as a moral stimulans, this depends on the interpretation of a determinism of quite catechizing influence, a far reaching catena, which, to be sure, generally does its work without rising to our consciousness. 235. Whoever is fundamentally a philosopher takes all things gravely only in relation to what can be endured- even himself. 236. Iconoclasm corrodes values and the threat of their dissolution re-erects them- as idols. 237. Hypochondria. -- Let us inquire into the mother of invention. A lucrative apothecary has always need of a symptom- or he has to himself become a symptom occasionally. 238. From Horace. One may indeed speak the truth- but with the accompanying smile one nevertheless tells a lie. But only a women could accomplish this thaumaturgy. For only a woman is capable of being impersonal with the truth. 239. What makes one a great comic? - At the same time, to retreat from ones highest enjoyment and greatest shame. 240. If a woman was not so disposed to feeling shameful- we would often be forced to put her to death. 241. In the absence of women. -- A peacock does not envy his fellow peacock's feather, no matter how beautiful it is. 242. It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain empathy by passing through its opposite- pity and disgust: consequently everything is pathology, even empathy. 243. What cause for jubilations! What music for the unaquit! -- Only one love is impossible in the infinite sense-- self-love. 244. The life of man is too long for our love: the life of beasts too short for our attachment. 245. A half-truth is often more comforting and sensual than a truth and more shameless than a falsehood. 246. A great deal of our curiosity for woman may be accounted for with the fact: that in every new experience she is like unto a little bird who spent its life in a little cage, and was suddenly hurled into the open sky. Thus- she jumps around a lot and turns somersaults in the air. 247. Most of the vice in pride lies simply in the fact that it must be renewed constantly. 248. There is no such thing as a heroic act- but only the heroism of a moral interpretation of the act. 249. The man that cannot cross the distance which separates him from his woman, lives more immodestly than the man without a woman. 250. The aegis of self-pity may protect one against the furies and the throws of fortune, against the tragedies of life- but not against the pinpricks of men. 251. Maenads-- A purely intellectual curiosity, as opposed to one owing merely to personal vanity, in a woman is rare- but in a group of woman, especially when they have been provoked by a lone man that has wondered by accident into their midst, to become the object of their amusement, it is the rule. 252. 'Principle' for argumentation. -- If a moralist has shame, we should take leave from argument with him: for if a moralist is shameless- he will take leave from us. 253. Not how one soul revolts at another but in how it comes closer shows me to what extent they are enemies for each other. 254. There is an accumulative vanity in a number of women, though none in particular are prideful. 255. What is the meaning of this? If one desires to sleep he does not reminisce: he makes plans for the next day. 256. One must be a either a great historian or a god to be able to tell apart catastrophes and blessings, without causing a catastrophe. 257. Ars Saltandi. -- One must pay dearly for his omniscience; to enjoy one beauty he has to ignore several horrible things. 258. The mother of invention is not desire- but desirelessness. 259. One finds another man's pride endurable not when it accords to his patience, but to his pride. 260. It is the pointed word which bringeth on a storm: a dull arrow is useless no matter how well it is shot. 261. My taste knows more about the conscience of a moralist than his conscience knows of my taste. 262. We only envy a writer when he says something with which we find ourselves in agreement. -- For that is the only thing that we cannot steal from him. 263. Tact in immorality consists in being weary of going beyond the mark- not in failing to attain it. 264. Tragic paradox of free-thinking: the mediocre philosophers who alone make the exercise of thought possible cannot gurantee its duration. 265. One who lives for the sake of making an image for himself sees to it that the image is never completed. 266. You have fell into the back of the herd? Are you doing it as a wolf? Or because you are wounded? A third case would be- the wolf has found you. 267. Iconoclasm consolidates rituals by the sacred fear which it inspires. 268. I am moral only above or beneath myself, in temptation or prostration; on the level of my habitual existence I am unaware that I exist. This lack of awareness is called 'sin.' 269. Our aversion to blood may be so terrible that we are prevented from- doctoring our wounds. 270. Danger in aphorisms. -- A thought, until it is the truth, is a mere melody, with beginning and end: and once it is the truth it is inaudible- as the motions of the stars and planets, the music of the spheres. 271. Sickness saves one from turgidity and thereby also from the effrontery, the shamelessness in knowledge by which the philosopher demeans and extenuates himself. For this reason, sickness may be taken as a precondition for the writing of aphorisms. 272. Almost every man feels comfortable speaking well of his intentions: yet the man who is comfortable with speaking well of his intellect is called 'prideful.' Once more, a man who is not comfortable with speaking well of his intellect- is called indecisive. 273. I have done that!- Sayeth my virtue. I am incapable of it!- So sayeth my vice. Eventually my vice learns the art of flattery- and I become a hypocrite. 274. Some Philomelas have an art for hiding their tapestries from all eyes and call it their- INNOCENCE. 275. Even the most courageous amongst us often exhibits cowardice in face of what he has already endured- yea, thereby we have invented punishment. 276. In irony there is no love of the asinine but precisely on that account a great deal too much mercy for them. 277. On the shamelessness of philosophers. -- Being unable to sanitize knowledge, we have demeaned it and made of knowledge a mere means to sanitation. 278. The lack of an Achilles's wrath, and a beautiful slave-girl, always takes its revenge: an impoverished man that is afraid to take up the truth in Hamadryads is no longer fit for any pleasure at all, much less philosophy. A noble love, a love that is worth absolutely anything, in every case risks the beloved- in spirit and body; it is only because an Orpheus, a profound lover, must grasp himself so tightly-- so tightly in fact that he rounds himself out, but only to see himself all the more squarely, that he learns to have the most personal of relationships even with his uncertainties, difficulties, as well as Sphinxes, and begins to see in them his kairos, the stamen and menstruation of his happinesses as well as distresses, his triumph and catastrophe, and the very communicatio idiomatum between man and woman themselves. We know the sensuality of love as much by what it forbids as by what it approves: this is our little non rudit onager, cum herbam habet. [Grynaeus] It is surprising that I have found no philosopher willing to approach the truth in this same way. 279. To the philosopher, the demise of a symbol is more poignant than the death of the beloved. And often the beloved is blessed precisely on account of her apotropaism. 280. Theodicy is more dishonourable towards God than any evil-doer: it supposes that he DESERVES to be vindicated. 281. We are forbidden of becoming devils through other peoples virtues. 282. Love, with respect to women, is in truth neither a passion or a madness, but an art. Its success consists in abandoning the nothingness of boredom for the dynamism of remorse- at will. 283. The most important value- the value of the effort we put in a thing, is precisely the last value to be realized. 284. Courage is the mysticism of duty. 285. Has woman ever been understood? No, the feminine philosophers have no psychological depth, and the psychologically keen-sighted are far from feminine. 286. A nation can never become successful in matters of politics or in military affairs without a prominent father-figure at its center. Also, a nation a nation can never become a military or political failure WITHOUT a prominent father figure at its center. 287. Most people are far too much occupied with the esteem of others to be vain. 288. Temptation only appears in the consciousness that has already overcome a temptation. 289. Lacking morality, - many feelings tend to disappear. 290. A person who opened himself too early to guilt can never turn away from it; this is a wound that becomes like a stomach through which one digests all of his experiences. 291. Guilt is not excess of moral sensibility. It is the possession of idees fixes as to how one shall mitigate one's moral sensibilities in the face of shameful acts. 292. Heaven is a noble table for dice-throwing. Morality has only one real charm- the charm of gambling. But what if we do not care if we win or lose? 293. There is so much morality upon the earth and yet there is nothing more rare than a value! This is due to the vast quantity of ruins, tendencies, and impulses in all works of morality heretofor, our omnes defluimus ut folia. [Drusius' Proverbia Sacra] Morality decomposes all creation, all value; this is its unique impulse-- and with the spiritual fundus accrued and disposed in conformity to a law whose origins one cannot find, except in the remotest most depths of the soul, it establishes a new world- it creates the sensation of newness (this is called revelation in theological terms) or the awe without which the reception of any new ideal, any new value, is incomprehensible. Morality, the puissance terrible become genius. 294. Principle of refugium. -- What if morality was really a climate changing idea that reinforced itself paleoclimatologically so that even what is forgotten and what was no more, was effortlessly made so? 295. Longing produces a nervousness like that of entering a yawning chasm, and this nervousness is infinite. Consequently, the normal psychological process of converting anxiety into energy, the creation of nervous energy, cannot be completed in longing. 296. The limina of every anxiety is an even greater anxiety. 297. The starry firmament as the secret chamber in which Erebus, the god of chaos, and Apollo, the god of music, settle their ancient quarrel. 298. Love is possible only by the deficience of our memory and the preoponderance of our imagination. 299. That anyone can accept the truth is the sad key to the lock that is almost always absent. This is proved by everything that truth does not open. 300. On the Aristocracy. -- It seems that a precondition of nobility is an offended taste. 301. Courage, solely with respect to a truth that is fully comprehended, is a clumsy cupbearer that breaks the cup while filling it with wine. 302. Sadness and sin... Why is it that in addition to the one we desire the other? For what could one add to the other? The essential pathos of guilt. 303. Diplomacy- the compulsion to create rules and to create rules to break. An essential characteristic of children at play. 304. Apostasy can almost always be traced to the fact that the profane had merely ceased banalizing us. 305. The moralist finds more grass to graze upon in the many dales of shame than on the arrid heights of innocence, chastity, purity. 306. Maritimi mores.-- In morals, we do not owe the conscience any apologies for torturing her- but rather for ignoring her. 307. There is always a gap between virtues that exposes a horroble set of teeth. 308. If my love for you is boundless, how shall I love you when my love has exceeded the bounds of your own? 309. The mediation by Christ was necessary. Knowledge, logoi, can tempt man, but cannot become man: knowledge and life are not equal but incomparable, hence all that is 'evil' may be taken for Mutae Tacitae. 310. The fact that our sorrow is exactly commensurate with our soul gives us the impression that it is eternal. 311. INCIPIT EURYDICE. The more one writes, the more trembling, the more fearful his words become. Every utterance, twired in the rhinds of the earth, seems extraordinarily new, like a flower that has never before been seen; but at the same time, because this little freshet of innovation seems incapable of finding its place in history, of interrupting the corrivation of ages, it transforms every utterance into something aimed against the writer. 312. The loss of paradise must matter more to God than to Eve, for God really loses this paradise and Eve does not! 313. The more we try to wrest ourselves from self-consciousness, consciousness wrests itself from us so that we sink further and further into pathology. 314. The truest form of health is the art of balancing illnesses. 315. All sickness is fatal. 090810 ... Phil Disinterest in the schemes of man. Was it not I who brought you to the light. Hold aloft greater ideals than vanity, for that way lies a washing of the soul and a dissappearance of reason. Sanity, as it can be described only by reason, as the dissappearance of one's own soul and a nightly vision of the harbor mist (though without the gloom and endless fighting being wrought in ironic tales of lust) is told under heaven's shield and raven's claw. Raving laws of written tomes to handle lost lamb and harry sheep to flock is like simply letting the grass in the wind blow. Aphorisms indeed are the truest test of the form of the word God, in which poet and mentor be lost without vision, clandestine, and most of all copying earlier works and simply pasting them throughout the aimless martyrdom of internet satire. A tragedy of aimless plot and insane literance, a deliberate attack on the mind and soul, a blasting away at the brick wall of sanity. For all who are not lost are blind, nor are they stupid, in fact they may not be lost at all. Only monkeys facing the cold wind of a cieling fan in mid-July, or possibly April. Have I run out of room? Good. Just shoot me is on and I have to go. All is in jest, except the epic facade of the latter, making me puke, rythmically. Good night everybody. 090810 what's it to you? who go blather from