Moral casuistry is of interest only to strict moralists; in the extreme cases where life is threatened, moral laxity acquires almost every license, thus sheltering all of morality’s fundamental principles from the test of holding water. ²

It is easy not to diagnose bloodthirsty bestiality in oneself, even with the most thorough investigation.

Stoics differentiated between what is proper to oneself and what is foreign, between what is inalienable and what is dispensable, between what can be affected and what is unreachable. From this perspective, property was foreign; one could cast it away without doing any harm to the core of what is proper to oneself. One could be affected, could win and lose with respect to what is foreign to oneself, not with respect to what is proper. Whatever can be cast away, let it perish, so that one cannot be destroyed by associating it too much with what is proper to oneself.

Were he to drown in the ocean, Hebbel writes, he wouldn’t see in it fate’s private hatred of me, as perhaps earlier, but merely the proof that I couldn’t swim.

What is attainable is no longer interesting.

The other’s demise is a small consolation once one’s own death appears to be inevitable.

One easily ruins both the pleasure and the sense of significance in this great scene if one inquires into the premises of its “school of thought.”

One doesn’t say it, but the creation of doubt was, for the most part, knowledge’s soundest accomplishment.

The advantage of distance: to let that which is to come, not the present, tip the scale. This, however, did not make humans trusting.

What has not been understood is humanity’s greatest source of consolation. Goethe knew all about this.

The feeling that the world is meaningless does yet not imply that it might, in the end, be experienced as meaningful.

One reads that the passions (pathemata) often become lessons (mathemata) for one who is ready to learn.

How far can one go with this ritual? The gods are insatiable; they drive up the price of rescue and favor.

We live in a world of simulation; this even allows the world to be adapted to philosophical “systems.”

“Formerly [Früher], many sailors didn’t want to learn to swim,” Ernst Jünger notes in his late diaries, adding by way of explanation that they had “their reasons for this.” The naming of these reasons can apparently be omitted; it would preserve the profundity.

Meaninglessness insinuates not only a lack but also a withholding, a robbing of what is essential.

Among language’s amazing inventions, one can count the invention of the unsayable; not only as a statement of failure in what is essential and considerable, but also as the marking of what has been affected by language’s self-limitation: the marking of the “individual” and the “one,” each on opposite ends of the scale of all that exists, as Neoplatonism first postulated them.

Sigmund Freud rightfully said that whoever asks for the meaning of life is sick. From this it follows that he must be healed, not satisfied; and if not healed, then consoled.