Nothing betrays less knowledge of humanity than to suppose that, if a
man has a great many friends, it is a proof of merit and intrinsic
value: as though men gave their friendship according to value and merit!
as though they were not, rather, just like dogs, which love the person
that pats them and gives them bits of meat, and never trouble themselves
about anything else! The man who understands how to pat his fellows
best, though they be the nastiest brutes,--that's the man who has many
friends.
It is the converse that is true. Men of great
intellectual worth, or, still more, men of genius, can have only very
few friends; for their clear eye soon discovers all defects, and their
sense of rectitude is always being outraged afresh by the extent and the
horror of them. It is only extreme necessity that can compel such men
not to betray their feelings, or even to stroke the defects as if they
were beautiful additions. Personal love (for we are not speaking of the
reverence which is gained by authority) cannot be won by a man of
genius, unless the gods have endowed him with an indestructible
cheerfulness of temper, a glance that makes the world look beautiful, or
unless he has succeeded by degrees in taking men exactly as they are;
that is to say, in making a fool of the fools, as is right and proper.
On the heights we must expect to be solitary.
Schopenhauer
Translated by T. Bailey Saunders
Existence - system of null-functions activated into partial non-nullity by ignorance.
The Void, of which it cannot be said that it is or is not, nor that it has consciousness or has none, while it denies absoluteness to any experiential value (alike to being and to consciousness) cannot be identified. And that is the doctrine of not-self (anatta) as I see it in one aspect at present. This voidness cannot be “is-ed” and so introduced into the worldly scheme, except as the denial of absoluteness of all particular values. It has no more effect on ordinary life than the theory of relativity. But just as that theory completely alters calculation of enormous speeds, so, as I see it, this void-element completely alters calculations of extraordinary situations, of death (as killing, suicide or the partner of old age). N.T
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