Selections from the Blue Octavo Notebooks

To what indifference people may come, to what profound conviction of having lost the right track for ever.

Psychology is impatience.
All human errors are impatience, the premature breaking off of what is methodical, an apparent fencing in of the apparent thing.

Is it possible to think something unconsoling? Or, rather, something unconsoling without the breath of consolation? A way out would seem to lie in the fact that recognition as such is consolation. And so one might well think: You must put yourself aside, and yet one might maintain oneself, without falsifying this recognition, by the consciousness of having recognized it. That, then, really means having pulled oneself out of the swamp by one's own pigtail. What is ridiculous in the physical world is possible in the spiritual world. There is no law of gravity (the angels do not fly, they have not overcome any force of gravity, it is only we observers in the terrestrial world who cannot imagine it in any better way than that), which is, of course, beyond our power of conception, or at any rate, conceivable only on a very high level. How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. (Evening.) Why? There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world. At least descriptive is probably, taken as a whole, a form of anthropomorphism, a nibbling at our own limits. The inner world can only be experienced, not described. -- Psychology is the description of the reflection of the terrestrial world in the heavenly plane, or, more correctly, the description of a reflection such as we, soaked as we are in our terrestrial nature, imagine it, for no reflection actually occurs, only we see earth wherever we turn.

The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master, not knowing that this is only a fantasy produced by a new knot in the master's whiplash.

Only he who is a party can judge, but as a party he cannot judge. Hence it follows that there is no possibility of judgment in the world, only a glimmer of it.

Celibacy and suicide are on similar levels of understanding, suicide and a martyr's death not so by any means, perhaps marriage and a martyr's death.

January 18. The complaint: If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?


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