There you have the two extremes: the man that is concerned mainly with the hidden life, and the man who seriously concerns himself with the expression of that life. What I want to do is to bring about harmony between the two extremes, for therein lies the Truth. The harmony of life is the understanding of Truth.
The epitaph that I would write for history would say: I conceal nothing. It is not enough not to lie. One should strive not to lie in a negative sense by remaining silent.
The secret of the nobility and beauty of great ladies lies in the art with which they can shed their veils. In such situations, they become like ancient statues. If they kept the merest scarf on, they would be lewd. Your bourgeois woman will always try to cover her nakedness.
Who combats bravely is not therefore brave, He dreads a death-bed like the meanest slave: Who reasons wisely is not therefore wise,- His pride in reasoning, not in acting lies.
And still I look for the men who will dare to be
roses of England
wild roses of England
men who are wild roses of England
with metal thorns, beware!
but still more brave and still more rare
the courage of rosiness in a cabbage world
fragrance of roses in a stale stink of lies
rose-leaves to bewilder the clever fools
and rose-briars to strangle the machine.
The reason that adulation is not displeasing is that, though untrue, it shows one to be of consequence enough, in one way or other, to induce people to lie.
The rule for every man is, not to depend on the education which other men have prepared for him-not even to consent to it; but to strive to see things as they are, and to be himself as he is. Defeat lies in self-surrender.
Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.
If it be the chief point of friendship to
comply with a friends motions and inclinations,
he possesses this in a eminent degree;
he lies down when I sit, and walks when I walk,
which is more than many good friends
can pretend to do.
He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider but it was a very corrupting business.
Here lies, in a "horizontal" position The "outside" case of Peter Pendulum, watch-maker. He departed this life "wound up" In hopes of being "taken in hand" by his Maker, And of being thoroughly "cleaned, repaired" and "set a-going" In the world to come.
Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration […]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour […]. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist" from, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense".
Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.
The comprehensibility of the world seems to me a wonder or eternal secret. Here lies the sense of wonder which increases even more with the development of our knowledge.