I have but few favorable chances in the great official road; one only progresses in it with tortoise steps, and great promotion is bought by great acts of cowardice or by a natural servility.
—6 July 1852
The longer I live the lower I bring down the level at which my mind had placed mankind; I think I shall have to bring it yet lower to reach the proper height.
—6 July 1852
2/2 on that, prose, a little poetry, perhaps, a few flowers by those insipid dishes—Art, conversation, the country, added to the daily flatness of work and housekeeping.
—22 June 1852
1/2 There are but two régimes in this world: 1° opium, intoxication, ecstasy, languor, sickness and death; and 2° boiled beef, monotony, boredom and health;
It is only by living as I do, in abstract science, that one can dispense with companionship. Those who lack this passion do not know what to do with themselves; my schoolfellows get married or take to cafés, or become as dull as caged birds.
—To his mother, 7 June 1852
It must be borne in mind that he is envious and spiteful, avenging himself for his incapacity on those whose competency makes him sensible of his incompetency….
This great lesson is to be gathered from it all: that it is unnecessary to think in order to make one’s way; that lack of ideas is esteemed and sought after, and that perfection consists in being an automaton, because an automaton is more docile than an intelligent being.
Unhappy with his students in Poitiers: "they write me impossible orations, with which I am perfectly sickened. Imagine the extreme of bad taste, cold declamation, noble style, prosopopoeia and hypotyposis, and, especially, an unapproachable lack of ideas."
I have read the last volume of Hegel’s Logic. Alas, another lost illusion! It is great, but it is not true Metaphysics; the method is artificial, and that much-lauded Construction of the Absolute is useless.
As soon as you take it upon yourself to consider your adversaries as so many driven sheep, and to despise in them the sanctity of the human will, you give them the same right against yourself....
If the enlightened minority has the right of forcing the stupid majority, one enlightened man has the right of forcing the stupid unanimity, which is the justification not of royalty, but of tyranny. (January 18, 1852)