Athenœum Fragments (excerpts)

Summary

5 What is called good society is usually only a mosaic of polished caricatures.

15 Suicide is usually only an event, not an action. If it is the former, the perpetrator is always wrong; it is like a child trying to free itself. But if it is an action, then there can be no question of right and wrong, but only one of decorum. For matters of decorum are subject to only the will. The will should determine everything that is not laid down precisely by the pure law, such as the here and now; and it may determine everything that does not destroy the free will of others and that of oneself. It is not wrong to die voluntarily; but it is often indecent to live longer.

27 Most people are, like Leibniz's possible worlds, only equally justified pretenders to existence. There are few who actually exist.

31 Prudery is the pretension to innocence without innocence. Women will probably have to remain prudish as long as men remain sentimental, stupid and bad enough to demand for them eternal innocence and a lack of education. For innocence is the only thing that can ennoble the loss of education.

34 Almost all marriages are only concubinages, morganatic marriages, or rather provisional attempts and distant approximations to a real marriage, whose true essence – according to not the paradoxes of this or that system but all spiritual and worldly rights – consists in several persons becoming one.