Great Throughts Treasury

"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not."

"Make yourself indispensable."

"One completely overcomes only what one assimilates."

"Dare to be yourself. I must underline that in my head too."

"Morality consists in substituting for the natural creature (the old Adam) a fiction that you prefer. But then you are no longer sincere. The old Adam is the sincere man."

"And do not long, through vanity, for too hasty manifestation of one's essence."

"I must stop puffing up my pride (in this notebook) just for the sake of doing as Stendhal did. The spirit of imitation; watch out for it. It is useless to do something simply because another man has done it. One must remember the rule of conduct of the great after having isolated it from the contingent facts of their lives, rather than imitating the little facts."

"Don't ever do anything through affectation or to make people like you or through imitation or for the pleasure of contradicting."

"I am torn by a conflict between the rules of morality and the rules of sincerity."

"My mind was quibbling just now as to whether one must first be before appearing or first appear and then be what one appears. (Like the people who first buy on credit and later worry about their debt; appearing before being amounts to getting in debt toward the physical world.)"

"Oh, to be utterly and perfectly sincere..."

"Perhaps, my mind said, we are only in so far as we appear. Moreover the two propositions are false when separated. (1) We are for the sake of appearing. (2) We appear because we are. The two must be joined in a mutual dependence. Then you get the desired imperative. One must be to appear. The appearing must not be distinguished from the being; the being asserts itself in the appearing; the appearing is the immediate manifestation of the being."

"Pay no attention to appearing. Being is alone important."

"Rather than recounting his life as he has lived it, [the artist] must live his life as he will recount it. In other words, the portrait of him formed by his life must identify itself with the ideal portrait he desires. And, in still simpler terms, he must be as he wishes to be."

"Whence: do not seek to be through the vain desire toappear; but rather because it is fitting to be so."

"When one has begun to write, the hardest thing is to be sincere. Essential to mull over that idea and to define artistic sincerity. Meanwhile, I hit upon this: the word must never precede the idea. Or else: the word must always be necessitated by the idea. It must be irresistible and inevitable; and the same is true of the sentence, of the whole work of art. And for the artist's whole life, since his vocation must be irresistible..."

"This occurs to me: the old Adam is the poet. The new man, whom you prefer, is the artist. The artist must take the place of the poet. From the struggle between the two is born the work of art."

"Whenever I get ready again to write really sincere notes in this notebook, I shall have to undertake such a disentangling in my cluttered brain that, to stir up all that dust, I am waiting for a series of vast empty hours, a long cold, a convalescence, during which my constantly reawakened curiosities will lie at rest; during which my sole care will be to rediscover myself."