If you want people to envy you your sorrow or your shame, look as if you were proud of it. If you have only enough of the actor in you, rest assured, you will become the hero of the day. Since the parable of the Pharisee and the publican was uttered, what a lot of people who could not fulfil their sacred duties pretended to be publicans and sinners, and so aroused sympathy, even envy.
56
Philosophers dearly love to call their utterances "truths," since in that guise they become binding upon us all. But each philosopher invents his own truths. Which means that he asks his pupils to deceive themselves in the way he shows, but that he reserves for himself the option of deceiving himself in his own way. Why? Why not allow everyone to deceive himself just as he likes?
57
When Xanthippe poured slops over Socrates, as he returned from his philosophical occupations, tradition says that he observed: "After a storm there is always rain." Would it not be more worthy (not of the philosopher, but of philosophy) to say: After one's philosophical exercise, one feels as if one had had Slops emptied over one's head. And therefore Xanthippe did but give outward expression to what had taken place in Socrates' soul. Symbols are not always beautiful.
58
From the notes of an underworld man—"I read little, I write little, and, it seems to me, I think little. He who is ill-disposed towards me will say that this shows a great defect in my character, perhaps he will call me lazy, an Oblomov, and will repeat the copy-book maxim that idleness is the mother of all the vices. A friend, on the other hand, will say it is only a temporary state, that perhaps I am not quite well—in short, he will find random excuses for me, more with the idea of consoling me than of speaking the truth. But for my part, I say let us wait. If it turns out at the end of my life that I have 'done' not less than others—why, then—it will mean that idleness may be a virtue."
59
Börne, a contemporary of Heine, was very much offended when his enemies insisted on explaining his misanthropic outpourings as the result of a stomach and liver disease. It seemed to him much nobler and loftier to be indignant and angry because of the triumph of evil on earth, than because of the disorders of his own physical organs. Sentimentality apart—was he right, and is it really nobler?
60