59 definitions
The book's index
Thoughts for the Times on War and Death
46 concepts · 59 definitions
- afterlife1
- altruism1
- ambivalence1
- character1
- child1
- civilization2
- conscience2
- dead1
- death3
- death wish1
- disillusionment2
- dream1
- egoism1
- evil1
- fatherland1
- fear of death1
- fiction1
- foreigner1
- grief1
- heroism1
- history1
- hypocrisy1
- hypocrite1
- immortality1
- intellect2
- killing the mandarin1
- life3
- love2
- masses1
- mental illness1
- mind1
- morality2
- nation1
- original sin1
- philosophy1
- prohibition1
- savage1
- science1
- sentimentalist1
- society1
- spirit1
- state2
- stupidity1
- unconscious1
- war3
- worry1
Life (n.) is like chess, where one false move may force us to resign — except that there is no second game, no return-match.
Life (n.) is impoverished when its highest stake, life itself, may not be risked — it becomes as shallow as an American flirtation, in which it is understood that nothing is to happen.
Life (n.) must be tolerated: that remains the first duty of all living beings — and illusion becomes valueless if it makes this harder.
Death (n.) we try to reduce from a necessity to a chance — stressing accident, disease, infection, old age.
Death (n.) cannot be imagined as our own: whenever we try, we are still there watching — in the unconscious, every one of us believes himself immortal.
Death (n.) must be prepared for: si vis vitam, para mortem — to bear life, make ready for death.
War (n.) strips off civilization's later layers and exposes the primal man in each of us: heroes who cannot believe in their own death, strangers branded as enemies.
War (n.) sweeps away our conventional denial of death: people die by the tens of thousands a day, chance gives way to accumulation — and life has become interesting again.
War (n.) tramples blindly on everything in its path, as if no future and no peace among men would follow it.
Love (n.) is kept ever vigilant and fresh by the hate that lurks behind it; we owe its fairest flowerings to the reaction against the hostile impulse within.
Love (n.) cannot be much younger than the lust to kill.
Morality (n.) so hard-won is thrown off every night like a garment and put on again next morning — harmlessly, because sleep paralyses us.
Morality (n.) can come from transformed instinct or from mere advantage; superficial acquaintance cannot tell the two apart, and optimism grossly exaggerates the number truly transformed.
A State (n.) forbids the individual to do wrong not because it wants to abolish wrongdoing but because it wants to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco.
A State (n.) at war demands the utmost obedience and sacrifice from its citizens while treating them like children with secrecy and censorship — and confesses its rapacity, which the citizen must then sanction as patriotism.
Conscience (n.) awoke beside the loved dead, and its first prohibition was 'Thou shalt not kill' — aimed at the satisfaction hidden behind the grief, and only later extended to strangers and enemies.
Conscience (n.) is not the inflexible judge ethical teachers declare it: in its origin it is "social anxiety" and nothing else — when the community stops objecting, evil passions are let loose.
Disillusionment (n.) is not strictly justified: it is only the destruction of an illusion, and we welcomed illusions precisely because they spared us unpleasure.
Disillusionment (n.) is misplaced in wartime: our fellow-men have not sunk as low as we feared, because they never rose as high as we believed.
Intellect (n.) functions reliably only when removed from strong emotion; otherwise it is an instrument of the will that delivers the inference the will requires.
Intellect (n.) is a weak, dependent thing, the toy and tool of our instincts and feelings — we act cleverly or stupidly as our inner resistances dictate.
Civilization (n.) relies on man's susceptibility to culture — his capacity to transform egoistic impulses under the influence of erotism — and we overrate it, regarding men as better than they are.
Civilization (n.) was attained through renouncing instinctual satisfaction, and demands the same renunciation from each newcomer in turn.