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FROM OTTILIE’S DIARY
“We accept every person in the world as that for which he gives himself out,
only he must give himself out for something. We can put up with the unpleasant
more easily than we can endure the insignificant.
“We venture upon anything in society except only what involves a
consequence.
“We never learn to know people when they come to us: we must go to them to
find out how things stand with them.
“I find it almost natural that we should see many faults in visitors, and that
directly they are gone we should judge them not in the most amiable manner.
For we have, so to say, a right to measure them by our own standard. Even
cautious, sensible men can scarcely keep themselves in such cases from being
sharp censors.
“When, on the contrary, we are staying at the houses of others, when we have
seen them in the midst of all their habits and environments among those
necessary conditions from which they cannot escape, when we have seen how
they affect those about them, and how they adapt themselves to their
circumstances, it is ignorance nay, worse, it is ill-will, to find ridiculous what in
more than one sense has a claim on our respect.
“That which we call politeness and good breeding effects what otherwise can
only be obtained by violence, or not even by that.
“Intercourse with women is the element of good manners.
“How can the character, the individuality, of a man co-exist with polish of
manner?
“The individuality can only be properly made prominent through good
manners. Every one likes what has something in it, only it not be a disagreeable
something.
“In life generally, and in society, no one has such high advantages as a well-
cultivated soldier.
“The rudest fighting people at least do not go out of their character, and
generally behind the roughness there is a certain latent good humor, so that in
difficulties it is possible to get on, even with them.
“No one is more intolerable than an underbred civilian. From him one has a
right to look for a delicacy, as he has no rough work to do.
“When we are living with people who have a delicate sense of propriety, we
are in misery on their account when anything unbecoming is committed. So I
always feel for and with Charlotte, when a person is tipping his chair. She cannot
endure it.
“No one would ever come into a mixed party with spectacles on his nose, if he
did but know that at once we women lose all pleasure in looking at him or
listening to what he has to say.
“Free-and-easiness, where there ought to be respect, is always ridiculous. No
one would put his hat down when he had scarcely paid the ordinary compliments
if he knew how comical it looks.
“There is no outward sign of courtesy that does not rest on a deep moral
foundation. The proper education would be that which communicated the sign
and the foundation of it at the same time.
“Behavior is a mirror in which every one displays his own image.
“There is a courtesy of the heart. It is akin to love. Out of it arises the purest
courtesy in the outward behavior.
“A freely offered homage is the most beautiful of all relations. And how were
that possible without love?
“We are never further from our wishes than when we imagine that we possess
what we have desired.
“No one is more a slave than the man who thinks himself free while he is not.
“A man has only to declare that he is free, and the next moment he feels the
conditions to which he is subject. Let him venture to declare that he is under
conditions, and then he will feel that he is free.
“Against great advantages in another, there are no means of defending
ourselves except love.
“There is something terrible in the sight of a highly-gifted man lying under
obligations to a fool.
“‘No man is a hero to his valet,’ the proverb says. But that is only because it
requires a hero to recognize a hero. The valet will probably know how to value
the valet-hero.
“Mediocrity has no greater consolation than in the thought that genius is not
immortal.
“The greatest men are connected with their own century always through some
weakness.
“One is apt to regard people as more dangerous than they are.
“Fools and modest people are alike innocuous. It is only your half-fools and
your half-wise who are really and truly dangerous.
“There is no better deliverance from the world than through art; and a man can
form no surer bond with it than through art.
“Alike in the moment of our highest fortune and our deepest necessity, we
require the artist.
“The business of art is with the difficult and the good.
“To see the difficult easily handled, gives us the feeling of the impossible.
“Difficulties increase the nearer we are to our end.
“Sowing is not so difficult as reaping.”
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