Aphoristic Writings, Notebook, and Letters to a Friend, by Otto ...

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Only from within himself can a person know the depth of the world: in him lie the
interconnections of the world.
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That we have no memory of a life before birth is so little an objection to original
sin and the fall from real existence that it can hardly be otherwise, and a memory of a
former life would have to form a flat contradiction to the idea of the fall of man. For
this memory would include time; but time is not there until birth, until the Fall. That
there are problems, sickness, i.e. sin, proves original sin. Being and Non-Being must
not be thought of in temporal relation to one another, but next to each other.
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Murder is committed by the criminal out of the most fearful despair: it is for him
the means of filling the greatest inner void, since as a criminal he no longer wills, he
no longer does; he sees that his life leads to no end, and that is why he wants to
accomplish something. He is thereby wholly indifferent as to whom he murders; the
intent to murder is never directed towards a particular individual, otherwise the
desire to murder, as a psychological disposition, would not lie so deep. He just wants
to murder in general, to negate.
Habituation
(practice)
Propagation
⎫
⎬
⎭
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Increasing of sin, function of
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time.
All sin seeks to multiply itself: all qualites of inferior life must be explained by
this.
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Vegetarians are just as mistaken as their opponents. If you did not want to
contribute to the killing of living beings, you could only drink milk, for whoever eats
fruit or eggs still kills embryos. Milk is perhaps for that reason the healthiest food,
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