Quotes About Vulnerability

Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable.

Resentment, born of weakness, harms no one more than the weak person himself.

Man is the most bungled of all the animals, the sickliest, and not one has strayed more dangerously from its instincts. But for all that, of course, he is the most interesting.

What have we in common with the rosebud, which trembles because a drop of dew is lying upon it?

To be sure, I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but (s)he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

With hard men intimacy is a thing of shame- and something precious.

Visiting the sick' is an orgasm of superiority in the contemplation of our neighbor's helplessness

as though the Truth were such an innocent and incompetent creature as to require protectors!

The sick are the greatest danger for the healthy; it is not from the strongest that harm comes to the strong, but from the weakest.

79. A soul which knows that it is loved, but does not itself love, betrays its sediment: its dregs come up.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

He wants to be known deep down, abysmally deep down, before he is capable of being loved at all; he dares to let himself be fathomed. He feels that his beloved is fully in his possession only when she no longer deceives herself about him, when she loves him just as much for his devilry and hidden insatiability as for his graciousness, patience, and spirituality.

One should adopt only those situations in which is in no need of sham virtues, but rather, like the tight-rope dancer on his tight rope, in which one must either fall or stand - or escape

To vigorous men intimacy is a matter of shame--and something precious.

That poem was not by me. It is among the things which quite overpower me; I have never been able to read it without tears coming to my eyes; it sounds like a voice for which I have been waiting and waiting since childhood. The poem is by my friend Lou... She is as shrewd as an eagle and brave as a lion, and yet still a very girlish child, who perhaps will not live long.

There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly.

I fear that the animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason – as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal.

But one day solitude will make you weary, one day your pride will buckle and your courage gnash its teeth. One day you will cry, 'I am alone!

Where the strong are weak, and the noble all too mild—there it builds its disgusting nest: the parasite lives where the great have small wounded recesses.

And often with our love we want merely to overleap envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable.

I do indeed find the cruelty of Nature which is so often referred to; but in a different place: Nature is cruel, but against her lucky and well-constituted children; she protects and shelters and loves the lowly.

better than they words express it, thine eyes tell me all thy danger

Sensuality often forces the growth of love too much, so that its root remains weak, and is easily torn up.

Die Sinnlichkeit übereilt oft das Wachsthum der Liebe, so dass die Wurzel schwach bleibt und leicht auszureissen ist.