an extraordinary impetus from this humiliating experience.

5.

This, to my sorrow, is what I realised; a good deal even struck me with
sudden fear. At last I felt, however, that if only I could be strong
enough to take sides against myself and what I most loved I would find the
road to truth and get solace and encouragement from it--and in this way I
became filled with a sensation of joy far greater than that upon which I
was now voluntarily turning my back.

6.

I was in love with art, passionately in love, and in the whole of
existence saw nothing else than art--and this at an age when, reasonably
enough, quite different passions usually possess the soul.

7.

_Goethe_ said: "The yearning spirit within me, which in earlier years I
may perhaps have fostered too earnestly, and which as I grew older I tried
my utmost to combat, did not seem becoming in the man, and I therefore had
to strive to attain to more complete freedom." Conclusion?--I have had to
do the same.

8.

He who wakes us always wounds us.

9.

I do not possess the talent of being loyal, and what is still worse, I
have not even the vanity to try to appear as if I did.

10.

He who accomplishes anything that lies beyond the vision and the
experience of his acquaintances,--provokes envy and hatred masked as
pity,--prejudice regards the work as decadence, disease, seduction. Long
faces.

11.

I frankly confess that I had hoped that by means of art the Germans would
become thoroughly disgusted with _decaying Christianity_--I regarded German
mythology as a solvent, as a means of accustoming people to polytheism.

What a fright I had over the Catholic revival!!

12.

It is possible neither to suffer sufficiently acutely from life, nor to be
so lifeless and emotionally weak, as to have _need_ of Wagner's art, as to
require it as a medium. This is the principal reason of one's _opposition_
to it, and not baser motives; something to which we are not driven by any
personal need, and which we do not _require_, we cannot esteem so highly.

13.

It is a question either of no longer _requiring_ Wagner's art, or of still
requiring it.

Gigantic forces lie concealed in it: _it drives one beyond its own
domain_.

14.

_Goethe_ said: "Are not Byron's audacity, sprightliness and grandeur all
creative? We must beware of always looking for this quality in that which
is perfectly pure a