The pain that extends to life as a whole, and loosens our hold on it, is the only pain that is really tragic.  That which attaches to particular objects is a will that is broken, but not resigned; it exhibits the struggle and inner contradiction of the will and of life itself; and it is comic, be it never so violent.  It is like the pain of the miser at the loss of his hoard.  Even though pain of the tragic kind proceeds from a single definite object, it does not remain there; it takes the separate affliction only as a symbol of life as a whole, and transfers it thither.

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Vexation is the attitude of the individual as intelligence towards the check imposed upon a strong manifestation of the individual as will.  There are two ways of avoiding it:  either by repressing the violence of the will—­in other words, by virtue; or by keeping the intelligence from dwelling upon the check—­in other words, by Stoicism.

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To win the favour of a very beautiful woman by one’s personality alone is perhaps a greater satisfaction to one’s vanity than to anything else; for it is an assurance that one’s personality is an equivalent for the person that is treasured and desired and defied above all others.  Hence it is that despised love is so great a pang, especially when it is associated with well-founded jealousy.

With this joy and this pain, it is probable that vanity is more largely concerned than the senses, because it is only the things of the mind, and not mere sensuality, that produce such violent convulsions.  The lower animals are familiar with lust, but not with the passionate pleasures and pains of love.

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To be suddenly placed in a strange town or country where the manner of life, possibly even the language, is very different from our own, is, at the first moment, like stepping into cold water.  We are brought into sudden contact with a new temperature, and we feel a powerful and superior influence from without which affects us uncomfortably.  We find ourselves in a strange element, where we cannot move with ease; and, over and above that, we have the feeling that while everything strikes us as strange, we ourselves strike others in the same way.  But as soon as we are a little composed and reconciled to our surroundings, as soon as we have appropriated some of its temperature, we feel an extraordinary sense of satisfaction, as in bathing in cool water; we assimilate ourselves to the new element, and cease to have any necessary pre-occupation with our person.  We devote our attention undisturbed to our environment, to which we now feel ourselves superior by being able to view it in an objective and disinterested fashion, instead of being oppressed by it, as before.

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