Human All Too Human 314

The desire to offend and injure no-one can be a sign of a just disposition as well as of one who waits for the right time. Animals live unhistorically. They are confined to the present and they can therefore never be anything but honest. If happiness, or reaching out for new happiness, is in any sense what keeps us carrying on, then perhaps no philosopher is more justified than the Cynic, for the animal is the living proof of the rightness of Cynicism because the smallest happiness, if it is present uninterruptedly, is far greater than the greatest happiness that only fills a vacuum temporarily. What is common to all happiness is the ability to forget or to feel unhistorically during its duration. If a man couldn't forget then he would see things as becoming, as a process, and he would cease to act. We can live without a memory but we can't live without forgetting.