truth.

And it can be understood why the makers of the present arts and
sciences have not fulfilled, and cannot fulfil, their vocation.
They do not fulfil it, because out of their obligations they have
erected a right.

Scientific and artistic activity, in its real sense, is only
fruitful when it knows no rights, but recognizes only obligations.
Only because it is its property to be always thus, does mankind so
highly prize this activity. If men really were called to the
service of others through artistic work, they would see in that work
only obligation, and they would fulfil it with toil, with
privations, and with self-abnegation.

The thinker or the artist will never sit calmly on Olympian heights,
as we have become accustomed to represent them to ourselves. The
thinker or the artist should suffer in company with the people, in
order that he may find salvation or consolation. Besides this, he
will suffer because he is always and eternally in turmoil and
agitation: he might decide and say that that which would confer
welfare on men, would free them from suffering, would afford them
consolation; but he has not said so, and has not presented it as he
should have done; he has not decided, and he has not spoken; and to-
morrow, possibly, it will be too late,--he will die. And therefore
suffering and self-sacrifice will always be the lot of the thinker
and the artist.

Not of this description will be the thinker and artist who is reared
in an establishment where, apparently, they manufacture the learned