(Diary, 1817.)
[Beethoven was greatly vexed by his servants.]
294. “Hope nourishes me; it nourishes half the world, and has been my
neighbor all my life, else what had become of me!”
(August 11, 1810, to Bettina von Arnim.)
295. “Fortune is round like a globe, hence, naturally, does not always
fall on the noblest and best.”
(Vienna, July 29, 1800, to Wegeler.)
296. “Show your power, Fate! We are not our own masters; what is decided
must be,--and so be it!”
(Diary, 1818.)
297. “Eternal Providence omnisciently directs the good and evil fortunes
of mortal men.”
(Diary, 1818.)
298. “With tranquility, O God, will I submit myself to changes, and
place all my trust in Thy unalterable mercy and goodness.”
(Diary, 1818.)
299. “All misfortune is mysterious and greatest when viewed alone;
discussed with others it seems more endurable because one becomes
entirely familiar with the things one dreads, and feels as if one had
overcome it.”
(Diary, 1816.)
300. “One must not flee for protection to poverty against the loss of
riches, nor to a lack of friendship against the loss of friends, nor by
abstention from procreation against the death of children, but to reason
against everything.”
(Diary, 1816.)
301. “I share deeply with you the righteous sorrow over the death of
your wife. It seems to me that such a parting, which confronts nearly
every married man, ought to keep one in the ranks of the unmarried.”
(May 20, 1811, to Gottfried Hartel, of Leipzig.)
302. “He who is afflicted with a malady which he can not alter, but
which gradually brings him nearer and nearer to death, without which he
would have lived longer, ought to reflect that murder or another cause
might have killed him even more quickly.”
(Diary, 1812-18.)
303. “We finite ones with infinite souls are born only for sorrows and
joy and it might almost be said that the best of us receive joy through
sorrow.”
(October 19, 1815, to Countess Erdody.)
304. “He is a base man who does not know how to die; I knew it as a boy
of fifteen.”
(In the spring of 1816, to Miss Fanny Giannatasio del Rio, when
Beethoven felt ill and spoke of dying. It is not known that he was ever
near death in his youth.)
305. “A second and third generation recompenses me three and fourfold
for the ill-will which I had to endure from my former contemporaries.”
(Copied into his Diary from Goethe’s “West-ostlicher Divan.”)
306.
“My hour at last is come;
Yet not ingloriously or passively
I die, but first will do some valiant deed,
Of which mankind shall hear in after
time.”--Homer.
(“The Iliad” [Bryant’s translation], Book XXII, 375-378.)
(Copied into his Diary, 1815.)