"We do not know it because we are fooling away our time with outward and perishing things, and are asleep in regard to that which is real within ourself"
About this Quote
Paracelsus is swinging a scalpel at the Renaissance ego: the conviction that collecting the world - objects, status, even sanctioned knowledge - is the same as understanding it. The line has the hard snap of a clinician diagnosing a patient who refuses to admit they are sick. We "do not know it" not because reality is inaccessible, but because attention has been squandered on "outward and perishing things" while the mind dozes through its own most immediate evidence.
The intent is polemical. Paracelsus spent his career at war with complacent medical orthodoxy, and this sentence carries that insurgent energy: you are distracted, you are dulled, you are mistaking the symptom for the cause. The subtext is almost insultingly practical: ignorance isn't a tragic cosmic condition, it's bad stewardship of time. "Fooling away" is moral language, not neutral description, implying culpability and choice.
Context sharpens the edge. In a period intoxicated by spectacle - courts, churches, printed authorities - Paracelsus argues that the crucial lab is inside the observer. That doesn't mean airy self-help. For a scientist-alchemist of his era, the "real within ourself" is where perception, conscience, and the capacity to read nature are calibrated. If that instrument is "asleep", all external learning turns into theater.
The rhetoric works because it flips the prestige hierarchy: the durable truth isn't in what you can display or hoard, but in the inner faculty that judges, attends, and wakes up. It's Renaissance anti-consumerism before consumerism had a name.
The intent is polemical. Paracelsus spent his career at war with complacent medical orthodoxy, and this sentence carries that insurgent energy: you are distracted, you are dulled, you are mistaking the symptom for the cause. The subtext is almost insultingly practical: ignorance isn't a tragic cosmic condition, it's bad stewardship of time. "Fooling away" is moral language, not neutral description, implying culpability and choice.
Context sharpens the edge. In a period intoxicated by spectacle - courts, churches, printed authorities - Paracelsus argues that the crucial lab is inside the observer. That doesn't mean airy self-help. For a scientist-alchemist of his era, the "real within ourself" is where perception, conscience, and the capacity to read nature are calibrated. If that instrument is "asleep", all external learning turns into theater.
The rhetoric works because it flips the prestige hierarchy: the durable truth isn't in what you can display or hoard, but in the inner faculty that judges, attends, and wakes up. It's Renaissance anti-consumerism before consumerism had a name.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
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