But we want to be the poets of our life — first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters.
— Nietzsche, The Gay Science
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One should be able to compose a symphony of ordinary existence out of “little things!” Instead of waiting for big ones to happen! The very smallest thing is big! …Little things take the place in life of the “big events”! That is their value, if one can grasp it!
— Peter Altenberg, “Little Things,” The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits
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That’s all there is, just particular people, particular things, poplars and beeches, black lilac bushes, and the mind that watches them, and the sorrow that everything ends.
— Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration
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It should not surprise us then when he acknowledges the limited character of his philosophizing in the middle writings. The task of painting what is casually called the picture of life as one set by both poets and philosophers is nonsensical. Philosophers need to show more modesty by showing that what they are doing is providing pictures and miniatures from a single life, from their own lives, “and nothing else is possible.”
— Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Earthbound Wisdom
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After the “Great” War, the very concept of “greatness” — great projects, great motives, great ideas — was under deep suspicion, if not dead in the water. This is perhaps why poetry was the dominant artistic wartime form: life — the good life, bad life, trench life, home life (when you are separated from your family — is made up of the small things poets observe, the all-important details which, as often as not, are made to seem meaningful. As the poets said, and as the phenomenologists and pragmatists had said before them, all the use in life is in the small things.
— Peter Watson, The Age of Atheists