This rotation is the vulgar, the inartistic method, and is based on an illusion. One is tired of living in the country, one moves to the city; one is tired of one’s native land, one travels abroad; one is europamüde, one goes to America, and so on; finally, one indulges in a dream of endless travel from star to star.
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No, Antonine was wiser; he says, ‘It is in your power to review your life, to look at things you saw before, from another point of view.’ The method I propose consists not in changing the soil but, as in the real rotation of crops, in changing the method of cultivation and type of grain.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard
Category: CONTENTMENT
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those who don’t bore themselves usually bore others, while those who do bore themselves amuse others. The people who do not bore themselves are generally those who are busy in the world in one way or another, but that is just why they are the most boring, the most insufferable, of all.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard -
So accept, then, our wish, a good wish: may no one understand you, but all envy you; may no friend attach himself to you, no girl love you; may no secret sympathy suspect your solitary pain; may no eye fathom your distant sorrow; may no ear detect your secret sigh! Or if your proud soul scorns such expressions of sympathy, spurns the alleviation, may the girls love you, may those with child seek you out in their anguish, may mothers put their hopes in you, may the dying look to you for comfort, may the young attach themselves to you, may husbands depend upon you, may the aged one reach out to you as to a staff – may all the world believe you are able to make it happy. So live well, then, you the unhappiest one! But what am I saying, the unhappiest, I ought to say the happiest, for this indeed is a gift of fortune that no one can give to themselves. See, language fails, and thought is confounded; for who is the happiest except the unhappiest, and who the unhappiest except the happiest? And what is life but madness, and faith but folly, and hope but reprieve, and love but salt in the wound?
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard -
He enjoys, for everyday purposes, the reputation of being in his right mind, yet he knows that were he to explain to a single person just how things were with him, he would be declared mad. This itself is enough to drive a person mad, yet he does not become so, and that is precisely his misfortune. His misfortune is that he has come to the world too soon and is therefore constantly arriving too late. He is forever quite close to the goal and the same moment at a distance from it; he now discovers that what it is that makes him unhappy, because now he has it, or because he is this way, is precisely what a few years ago would have made him happy if he had had it then, whereas then he was unhappy because he did not have it. His life has no meaning, like that of Ancaeus, of whom it is customary to say that nothing is known of him except that he gave rise to a proverb: ‘There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip’, as if this were not more than enough. His life knows no rest and has no content, he is not present to himself in the moment, not present to himself in the future, for the future has been experienced, and not in the past, because the past has still not arrived.
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Left to himself he stands in the wide world alone, he has no contemporaneity to attach himself to, no past he can long for, for his past has still not arrived, and no future he can hope for, for his future is already past.
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He cannot become old, for he has never been young; he cannot become young, for he has already become old; in a way he cannot die, for he has never lived; in a way he cannot live, for he is already dead; he cannot love, for love is always in the present, and he has no present time, no future, no past, and yet he is of a sympathetic nature, and he hates the world only because he loves it; he has no passion, not because he lacks it, but because that same instant he has the opposite; he has no time for anything, not because his time is taken up with something else, but because he has no time at all; he is powerless, not because he lacks strength, but because his own strength makes him impotent.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard -
Unhappy individuals who hope never have the same pain as those who remember. Hoping individuals always have a more gratifying disappointment. The unhappiest one will always, therefore, be found among the unhappy rememberers.
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This is what it amounts to: on the one hand, he constantly hopes for something he should be remembering, his hope is constantly disappointed, but on its being disappointed he discovers that the reason is not that the goal has been moved further on but that he has gone past it, that it has already been experienced, or is supposed to have been, and has thus passed over into memory.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard -
Thus were an individual to lose himself in antiquity, or in the Middle Ages, or whatever other period, but in such a way that this was definitely real for him, or if he lost himself in his own childhood or youth in such a way that that was decidedly real for him, then strictly he would not be a genuinely unhappy individual. Were I to imagine, on the other hand, a person who has never had a childhood himself, this age having passed him by without acquiring significance for him, but who now, say by becoming a teacher of children, discovered all the beauty that lies in childhood, and would now remember his own childhood, always look back upon it; then he indeed would be a very fitting example. He wants in retrospect to discover the significance of what, for him, is past and nevertheless remember it in its significance. Were I to imagine someone who had lived without appreciating the joy of life, or its pleasures, and who now at death’s door caught sight of it, but didn’t die, which would have been the best, but revived though not to live over again, then he could well be considered in the matter of who was the unhappiest.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard -
When an individual who loses his memory, or has nothing to remember, will not become a hoping one but remains a remembering one, that is a form of the unhappy. Thus were an individual to lose himself in antiquity, or in the Middle Ages, or whatever other period, but in such a way that this was definitely real for him, or if he lost himself in his own childhood or youth in such a way that that was decidedly real for him, then strictly he would not be a genuinely unhappy individual. Were I to imagine, on the other hand, a person who has never had a childhood himself, this age having passed him by without acquiring significance for him, but who now, say by becoming a teacher of children, discovered all the beauty that lies in childhood, and would now remember his own childhood, always look back upon it; then he indeed would be a very fitting example. He wants in retrospect to discover the significance of what, for him, is past and nevertheless remember it in its significance. Were I to imagine someone who had lived without appreciating the joy of life, or its pleasures, and who now at death’s door caught sight of it, but didn’t die, which would have been the best, but revived though not to live over again, then he could well be considered in the matter of who was the unhappiest. Unhappy individuals who hope never have the same pain as those who remember. Hoping individuals always have a more gratifying disappointment. The unhappiest one will always, therefore, be found among the unhappy rememberers.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard -
What a man is for himself, what keeps him company in solitude and that no one can give him or take from him, is obviously more important to him than what he can possess, or what he can be in the eyes of others. A man of wit, even in the deepest solitude, will find in his own thoughts and fantasies a perfect distraction, while the continual change brought about by society, plays, excursions and parties will be quite unable to ward off the boredom that tortures the fool.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life’
In the Presence of Schopenhauer
Michel Houellebecq
SO GOOD QUOTES 