For my wisdom is really not zum für Jedermann, and it is always more prudent to keep one’s rules of prudence to oneself. Disciples, then, I have no wish for, but should someone happen to be present at my deathbed, and if I was sure it was all over with me, I might perhaps in a fit of philanthropic delirium whisper my teaching in his ear, uncertain whether I had done him a service or not.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard
Category: KNOWLEDGE & SELF-KNOWLEDGE
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In any case a reason is a curious thing; if I concentrate all my passion on it, it grows into a huge necessity that can move heaven and earth; if I lack passion, I look down on it with scorn.–I have speculated for some time as to the real reason why I resigned my post as secondary-school teacher. Thinking it over now, it occurs to me that such a position was the very thing for me. Today it dawned on me: that was precisely the reason, I had to consider myself absolutely fitted for the job. So if I’d continued in it I had everything to lose, nothing to gain. Wherefore I thought it proper to resign my post and seek employment with a travelling theatre, the reason being that I had no talent, and so everything to gain. […]
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard -
If anyone should keep a diary it’s me, to aid my memory a little. After a while it often happens that I completely forget what reasons motivated me to do this or that, not just in bagatelles, but also in taking the most decisive steps. Should the reason then occur to me, sometimes it seems so strange that I myself refuse to believe it was the reason.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard -
Ask any questions you will, just don’t ask me for reasons. A young girl is excused for not being able to give reasons, they say she lives in her feelings. It is different with me. Generally, I have so many and usually mutually contradictory reasons that, for that reason, it is impossible for me to give reasons.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard -
I do not think I am doing anything unworthy of my pen by recommending here that one take good care of keeping his fortune, whether inherited or acquired. For to possess enough to be able, even if one is alone and without a family, to live comfortably in true independence, that is, without working, is a priceless advantage: it grants one exemption and immunity from the miseries and torment attached to human life, as well as emancipation from the general chores which are the natural fate of the children of the earth. It is only by this favour of fate that one is truly a free born man, and really sui juris (his own master), master of his time and his powers, and able to say every morning: ‘The day belongs to me’. Also, between the man who has a thousand pounds of income and the man who has a hundred thousand, the difference is infinitely less than between the former and the man who has nothing. But inherited wealth achieves its highest value when it falls to the one who, endowed with superior intellectual powers, pursues enterprises that are not really compatible with having to earn one’s bread: he is then doubly favoured by fate and can live in full accord with his genius. He will pay his debt to humankind a hundred times over by producing what no one else could produce and giving it what will become its common good, while at the same time making it honourable. Another, placed in such a favoured position, will render himself worthy of humankind by his philanthropic works. Whoever, on the contrary, does nothing of this kind, who does not even try, if only once, as an experiment, to advance a science through serious studies, and does not give himself even the smallest opportunity of doing so, is merely a contemptible idler.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life’In the Presence of Schopenhauer
Michel Houellebecq -
From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.
The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the ‘present state of the question’. To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge—to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour—this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded.
The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis -
From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.
And the questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will be depends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke the future to help them to make. As a result, while their minds are buzzing in this vacuum, we have the better chance to slip in and bend them to the action we have decided on. And great work has already been done. Once they knew that some changes were for the better, and others for the worse, and others again indifferent. We have largely removed this knowledge. For the descriptive adjective ‘unchanged’ we have substituted the emotional adjective ‘stagnant’. We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain—not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is,
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You see how it is done? If each side had been frankly contending for its own real wish, they would all have kept within the bounds of reason and courtesy; but just because the contention is reversed and each side is fighting the other side’s battle, all the bitterness which really flows from thwarted self-righteousness and obstinacy and the accumulated grudges of the last ten years is concealed from them by the nominal or official ‘Unselfishness’ of what they are doing or, at least, held to be excused by it.
The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis
SO GOOD QUOTES 