One should be an enigma not just to others but to oneself too. I study myself. When I’m tired of that I light a cigar to pass the time, and think: God only knows what the good Lord really meant with me, or what He meant to make of me. […]
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 -
Besides my other numerous circle of acquaintances I have one more intimate confidant–my melancholy. In the midst of my joy, in the midst of my work, he waves to me, calls me to one side, even though physically I stay put. My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known; what wonder, then, that I love her in return. […]
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 -
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 