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| �Conveying a measure of love to my neighbour was my greatest joy. Whenever I saw this despicable condescension towards less important people, I felt able to say to myself, 'At least that's not how I live.' � ("Stoicism and My Life", 1850)
�Could anyone misunderstand this, as if it were the intention of Christianity to hold self-love in honor? On the contrary, it is its intention to strip us of our selfishness. This selfishness consists in loving one's self; but if one must love his neighbor as himself, then the commandment opens the lock of self-love as with a picklock, and the man with it. If the commandment about loving one's neighbor were expressed in some other way than by the use of this little phrase, �as thyself,� which is at once so easy to use and yet has the tension of eternity, then the commandment would not be able thus to master the self-love... It does not leave self-love the least excuse, the least loophole open. How strange! Long and shrewd speeches might be made about how a man ought to love his neighbor; and then, after all the speeches had been heard, self-love could still hit upon an excuse and find a way of escape, because the subject had not been absolutely exhausted; all alternatives had not been canvassed; because something had been forgotten, or not accurately and bindingly enough expressed and described.� (Works of Love) �Could this lack in literature be due to the fact that philosophers do not consider such matters, or that they do not understand them?� (Either/Or, VOL. I: DIARY OF THE SEDUCER) �Curiously enough, privately I am much more concise and clear about myself. But as soon as I note it down it becomes a production. Likewise, it is curious that I have no desire to record my religious impressions, ideas, expressions, in the way I myself use them; it is as if they were too important.� ("About Myself", 13 October 1853) �Despair is, namely, not something which may happen to a man, an event like fortune and misfortune. Despair is a disproportion in his inmost being--so far down, so deep, that neither fate nor events can encroach upon it, but can only reveal the fact that the disproportion--was there. Therefore there is only one assurance against despair: to undergo the change of eternity by the �shalt� of duty; anyone who has not understood this change is desperate; fortune and prosperity may conceal it; misfortune and adversity, on the contrary, do not, as he thinks, make him desperate, but they reveal the fact that he--was desperate.� (Works of Love) �Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it?� (Either/Or, VOL. II: EQUILIBRIUM BETWEEN THE AESTHETIC AND THE ETHICAL IN THE COMPOSITION OF PERSONALITY) |
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