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| �But a lot depends on yourself, for there is a battle no one else can fight for you, a doubt no one else can appease, a care that no one else can put to rest, the care and concern about God. Once you have found assurance about this, you will find the world to be much better, for then you will not seek in the world or demand of it what it cannot give--then you yourself will be able to comfort and reassure others.� (1840-41)
�But all true effort to help begins with self-humiliation: the helper must first humble himself under him he would help, and therewith must understand that to help does not mean to be a sovereign but to be a servant, that to help does not mean to be ambitious but to be patient, that to help means to endure for the time being the imputation that one is in the wrong and does not understand what the other understands.� (The Point of View) �But before God, the infinite spirit, all the millions who have lived and live now do not form a mass; he sees only individuals.� �But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.� (Either/Or, VOL. II: EQUILIBRIUM BETWEEN THE AESTHETIC AND THE ETHICAL IN THE COMPOSITION OF PERSONALITY) �But humor is also the joy which has overcome the world.� (1837) �But I must be careful with this thought of dying, in case I take some step on the basis of the belief that I am going to die in half a year and then I live to be eighty-two. No, material like that can be completed, put in its desk, sealed and marked 'To be opened after my death'.� (1849) �But if a man proposes to himself every day to bear in mind and existentially to hold fast what the clergyman says on Sunday, understanding this as the earnestness of life, and therewith again understanding all his ability and inability as a jest: does this mean that he will undertake nothing at all, because everything is empty and vain? Ah, no, for then precisely he will have no occasion to appreciate the jest, since the contradiction will not arise which brings it into juxtaposition with the earnestness of life: there is no contradiction in the thought that everything is vanity in the eyes of a creature of vanity.� (Concluding Unscientific Postscript) �But in the midst of nature where a person, free from life's often suffocating air, breathes more freely, here the soul opens willingly to every noble impression. Here a human being steps forth as nature's master, but he also feels that in nature something higher is manifested, something he must bow down before. He feels a need to surrender to this power that rules it all.� (1835) |
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