“It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.”

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punis…" by Sören Kierkegaard?

Sören Kierkegaard309

Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism 1813–1855

Related quotes

“Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.”

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer

"1896", p. 17
A Writer's Notebook (1946)

“If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.”

Charles Bukowski book Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969)

“School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.”

John Taylor Gatto book Dumbing Us Down

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), p. 19

“Those among them that have not received our religion do not fright any from it, and use none ill that goes over to it, so that all the while I was there one man was only punished on this occasion.”

Thomas More book Utopia

Source: Utopia (1516), Ch. 9 : Of the Religions of the Utopians
Context: Those among them that have not received our religion do not fright any from it, and use none ill that goes over to it, so that all the while I was there one man was only punished on this occasion. He being newly baptised did, notwithstanding all that we could say to the contrary, dispute publicly concerning the Christian religion, with more zeal than discretion, and with so much heat, that he not only preferred our worship to theirs, but condemned all their rites as profane, and cried out against all that adhered to them as impious and sacrilegious persons, that were to be damned to everlasting burnings. Upon his having frequently preached in this manner he was seized, and after trial he was condemned to banishment, not for having disparaged their religion, but for his inflaming the people to sedition; for this is one of their most ancient laws, that no man ought to be punished for his religion.

“Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

Source: Persons and Places (1944), p. 61

“Oh! what a frightful business is this modern society; the race for wealth — wealth.”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

I am ashamed to write the word. Wealth means well-being, weal, the opposite of woe. And is that money? or can money buy it? We boast much of the purity of our faith, of the sins of idolatry among the Romanists, and we send missionaries to the poor unenlightened heathens, to bring them out of their darkness into our light, our glorious light; but oh! if you may measure the fearfulness of an idol by the blood which stains its sacrifice, by the multitude of its victims, where in all the world, in the fetish of the poor negro, in the hideous car of Indian Juggernaut, can you find a monster whose worship is polluted by such enormity as this English one of money!
Letter VII
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)

“Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn't make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items.”

Stanley Fish (1938) American academic

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 3, It's Not The Thought That Counts, p. 33