
“We should certainly count our blessings, but we should also make our blessings count.”
Section 172
Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)
“We should certainly count our blessings, but we should also make our blessings count.”
“Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.”
Musica est exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi.
Letter to Christian Goldbach, April 17, 1712.
Arthur Schopenhauer paraphrased this quotation in the first book of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung: Musica est exercitium metaphysices occultum nescientis se philosophari animi. (Music is a hidden metaphysical exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is philosophizing.)
Source: Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches
Letter 2
Letters Written in Sweden (1796)
Context: The more I see of the world, the more I am convinced that civilisation is a blessing not sufficiently estimated by those who have not traced its progress; for it not only refines our enjoyments, but produces a variety which enables us to retain the primitive delicacy of our sensations. Without the aid of the imagination all the pleasures of the senses must sink into grossness, unless continual novelty serve as a substitute for the imagination, which, being impossible, it was to this weariness, I suppose, that Solomon alluded when he declared that there was nothing new under the sun!
In Darkest England : And The Way Out (1890), p. 81
White Self-Hate: Master-Stroke Of The Enemy
1962, White Self-Hate: Master-Stroke Of The Enemy