Quotes about the trip
page 99

Helen Hayes photo
John Flavel photo
John Vorster photo

“…the policy of separate development can be tested by any unprejudiced person against the requirements of Christianity and morality, and it will be found to meet all those requirements. … for conditions such as those in South Africa there is no other policy[, for without it] you will have chaos and ultimately bring about the downfall of all population groups here in South Africa. South Africa's problems are unique and South Africa has chosen its solution. …we, the Whites, the Coloureds, the Asians and the Bantu, will work out our own solutions here in South Africa. …we instituted the policy of separate development, not because we considered ourselves better than others, not because we considered ourselves richer or more educated than others. We instituted the policy of separate development because we said we were different from others. We prize that otherness and are not prepared to relinquish it. … We have our land and we and we alone will have author­ity over it. We have our Parliament and in that Parliament we and we alone will be represented; that is why [during] this past session it was my pleasant privilege to … abolish Coloured representation in Parliament; and it has been abolished once and for all. … but one should also put something in its place. That is why the National Party … for the first time [has given] the Coloureds in the Republic a Coloured Persons Representative Council in their own political area [where they] can exercise their political rights in their own way and by their own people. That is morality, that is policy, that is standpoint. … We said you may not attend my university, but we did not leave it at that. We said we shall give you a university of your own. We said you may not attend my school but we said we shall give you a school of your own. That is morality, that is Christianity …”

John Vorster (1915–1983) politician from South Africa and seventh Prime Minister of South Africa

John Vorster in his Heilbron speech http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/extract-speech-made-heilbron-16-august-1968 on 16 August 1968, as quoted in sahistory.org.za

Roger Manganelli photo
P.G. Wodehouse photo

“The successful managers know that the best way for their people to learn and grow is through experience and that means taking chances and making errors.”

Robert W. Bly (1957) American writer

101 Ways to Make Every Second Count: Time Management Tips and Techniques for More Success With Less Stress (1999)

H.L. Mencken photo
Russell L. Ackoff photo

“A subject may be said to be in such a state if he (it) wants something and has unequally efficient alternative ways of trying to get it.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1970s, On purposeful systems., 1972, p. 39, as cited in: Jacob Hendrik Galjaard (2009) De droom van mijnheer Ariyoshi. p. 89:

Joseph Brodsky photo
Martin Sheen photo
Nelson Mandela photo

“It is never my custom to use words lightly. If twenty-seven years in prison have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on the way people live and die.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

Nelson Mandela on words, Closing address 13th International Aids Conference, Durban, South Africa (14 July 2000). Source: From Nelson Mandela By Himself: The Authorised Book of Quotations © 2010 by Nelson R. Mandela and The Nelson Mandela Foundation http://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/mini-site/selected-quotes
2000s

Kalki Koechlin photo

“It's all a part of this world where we're all kind of mixing a lot, and… in that way we're all a bit confused about who we are, where we belong, where's home, and … who is important to us…”

Kalki Koechlin (1984) Indian actress

Interview with Olivia Bannock at the Toronto International Film Festival, on the subject of her work with Anurag Kashyap, in That Girl in Yellow Boots, for myETVmedia with Kalki Koechlin (28 September 2010) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1z-_AJiCVE

Erving Goffman photo
Bill Cosby photo
Peter Kropotkin photo
Tsunetomo Yamamoto photo
Deane Montgomery photo

“A group which has a simple structure may offer difficult questions when operating as a transformation group. For example, the ways in which a cyclic group of order 2 can operate on a manifold, even on E 3, are far from completely known.”

Deane Montgomery (1909–1992) American mathematician

[Properties of finite-dimensional groups, Proceedings of the International Mathematical Congress held in Cambridge, Mass. in 1950, 442–446, University of Toronto Press, 1952, http://www.mathunion.org/ICM/ICM1950.2/Main/icm1950.2.0442.0446.ocr.pdf] (quote from p. 442)

Joe Zawinul photo
Frederick Buechner photo

“The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation (1983)

John McCain photo
Paul Klee photo

“The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Diary entry (December 1905), # 733, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918; University of California Press, 1968
1903 - 1910

Prince photo
Herman Cain photo

“I don't believe racism in this country today holds anybody back in a big way. Are there some elements of racism? Yes, it gets back to if we don't grow this economy, that is a ripple effect for every economic level, and because blacks are more disproportionately unemployed, they get hit the worst when economic policies don't work. That's where it starts.”

Herman Cain (1945) American writer, businessman and activist

State of the Union
2011-10-09
Television, quoted in * Cain: Racism not holding anyone back
Political Ticker
2011-10-09
Kevin
Liptak
CNN
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/09/cain-racism-not-holding-anyone-back/

Paul Kurtz photo
Derren Brown photo
Mahendra Chaudhry photo
Clifford D. Simak photo
John Updike photo
Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo

“Obama’s manner in dealing with other people and acting in the world fully exemplifies the cheerful impersonal friendliness—the middle distance—that marks American sociability. (Now allow me to speak as a critic. Remember Madame de Staël’s meetings that deprive us of solitude without affording us company? Or Schopenhauer’s porcupines, who shift restlessly from getting cold at a distance to prickling one another at close quarters, until they settle into some acceptable compromise position?) The cheerful impersonal friendliness serves to mask recesses of loneliness and secretiveness in the American character, and no less with Obama than with anyone else. He is enigmatic—and seemed so as much then as now—in a characteristically American way…. Moreover, he excelled at the style of sociability that is most prized in the American professional and business class and serves as the supreme object of education in the top prep schools: how to cooperate with your peers by casting on them a spell of charismatic seduction, which you nevertheless disguise under a veneer of self-depreciation and informality. Obama did not master this style in prep school, but he became a virtuoso at it nevertheless, as the condition of preferment in American society that it is. As often happens, the outsider turned out to be better at it than the vast majority of the insiders…. Together with the meritocratic educational achievements, the mastery of the preferred social style turns Obama into what is, in a sense, the first American elite president—that is the first who talks and acts as a member of the American elite—since John Kennedy …. Obama's mixed race, his apparent and assumed blackness, his non-elite class origins and lack of inherited money, his Third-World childhood experiences—all this creates the distance of the outsider, while the achieved elite character makes the distance seem less threatening.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Quoted in David Remnick, The Bridgeː The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (2010), p. 185-6
On Barack Obama

Abby Stein photo
Roger Ebert photo

“I was noodling around Rotten Tomatoes, trying to determine who played the bank's security chief, and noticed the movie had not yet been reviewed by anybody. Hold on! In the "Forum" section for this movie, "islandhome" wrote at 7:58 a. m. Jan. 8: "review of this movie … tonight i'll post." At 11:19 a. m. Jan. 10, "islandhome" was finally back with the promised review. It is written without capital letters, flush left like a poem, and I quote it verbatim, spelling and all:
:hello sorry i slept when i got back
:well it was kinda fun
:it could never happen in the way it was portraid
:but what ever its a movie
:for the girls most will like it
:and the men will not mind it much
:i thought it was going to be kinda like how to beat the high cost of living
:kinda the same them but not as much fun
:ill give it a 4 0ut of 10
I read this twice, three times. I had been testing out various first sentences for my own review, but somehow the purity and directness of islandhome's review undercut me. It is so final. "for the girls most will like it/and the men will not mind it much."”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

How can you improve on that? It's worthy of Charles Bukowski. ...The bottom line is some girls will like it, the men not so much, and I give it 1½ stars out of 4.
Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mad-money-2008 of Mad Money (17 January 2008)
Reviews, One-and-a-half star reviews

Arshile Gorky photo
George W. Bush photo
Pat Conroy photo
Frederick Douglass photo

“The slave is a man, "the image of God," but "a little lower than the angels;" possessing a soul, eternal and indestructible; capable of endless happiness, or immeasurable woe; a creature of hopes and fears, of affections and passions, of joys and sorrows, and he is endowed with those mysterious powers by which man soars above the things of time and sense, and grasps, with undying tenacity, the elevating and sublimely glorious idea of a God. It is such a being that is smitten and blasted. The first work of slavery is to mar and deface those characteristics of its victims which distinguish men from things, and persons from property. Its first aim is to destroy all sense of high moral and religious responsibility. It reduces man to a mere machine. It cuts him off from his Maker, it hides from him the laws of God, and leaves him to grope his way from time to eternity in the dark, under the arbitrary and despotic control of a frail, depraved, and sinful fellow-man. As the serpent-charmer of India is compelled to extract the deadly teeth of his venomous prey before he is able to handle him with impunity, so the slaveholder must strike down the conscience of the slave before he can obtain the entire mastery over his victim.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

The Nature of Slavery. Extract from a Lecture on Slavery, at Rochester, December 1, 1850
1850s, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)

Ramakrishna photo
Steve Ballmer photo

“I think fully accepting that things are not the way they need to be, and going to work on those issues in a way that people understand you are serious about, as opposed to the tech industry generally appearing arrogant, I understand that.”

Steve Ballmer (1956) American businessman who was the chief executive officer of Microsoft

Business Insider: "Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has advice for Facebook and Google: Don't make the mistake we did" http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-microsoft-ceo-steve-baller-tech-industry-work-with-regulators-2018-6?r=UK&IR=T (23 June 2018)
2010s

Francis Parkman photo
Thomas Kuhn photo

“I rapidly discovered that Aristotle had known almost no mechanics at all. … How could his characteristic talents have deserted him so systematically when he turned to the study of motion and mechanics? Equally, if his talents had so deserted him, why had his writings in physics been taken so seriously for so many centuries after his death? … I was sitting at my desk with the text of Aristotle's Physics open in front of me… Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together. My jaw dropped, for all at once Aristotle seemed a very good physicist indeed, but of a sort I'd never dreamed possible. Now I could understand why he had said what he'd said, and what his authority had been. Statements that had previously seemed egregious mistakes, now seemed at worst near misses within a powerful and generally successful tradition. That sort of experience -- the pieces suddenly sorting themselves out and coming together in a new way -- is the first general characteristic of revolutionary change that I shall be singling out after further consideration of examples. Though scientific revolutions leave much piecemeal mopping up to do, the central change cannot be experienced piecemenal, one step at a time. Instead, it involves some relatively sudden and unstructured transformation in which some part of the flux of experience sorts itself out differently and displays patterns that were not visible before.”

Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) American historian, physicist and philosopher

Source: The Road Since Structure (2002), p. 16-17; from "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" (1982)

Jane Roberts photo
Remy de Gourmont photo
Augustus De Morgan photo
Dirk Helbing photo

“As today’s form of capitalism is not compatible with our social and cultural value system, sooner or later it will be damaging to the foundations of societies and the values they are built on.
Therefore, capitalism must be upgraded in a way that is compatible with societal and cultural values and with the fairness principle to provide equal opportunities.”

Dirk Helbing (1965) Complex systems scientist

" An Urgent Appeal to Save the Planet, Part IV: Upgrading Today’s Capitalism https://www.theglobalist.com/capitalism-society-equality-sustainability-crowd-funding/" (August 23, 2017)

Charlie Sheen photo
Robert T. Bakker photo
Sören Kierkegaard photo

“This is the truth of the matter. In every human being there is a capacity, the capacity for knowledge. And every person - the most knowing and the most limited - is in his knowledge far beyond what he is in his life or what his life expresses. Yet this misrelation is of little concern to us. On the contrary, we set a high price on knowledge, and everyone strives for this knowledge more and more. "But," says the sensible person, "one must be careful about the direction one's knowing takes. If my knowing turns inward, against me, if I do not take care to prevent this, then knowing is the most intoxicating thing there is, the way to become completely intoxicated, since there then occurs an intoxicating confusion between the knowledge and the knower, so that the knower himself will resemble, will be, that which is known. If your knowing takes such a turn and you yield to it, it will soon end with your tumbling like a drunk man into actuality, plunging yourself recklessly into drunken action without giving the understanding and sagacity the time to take into proper consideration what is prudent, what is advantageous, what will pay. This is why we, the sober ones, warn you, not against knowing or against expanding your knowledge, but against letting your knowledge take an inward direction, for then it is intoxicating." This is thieves' jargon. It says that it is one's knowledge that, by taking the inward direction in this way, intoxicates, rather than that in precisely this way it makes manifest that one is intoxicated, intoxicated in one's attachment to this earthly life, the temporal, the secular, and the selfish. And this is what one fears, fears that one's knowing, turned inward, toward oneself, will expose the intoxication there, will expose that one prefers to remain in this state, will wrench one out of this state and as a result of such a step will make it impossible for one to slip back into that adored state, into intoxication. p. 118”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

1850s, Judge For Yourselves! 1851 (1876)

Oliver Goldsmith photo

“Hope, like the gleaming taper's light,
Adorns and cheers our way;
And still, as darker grows the night,
Emits a brighter ray.”

Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) Irish physician and writer

Act II.
The Captivity, An Oratorio (1764)

Robert E. Howard photo
Syd Barrett photo

“That's all I wanted to do as a kid. Play a guitar properly and jump around. But too many people got in the way.”

Syd Barrett (1946–2006) English musician

Rolling Stone, December 1971

Bhakti Tirtha Swami photo
Joe Biden photo

“But I respectfully suggest, Major, that the responsibility is slightly above your pay grade, to decide whether to take the nation to war alone, or to take the nation to war part way, or to take the Nation to work half-way. That is a real tough decision.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

To Scott Ritter, in hearings about the disarmament process, before the Senate Committee on Armed Services (September 1998), quoted in * 2020-01-07 Joe Biden, five years before invasion, said the only way of disarming Iraq is "taking Saddam down" Ryan Grim The Intercept https://theintercept.com/2020/01/07/joe-biden-iraq-war-history/
1990s

Christopher Walken photo
Bell Hooks photo

“Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique is still heralded as having paved the way for contemporary feminist movement-it was written as if these women did not exist. Friedan's famous phrase, "the problem that has no name," often quoted to describe the condition of women in this society, actually referred to the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle and upper class, married white women-housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who wanted more out of life. Friedan concludes her first chapter by stating: "We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my house.'" That "more" she defined as careers. She did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the children and maintain the home if more women like herself were freed from their house labor and given equal access with white men to the professions. She did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the existence of all non-white women and poor white women. She did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute, than to be a leisure class housewife. She made her plight and the plight of white women like herself synonymous with a condition affecting all American women. In so doing, she deflected attention away from her classism, her racism, her sexist attitudes towards the masses of American women. In the context of her book, Friedan makes clear that the women she saw as victimized by sexism were college-educated, white women who were compelled by sexist conditioning to remain in the home. … Specific problems and dilemmas of leisure class white housewives were real concerns that merited consideration and change but they were not the pressing political concerns of masses of women. Masses of women were concerned about economic survival, ethnic and racial discrimination, etc. When Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, more than one third of all women were in the work force. Although many women longed to be housewives, only women with leisure time and money could actually shape their identities on the model of the feminine mystique.”

p. 1-2 https://books.google.com/books?id=uvIQbop4cdsC&pg=PA1.
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner photo
Bert McCracken photo
Salvador Dalí photo

“September 1952/the2nd/Again this morning, while I was on the toilet, I had a truly remarkable piece of insight. My bowel movement, by the way, was perfectly exceptional, smooth and odourless.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), pp. 59 – 64

AnnaSophia Robb photo
Bruce Fein photo

“Congress does act slowly, often without foresight, and in ways detrimental to efficient government. But our entire consitutional scheme of checks and balances is intended to curb swift government action and to subordinate efficiency concerns to safeguard liberty and freedom.”

Bruce Fein (1947) American lawyer

AIDS in the workplace; the administration's impeccable logic http://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/13/business/aids-in-the-workplace-the-administration-s-impeccable-logic.html, The New York Times (July 13, 1986)

Margaret Atwood photo
Pope Benedict XVI photo
Mukesh Ambani photo
Richard Henry Dana Jr. photo

“Referring to a professor aboard ship: This passenger — the first and only one we had had, except to go from port to port on the coast — was no one else than a gentleman whom I had known in my smoother days, and the last person I should have expected to see on the coast of California — Professor Nuttall of Cambridge. I had left him quietly seated in the chair of the Botany and Ornithology Department at Harvard University, and the next I saw of him, he was strolling about San Diego beach, in a sailors' pea jacket, with a wide straw hat, and barefooted, with his trousers rolled up to his knees, picking up stones and shells… I was often amused to see the sailors puzzled to know what to make of him, and to hear their conjectures about him and his business… The Pilgrim's crew called Mr. Nuttall "Old Curious," from his zeal for curiosities; and some of them said that he was crazy, and that his friends let him go about and amuse himself this way. Why else would (he)… come to such a place as California to pick up shells and stones, they could not understand. One of them, however, who had seen something more of the world ashore said, "Oh, 'vast there!… I've seen them colleges and know the ropes. They keep all such things for cur'osities, and study 'em, and have men a purpose to go and get 'em… He'll carry all these things to the college, and if they are better than any that they have had before, he'll be head of the college. Then, by and by, somebody else will go after some more, and if they beat him he'll have to go again, or else give up his berth. That's the way they do it. This old covery knows the ropes. He has worked a traverse over 'em, and come 'way out here where nobody's ever been afore, and where they'll never think of coming."”

This explanation satisfied Jack; and as it raised Mr. Nuttall's credit, and was near enough to the truth for common purposes, I did not disturb it.
Source: Two Years Before the Mast (1840), p. 267

Cormac McCarthy photo
Amitabh Bachchan photo
Edgar Degas photo

“Draw all kind of everyday object placed, in such a way that they have in them the life of the man or woman – corsets that have just been removed, for example, and which retain the form of the body. Do a series in aquatint on mourning, different blacks – black veils of deep mourning floating on the face – black gloves – mourning carriages, undertaker’s vehicles – carriages like Venetian gondolas. On smoke – smoker’s smoke, pipes, cigarettes, cigars – smoke from locomotives, from tall factory chimneys, from steam boats, etc. On evening – infinite variety of subjects in cafes, different tones of glass robes reflected in the mirrors. On bakery, bread. Series of baker's boys, seen in the cellar itself or through the basement windows from the street – backs the colour of the pink flour – beautiful curves of dough – still-life's of different breads, large, oval, long, round, etc. Studies in color of the yellows, pinks, grays, whites of bread…… Neither monuments nor houses have ever been done from below, close up as they appear when you walk down the street. [a working note in which Degas planned series of views of modern Paris, the same time when he sketched the backstreet brothels, making graphic unflinching and even his realistic 'pornographic' sketches he called his 'glimpses through the keyhole', in which he also experimented with perspectives]”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

Quote from Degas' Notebooks; Clarendon Press, Oxford 1976, nos 30 & 34 circa 1877; as quoted in The private lives of the Impressionists, Sue Roe, Harpen Collins Publishers, New York 2006, p. 182
quotes, undated

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg photo
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner photo

“[the way of life of Die Brücke artists] though strange to the ordinary man, was not meant to shock, it was a pure and simple compulsion to integrate art and life..”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

Quote in Expressionism, a German Intuition, 1905-1920: [Exhibition 1980-81]; Paul Vogt, Horts Keller, Martin Urban, Wolf-Dieter Dube, and Eberhard Roters; Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1980, p. 7
undated

Daryl Palumbo photo

“We are OK;
In a misguided sadist way;
We are OK.
We are OK;
In a disabled, veteran's way;
We're…
so…
cold.”

Daryl Palumbo (1979) Vocalist musician

Convectuoso (Glassjaw)

Nile Kinnick photo
Bernard Goldberg photo

“I consider myself to be an old-fashioned liberal. I'm a liberal the way liberals used to be when they were like John F. Kennedy and when they were like Hubert Humphrey. When they were upbeat and enthusiastic and mainstream. I am not a liberal the way liberals are today at least as exemplified by Al Franken and Michael Moore, where they're angry, nasty, closed minded, & not mainstream, but fringe.”

Bernard Goldberg (1945) American journalist

The Bernard Goldberg Interview http://www.rightwingnews.com/interviews/goldberg.php RightWingNews.com John Hawkins, 2001. Today's 'Liberals': Close-Minded, Nasty and Fringe http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/10/15/124248.shtml Newsmax.com. Bernard Goldberg (October 16, 2003)

Peter D. Schiff photo
Mahela Jayawardene photo

“You would always prefer to give back to your own country first but the way Mahela conducted himself as a player for Sri Lanka over the years has been exemplary”

Mahela Jayawardene (1977) Former Sri Lankan cricketer

Kumar Sangakkara on Mahela as a coaching consultant for England, quoted on The Guardian, "Kumar Sangakkara: England made smart move on mentor Mahela Jayawardene" http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/mar/13/kumar-sangakkara-england-mahela-jayawardene-world-twenty20-sri-lanka, March 13, 2016.
About

Pierce Brosnan photo
Igor Stravinsky photo
Jesse Ventura photo
Felix Frankfurter photo

“The most constructive way of resolving conflicts is to avoid them.”

Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965) American judge

Concurring, Western Pacific Railroad Corp. v. Western Pacific Railroad Co., 345 U.S. 247, 270 (1953).
Judicial opinions

“The rational man may talk a good game about suicide, but reason must give way to obsession and finally squalor before he can actually do it.”

Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) English-American novelist and essayist

"A. Alvarez: The Savage God" (1972), p. 69
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Michael Halliday photo

“What makes learning possible is that the coding imposed by the mother tongue corresponds to a possible mode of perception and interpretation of the environment. A green car can be analysed experientially as carness qualified by greenness, if that is the way the system works.”

Michael Halliday (1925–2018) Australian linguist

Source: 1970s and later, Learning How to Mean--Explorations in the Development of Language, 1975, p. 140 cited in: Clare Painter (2005) Learning Through Language In Early Childhood. p. 64.

Rand Paul photo

“We have people coming in by the millions…Am I absolutely opposed to immigration? No…We have to find a way to believe in the rule of law, believe in border control and at the same time, not villify the issue.”

Rand Paul (1963) American politician, ophthalmologist, and United States Senator from Kentucky

Speaking in Paducah, 2009-05-09
Rand Paul set to launch Senate campaign
KY Wordsmith
http://kywordsmith.com/#/rand-paul-issues/4533680792
2010-11-17
2000s

Ron Paul photo
Gabriel García Márquez photo
Agatha Christie photo
Pink (singer) photo
Anthony Bourdain photo
Harry V. Jaffa photo
Matt Ridley photo
L. Frank Baum photo
Sören Kierkegaard photo

“But on the other hand, the understanding, reflection, is also a gift of God. What shall one do with it, how dispose of it if one is not to use it? And if one then uses it in fear and trembling not for one’s own advantage but to serve the truth, if one uses it that way in fear and trembling and furthermore believing that it still is God who determines the issue in its eternal significance, venturing to trust in him, and with unconditional obedience yielding to what he makes use of it: is this not fear of God and serving God the way a person of reflection can, in the somewhat different way than the spontaneously immediate person, but perhaps more ardently. But if this is the case, does not a maieutic element enter into the relation to other man or to various other men. The maieutic is really only the expression for a superiority between man and man. That is exists cannot be denied-but existence presses far more powerfully upon the superior one precisely because he is a maieutic (because he has the responsibility) than upon the other. As far as I am concerned, there has been no lack of witnesses. All my upbuilding discourses are in fact in the form of direct communication. Consequently there can be a question only about this, something that has occupied me for a long time (already back in earlier journals): should I for one definitely explain myself as author, what I declare myself to be, how I from the beginning understood myself to be a religious author. But now is not the time to do it; I am also somewhat strained at the moment, I need more physical recreation.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

JP VI 6234 (Pap. IX A 222 1848)
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s