Journals VII 1A 363
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s
Context: Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.
“There is within every human being a deep well of thinking over which a heavy iron lid is kept clamped.”
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Sherwood Anderson 19
writer 1876–1941Related quotes
"The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844)
“I think every well-adjusted human being has dealt squarely with his or her own depravity.”
Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)
Source: Nationalism and Culture (1937), Ch. 1 "The Insufficiency of Economic Materialism"
Context: Every process which arises from our physical being and is related to it, is an event which lies outside of our volition. Every social process, however, arises from human intentions and human goal setting and occurs within the limits of our volition. Consequently, it is not subject to the concept of natural necessity. … We are here stating no prejudiced opinion, but merely an established fact. Every result of human purposiveness is of indisputable importance for man's social existence, but we should stop regarding social processes as deterministic manifestations of a necessary course of events. Such a view can only lead to the most erroneous conclusions and contribute to a fatal confusion in our understanding of historical events.
It is doubtless the task of the historian to trace the inner connection of historical events and to make clear their causes and effects, but he must not forget that these connections are of a sort quite different from those of natural physical events and must therefore have quite a different valuation.
“Bloodshed kept pace with iron production”
Source: Technics and Civilization (1934), Ch. 4, sct. 5
Context: Bloodshed kept pace with iron production: in essence, the entire paleotechnic period was ruled, from beginning to end, by the policy of blood and iron. The brutal contempt for life was equalled only by the the almost priestly ritual it developed for inflicting death. Its "peace" was indeed the peace that passeth understanding: what was it but latent warfare.
Lady Geraldine's Courtship http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/ebbrowning/bl-ebbrown-togeorge1.htm, st. 41 (1844).
Source: Ashtanga Yoga Primer, 1981, p.11
Source: Basic Verities, Prose and Poetry (1943), p. 82