Sublime

There’s a line from Blaise Pascal I read. Basically, it says: “All of man’s troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself.”

Søren Kierkegaard spoke of the “despair of wanting to be another self”; we all know that despair.1 At times of such despair, knowing what it is that moves us the most can be a critical touchstone.

As Goethe once observed, the great failing is “to see yourself as more than you are and to value yourself at less than your true worth.”

For not only is an odd man “not always” a particular and isolated case, but, on the contrary, it sometimes happens that it is precisely he, perhaps, who bears within himself the heart of the whole, while the other people of his epoch have all for some reason been torn away from it for a time by some kind of flooding wind.

If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.

He’s one of those who don’t need millions, but need to resolve their thought.”

“Hell is other people,” said Sartre. How true. When you are in this state of dependency, you always have to be on your best behavior; you can never let your hair down; you’ve got to live up to expectations. To be with people is to live in tension.