“People understand me so poorly that they don’t even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.”

- Soren Kierkegaard

“The distinction that lies in being unhappy (as if to feel happy were a sign of shallowness, lack of ambition, ordinariness) is so great that when someone says, “But how happy you must be!” we usually protest”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

When I look back into the times during when I went through severe depression, when my thoughts were most profound and meaningful, I can’t help feeling nostalgia. I felt unhappy, but perhaps that was the choice I made. I feel perhaps like when Kierkegaard broke off his relationship with Regine Oslen, for no apparent external reason. He thought that his melancholy wasn’t suited for a contented marriage life, and his religious profoundness would be interfered, and now I go through the same despair.

Despair is not just an emotional state, in a deeper sense it is the loss of self, i.e., it describes the state when one has the wrong conception of oneself. Perhaps my self has the wrong understanding of who it is because it conceives itself too much in terms of its own limiting circumstances (and thus fails to recognize its own freedom to determine what it will be) or too much in terms of what it would like to be, (thus ignoring its own circumstances). Can I really live a happy life directed by nothing but love without compromising the struggles and the life of a philosopher that Nietzsche glorified?

“You remind me of someone who is looking through a closed window and cannot explain to himself the strange movements of a passer-by. He doesn’t know what kind of a storm is raging outside and that this person is perhaps only with great effort keeping himself on his feet.”

- Ludwig Wittgenstein

- Albert Schweitzer

“The dangers for a philosopher’s development are indeed so manifold today that one may doubt whether this fruit can still ripen at all. The scope and the tower-building of the sciences has grown to be enormous, and with this also the probability that the philosopher grows weary while still learning or allows himself to be detained somewhere to become a “specialist” - so he never attains his proper level, the height for a comprehensive look, for looking around, for looking down. Or he attains it too late, when his best time and strength are spent - or impaired, coarsened, degenerated, so his view, his over-all value judgment does not mean much any more. It may be precisely the sensitivity of his intellectual conscience that leads him to delay somewhere along the way and to be late: he is afraid of the seduction to become a dilettante, a millipede, an insect with a thousand antennae; he knows too well that whoever has lost his self-respect cannot command or lead in the realm of knowledge - unless he would like to become a great actor, a philosophical Cagliostro and pied piper, in short, a seducer. This is in the end a question of taste, even if it were not a question of conscience.

Add to this, by way of once more doubling the difficulties for a philosopher, that he demands of himself a judgment, a Yes or No, not about the sciences but about life and the value of life - that he is reluctant to come to believe that he has a right, or even a duty, to such a judgment, and must seek his way to this right and faith only from the most comprehensive - perhaps most disturbing and destructive experiences, and frequently hesitates, doubts, and lapses into science.

Indeed, the crowd has for a long time misjudged and mistaken the philosopher, whether for a scientific man and ideal scholar or for a religiously elevated, desensualized, “desecularized” enthusiast and sot of God. And if a man is praised today for living “wisely” or “as a philosopher,” it hardly means more than “prudently and apart.” Wisdom - seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher as it seems to us, my friends? lives “unphilosophically” and “unwisely,” above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life - he risks himself constantly, he plays the wicked game…”

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Check is I already have this: The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question. -_-; Yeah….. I’m not going to stop.

- Leo Tolstoy

Inevitably we would die like everyone, and our carcasses would be buried in the soil to rot. Would have our life been an absurd meaningless attempt to achieve what will eventually lead to nothing but destruction? But knowing this allows me to live passionately and affirm the importance of love in my life, for I can’t see any other basis to live for. It also helped me draw away from epicurean consolidation as a hypocrisy for Christianity, disguising its true meaning as a matter of life affirmation rather than social comfort.

- Soren Kierkegaard

Our attention to people are based on what we see them as rather than what they mask themselves to be. It’s what reveals the sheer absurdity of Jesus’s teachings of universal love, to strongly judge a person’s action but not judge the person. We have to find ourselves in a position to not judge a person’s actions as for what it is if they are close to us, for we like to ignore the extent of the horror in the way they live their lives. For those who do understand the foolishness in other people’s lives can not rid of themselves with this resentment without compromising their judgment.