Chapter 9 1895

get up.God is the last to wait.As soon as you wake up, you immediately feel life rushing. Three-quarters of your life is spent preparing for happiness; but don't think that you can enjoy happiness in the last quarter.This kind of preparation has been deeply formed into the habit. After preparing for yourself, you have to prepare for others. Therefore, the best time to enjoy happiness is postponed until after death.This is why it is especially necessary for man to believe in eternal life.The wise will realize that true happiness requires no preparation, or at least, only a kind of inner preparation.

Man is extraordinarily clever in preventing his own happiness.I feel that the less a man is capable of bearing misfortune, the more easily he succumbs to it. (Again, I'm only referring to other people, and I've always found happiness to be very simple and always attainable, not dependent on things at all.) Man is unhappy through lack of faith or through selfishness.However, how to make people understand this?It is an extraordinary invention for a man to call himself religious and yet to consider himself unfortunate.We know, however, that Christianity often leads men to this state; and it is a noble form, especially when compared with the Passion of Christ. (The Gospel of John never leads that way.)

Few realize that man can be freed from selfishness (by devoutly loving God) by other kinds of love than by loving souls. Our actions stick to us as fire does to phosphorus.Yes, they become our splendor, but only at the expense of us. Can man understand this?Any feeling is an infinite Eliminate your sense of superiority.This is a great obstacle to thinking. I think patriotism has only one good thing, which is to confer a competitive vanity on some people who are not too sleepy. Eliminate any sense of superiority, more or less.Appreciation for others is reduced, but so is self-appreciation.Appreciation for God, that is, for the beauty of the action itself, grows in proportion, regardless of difficulty;Besides, all beautiful behaviors are enviable; instead of congratulating others, they are jealous, which I can understand.

Do out of duty what another does out of love.The love for God should always be higher than the love for the world. Mourning the dead should be avoided as soon as self-pity is all that remains.What you mourn at such times is not the dead woman, but the happiness you have had with her love. The noblest life is not obtained by loving others, but by loving duty. A waned enthusiasm.Sentimentality is always pathetic, weakens the mind, and reveals a feeble soul.Sentimentality is cured with a sense of duty, with self-respect and a transcendent selfishness.Pity (pieta) is neither sentimentality nor any "angelic quality".

O Sparta, only healthy men live; you are doomed to keep only fools. You only look at the body, and are therefore disabled; if you allow people who are disabled like you to live, then perhaps you will be able to retain a large number of poets, philosophers, and artists of all kinds, like other Greek city-states?