A Quote by Rollo May
When one read's Kierkegaard's profound analyses of anxiety and despair or Nietzsche's amazingly acute insights into the dynamics of resentment and the guilt and hostility which accompany repressed emotional powers, one might pinch oneself to realize that one is reading works written in the last century and not some new contemporary psychological analysis.
Related Quotes
Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.
What is courage? This courage will not be the opposite of despair. We shall often be faced with despair, as indeed every sensitive person has been during the last several decades in this country. Hence Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Camus and Sartre have proclaimed that courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.
It feels much nobler to feel guilty than resentful, and it takes more courage to express resentment than guilt. With expressing guilt you expect to pacify your opponent; with expressing resentment you might stir up hostility in him.
Neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche had the slightest interest in starting a movement – or a new system, a thought which would indeed have offended them. Both proclaimed, in Nietzsche's phrase, Follow not me, but you!
Until I was a junior in high school, I was a "boy scientist" type and expected to go into chemistry. Then I discovered the humanities. I read the plays of Shakespeare voraciously, some novels, such as Pasternack's Dr. Zhivago and Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, and I got into philosophy by reading Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
I believe the advantage music has is the capacity to multiply itself, the capacity to keep itself in space and access itself at different times and in different processes and to make profound analyses, analyses that through musicality would be able to connect with people who don't necessarily have the energy or wish in any exact moment to connect to well-read or critical analysis.
In working towards ways of reading Mann, so that his own advances in suggesting new perspectives will become more vivid, I do some fairly standard philosophical analysis of ideas in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.
Perhaps the most sophisticated and highly evolved system is that originated by Joseph Scogna. I was impressed by the profound insights into the relationship between my own bodily functions and the psychological and emotional issues that emerged.
Reading is professionally important for me to keep tuned in to what's being written in my genre, let's not lie. But that's not the reason I read. I read for my own emotional and mental health. If I stopped reading, I'd probably just die.
THE WRITER can get free of his writing only by using it, that is, by reading oneself. As if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as a launching pad for reading the writing to come. Moreover, what he has written is read in the process, hence constantly modified by his reading. The book is an unbearable totality. I write against a background of facets.
True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.
It's strange that in an age when we pride ourselves on our independence of thought we meekly submit without further question to the declaration of a clearly unbalanced nineteenth century philosopher that God is dead! That's cheeky, of course - and one rarely comes away from reading Nietzsche without learning something new and significant. He's certainly FAR more unsettling for faith than any contemporary atheist I know of.
When I was writing Love and Lies, I was going over a lot of my old notes to see if there were any insights in them. I was obsessed with Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer. These are not guys that you want to go to for understanding the nature of love. They clearly didn't get it.
Of course, if one's reading Kierkegaard for personal interest that's fine - but it's sloppy scholarship just to cherry pick what suits one from a particular author, whether it's Kierkegaard, Heidegger, or whoever. Nevertheless, it does seem to me that even the more religious parts of the authorship can offer significant insights into the meaning of the human condition to those who can't then say that, e.g., they believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God and their personal Saviour.
I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.
I was reading about all of these medical and psychological experimental programs that the government and various intelligence agencies had run throughout the 20th century. Any book you can read on that, there's some really horrifying and fascinating stuff that goes on there.
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