* How near, besides, is man to madness despite all his knowledge? What is truth other than to live for an idea? Everything must in the final analysis be based on a postulate. But only when it no longer stands outside him but he lives in it, only then, for him, does it cease to be a postulate (Dialectic-Dispute).
* So it will be easy for us the first time we receive that ball of yarn from Ariadne (love) to go through all the mazes of the labyrinth (life) and kill the monster. But how many plunge into life (the labyrinth) without observing that precaution (the young girls and the little boys who are sacrificed every year to the Minotaur)?
* It may well also persist in a certain sense, but he is in a position to withstand these squalls in life, for the more the person lives for an idea, the more easily he also comes to sit on the wonder-chair before the whole world.33 Often, too, when one is most convinced that one knows oneself, one can be seized by a curious anxiety that one has really only learned someone else’s life by rote.
† The proverb also says: ‘From children and the insane one shall hear the truth.’ And here, surely, it is not a matter of truth according to premises and conclusions. Yet how often have the words of a child or a madman thundered down on the man on whom acuity could make no impression?
* This life, which is fairly prevalent in the whole age, also manifests itself on a larger scale. Whereas the past ages built works before which the observer could only stand in silence, now they build a tunnel under the Thames (utility and advantage). Yes, almost before a child has time to admire the beauty of a plant or some species of animal or other, it asks: ‘What use is it?’
* Cf. the scholastic principle that ‘something can be true in philosophy that is false in theology’.
* The philosopher must either embrace optimism – or despair.
* And the groom currying his horse banged the curry comb against a stone, and from another part of town came the voice of the shrimp-seller.
* Password (also with respect to what Grundtvig so often tells us, that in the earliest Church they did not dare to utter it aloud; one person whispered it in the ear of another, and so on).
* What I call the romantic.
* Which is why in a sense it is comical to think of Pastor Stiefel (a contemporary of Luther), who prophesied the world’s downfall at an appointed hour and gathered his congregation in the church, but nothing came of it, and it came close to being his own downfall, the people becoming so indignant at this that they were on the point of taking his life.