In Your Head

     "The benignant efficacies of Concealment," cries our Professor, "who shall speak or sing? Silence and Secrecy! Altars might still be raised to them (were this an altar-building time) for universal worship. Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule. Not William the Silent only, but all the considerable men I have known, and the most undiplomatic and strategic of these, forbode to babble of what they were creating and projecting. Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but hold thy tongue for one day: on the morrow how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck and rubbish have those mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises were shut out! Speech is too often not, as the Frenchman [Talleyrand] defined it, the art of concealing Thought; but of quite stifling and suspending Thought, so that there is none to conceal...."
— Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Archibald MacMerchan (ed.), p. 198.

151, 23. From Suicide. The thought of self-destruction had occurred to Carlyle in his years of depression. "My curse seems deeper and blacker than that of any man: to be immured in a rotten carcass, every avenue of which is changed into an inlet of pain, till my intellect is obscured and weakened, and my head and heart are alike desolate and dark. How have I deserved this? Or is it mere fate that orders these things, caring no jot for merit or demerit, crushing our poor mortal interests among its ponderous machinery, and grinding us and them to dust relentlessly? I know not. Shall I ever know? Then why don't you kill yourself, sir? Is there not arsenic? is there not ratsbane of various kinds? and hemp? and steel? Most true, Sathanas, all these things are, but it will be time enough to use them when I have lost the game which I am yet but losing. You observe, sir, I have still a glimmering of hope; and while my friends, my mother, father, brothers, sisters live, the duty of not breaking their hearts would still remain to be performed when hope had utterly fled....
— From Thomas Carlyle's Journal, in "Notes" to Ibid., p. 349.

173, 9. But the whim we have. "When we speak of happiness and being happy, we half unconsciously mean some extra enjoyment, if I may say so, pleasure, some series of agreeable sensation, superadded to the ordinary pleasure of existing, which really, if free from positive pain, is all we have right to pretend to. In place of reckoning ourselves happy when we are not miserable, we reckon ourselvesmiserable when not happy. A proceeding, if you think of it, quite against rule! What claim have I to be in raptures? None in the world, except that I have taken such a whim into my own wise head; and having got so much, I feel as if I could never get my due....
     "And so when the young gentleman goes forth into the world, and finds that it is really and truly not made of wax, but of stone and metal, and will keep its own shape, let the young gentleman fume as he likes; bless us, what a storm he gets into! What terrible elegies and pindaries and Childe Harolds and Sorrows of Werther! O devil take it, Providence is in the wrong; has used him (sweet, meritorious gentleman) unjustly. He will bring his action of damages against Providence! Trust me a hopeful lawsuit!
— Thomas Carlyle, from Wotton Reinfred, pp. 92-94, in Ibid., p. 357.

The most insatiable people are certain ascetics who go on hunger-strike in all spheres of life, thinking that in this way they will simultaneously achieve the following:
     1) a voice will say: Enough, you have fasted enough, now you may eat like the others and it will not be accounted unto you as eating.
     2) the same voice will at the same time say: You have fasted for so long under compulsion, from now on you will fast with joy, it will be sweeter than food (at the same time, however, you will also really eat).
     3) the same voice will at the same time say: You have conquered the world, I release you from it, as from eating and from fasting (at the same time, however, you will both fast and eat).
     In addition to this there also comes a voice that has been speaking to them ceaselessly all the time: Though you do not fast completely, you have the good will, and that suffices.
— Franz Kafka, "The Hunger Strike" (entire), in Parables and Paradoxes, p. 187.