Consent to Advice

     They will never understand this book, those who search for happiness. The soul remains unsatisfied; it falls asleep amid happy surroundings. It becomes inert rather than alert. The soul should remain alert, active. It should find happiness not in HAPPINESS but in the awareness of its violent activity.
     It follows that sorrow is to be preferred over joy, for it quickens the soul; when it does not vanquish it stimulates. It causes suffering, but pride of undaunted living compensates for minor lapses. Supreme arrogance is the mask of intense living. I would not exchange the intense life for any other; I have lived several lives, and the least of these was the real one.
— Andrè Gide, The Notebooks of Andrè Walter, The White Notebook, p. 26.

     Writing bores me, for what is there to write? Of all the emotions that demand expression, why choose one rather than another? Yet I must write, for my head is bursting under the pressure of accumulated emotions.
— Andrè Gide, Ibid., The Black Notebook, p. 85.

     Strange enough how creatures of the humankind shut their eyes to plainest facts; and by the mere inertia of Oblivion, and Stupidity, live at ease in the midst of Wonders and Terrors. But indeed man is, and was always, a blockhead and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider. Prejudice, which he pretends to hate, is his absolute law-giver; mere use —  and want — everywhere leads him by the nose; thus let but a Rising of the Sun, let but a Creation of the World happen twice, and it ceases to be marvelous, to be noteworthy, or noticeable....
— Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Archibald MacMechan (ed.), pp. 49-50.

....Often we would condole over the hard destiny of the Young in this era: how after all our toil, we were to be turned-out into the world, with beards on our chins indeed, but with few other attributes of manhood; no existing thing that we were trained to Act on, nothing that we could so much as Believe. "How has our head on the outside a polished Hat," would Towgood exclaim, "and in the inside Vacancy, or a froth of Vocables and Attorney-Logic! At a small cost men are educated to make leather into shoes; but at a great cost, what am I educated to make? By Heaven, Brother! what I have already eaten and worn, as I came thus far, would endow a considerable Hospital of Incurables." — "Man , indeed," I would answer, "has a Digestive Faculty, which must be kept working were it even partly by stealth. But as for our Miseducation, make not bad worse; waste not the time yet ours, in trampling on thistles because they have yielded no figs. Frisch zu, Bruder! Here are Books and we have brains to read them; here is a whole Earth and a whole Heaven, and we have eyes to look on them: Frisch zu!"
— Thomas Carlyle, Ibid., p. 106.

....Our Works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible Percept, Know thyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, Know what thou canst work at.
— Thomas Carlyle, Ibid., p. 149.

     "To me, in this our life," says the Professor, which is an internecine warfare with the Time-spirit, other warfare seems questionable, Host thou in any way a Contention with thy brother, I advise thee, think well what the meaning thereof is. If thou guage it to the bottom, it is simply this: "Fellow, see! thou art taking more than thy share of Happiness in the world, something from my share: which, by the Heavens, thou shalt not; nay I will fight thee rather." — Alas, and the whole lot to be divided is such a beggarly matter truly a "feast of shells," for the substance has been spilled out: not enough to quench one Appetite; and the collective human species clutching at them! — Can we not, in all such cases, rather say: "Take it, thou too-revenous individual; take that pitiful additional fraction of a share, which I reckoned mine, but which thou so wantest; take it with a blessing: would to Heaven I had enough for thee!" — If Fichte's Wissenshaftslehre be, "to a certain extent, Applied Christianity," surely to a still greater extent, so is this. We have here not a Whole Duty of Man, yet a Half Duty, namely, the Passive half: could we but do it, as we can demonstrate it!
    But indeed Conviction, were it never so excellent, is worthless till it convert itself into Conduct. Nay, properly Conviction is not possible till then; inasmuch as all Speculation is by nature endless, formless, a vortex and vortices: only by a felt indubitable certainty of Experience does it find any center to revolve round, and so fashion itself into a system. Most true is it, as a wise man teaches us, that "Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by Action." On which ground, too, let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this other precept well to heart, which to me was of invaluable service: "Do the Duty which lies nearest thee," which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.
— Thomas Carlyle, Ibid., pp. 176-177.