Is Good Enough?

....And what would it have profited us if, having discussed the opinions of innumerable others, like "asymboli" 34 at the banquet of wise men, we should contribute nothing of our own, nothing conceived and elaborated by our own mind? Indeed, it is the characteristic of the impotent (as Seneca 35 writes) to have their knowledge all written down in note-books, as though the discoveries of those who preceded us had closed the path to our own efforts, as though the power of nature had become effete in us and could bring forth nothing which, if it could not demonstrate the truth, might at least point to it from afar. The farmer hates sterility in his field and the husband deplores it in his wife; even more then must the divine mind hate the sterile mind with which it is joined and associated, because it hopes from that source to have offspring of such a higher nature.
34 Those who contributed nothing to the cost of a banquet at which they partook.
35 Epistles, XXXIII, 7.
— Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, Oration On the Dignity of Man, pp. 48-49.

     "What is your strongest happiness?" I say to a man for whom I care. We are in the new summer cottage. Rain is pouring down from a sky that is drearily gray. I had imagined us walking about naked and brown and beautiful and discovering new things from each other in the sun.
     "My happiness?" he replies, and looks up from what he is reading. He does not know what I am thinking. Perhaps he is afraid he might not say what I expect to hear.
     "My happiness — I think it is when I have worked in the sweat of my body a whole day on something hard and physical. When I've become exhausted and my limbs are aching — and then finally I finish. Come in and sit down. Rest in the knowledge that I've achieved what I set out to do. Relax in the joy of a job well done."
     He does not ask what my happiness is. But the next day I know. We have had a sumptuous lunch. He praises my cooking and takes several helpings. And we lie on the bed and are close. Sated with tenderness. When we no longer have any fears or questions between us. Only tender pleasure in the other's body and hands and face and expression. I am together with him, in the only way that I really live.
    When I awake and it is still light outside, he is gone, and I go with bare feet into the living room, still warm and happy from him, and see that he has lit the fireplace. In the kitchen I find coffee he has put on the hot plate for me, with a cup beside it.
     I have not a thread on my body as I go out into the garden.
     It is still raining and toes slide into the earth that is wet and fragrant. And then I see him down by the garage splitting wood so that I shall have enough for the winter. He has made a chopping block and bought an ax for the house. I don't know what he is thinking, but he looks so happy and brown and alive. Suddenly I remember that he is in the middle of his happiness.
     And I go in again and feel my happiness flowing through my whole body.
— Liv Ullman, Changing, pp. 103-104.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, ....
— Samuel Beckett, Murphy, p. 1.

The knight of faith knows ... that it is beautiful and salutory to be the individual who translates himself into the universal, who edits, as it were, a pure and elegant edition of himself, as free from errors as possible and which everyone can read.... But he knows also that higher than this there winds a solitary path, narrow and steep; he knows that it is terrible to be born outside the universal, to walk without meeting a single traveler.... The knight of faith knows to give up oneself for the universal inspires enthusiasm, and knows that security is to be found in this precisely because it is for the universal.... The hero does the deed and finds repose in the universal, the knight of faith is kept in constant tension.
— Sören Kierkegaard, from Fear and Trembling, Walter Lowrie (tr.), pp. 115-120, in  The Portable Dragon: The Western Man's Guide to the I Ching, R.G.H. Siu, p. 13.

The fact is that he [André Gide] brings to each a new strength. One of the strongest elements of the influence he exerts is the persuasive and intoxicating encouragement he gives us to persevere, resolutely and happily, each in his own being; and to demand of ourselves the most particular, the most authentic, the best.... He has the gift of sharpening each man's crtical sense and of increasing his insight, without diminishing his fervor. He does more: he exalts in others — not pride, certainly, and I don't know quite how to put it: an upright vision of self; a confidence, a modest confidence in oneself.
— Roger Martin Du Gard, André Gide, Albert Guérard (tr.), in The Portable Dragon: The Western Man's Guide to the I Ching, R.G.H. Siu, p. 14.