Either/Or: A Fragment of life

Most people are in such a rush to enjoy themselves that they hurry right past it

For what do they achieve, these busy botchers? Are they not like the housewife who, in confusion at the fire in her house, saved the fire-tongs?

vacuous, rapturous and agonizing birth pangs

What are all such enemies taken together compared to the pallid, bloodless, glutinous nocturnal shapes with which I fight and to which I myself give life and being.

I can’t be bothered. I can’t be bothered to ride, the motion is too violent; I can’t be bothered to walk, it’s strenuous; I can’t be bothered to lie down, for either I’d have to stay lying down and that I can’t be bothered with, or I’d have to get up again, and I can’t be bothered with that either. In short: I just can’t be bothered

May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful

My fair reader, in this book you will find something you ought perhaps not to know, and something else you might well profit from knowing; so read the first something in such a way that you who have read it can be as though one who has not read it, the other in such a way that you who have read it can be as though one who has not forgotten what has been read

Little by little, hearing became my favourite sense

When Epaminondas was wounded in the battle of Mantinea, he left the arrow in the wound until he heard the battle was won, because he knew that the moment it was drawn out he would die.

As Xerxes had the sea whipped, I resolved to take a terrible revenge.