Thursday, July 17, 2008

Quote of the Week

Let people who do not know what to do with themselves in this life, but fritter away their time reading magazines and watching television, hope for eternal life.....The life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity. It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation, that makes life worth while and death welcome.


Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic, Pg 386

2 comments:

Kelvin Oliver said...

This quote is very deep and thought provoking. I really don't know how to comment towards Kaufmann. I believe that in a way it could say that let everyone else alone who have no goals in life and doesn't want to make anything out of themselves. Therefore, we all should go about our own lives of "...love and intensity, suffering and creation, that makes life worth while and death welcome." I do like that part.

Stephen J. Gallagher said...

Kaufmann was an interesting man. I'd call him "the last of the existentialists"; after him, the new people were doing uninteresting things such as structuralism and neo-pragmatism. That being said, he was apparently a first-class jerk, breathtaking arrogant and full of himself. He never really grasped the fact that his fame (at the time; it hasn't lasted) was 95% the result of his admittedly brilliant translations of the work of Friedrich Nietzsche.