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Every winter ends in a spring

I know that now I am going to write. There comes a time when the tree, after much suffering, must bear fruit. Every winter ends in a spring. I must bear witness. Afterwards, the cycle will start up again.

I shall tell of nothing but my love of life. But I shall tell of it in my own way....

Others write because of the temptations they have put off. And each disappointment in life makes a work of art for them, a lie woven out of the lies of their life. But what I write will spring from my moments of happiness, even when what I write is cruel. I must write as I must swim, because my body demands it.

--Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942 (1962; trans. Philip Thody)

Lovely Italy

Ancient, lovely Italy offered me its host of masterworks. With what reverent and poetic awe I wandered through those vast edifices consecrated to religion by the arts! What a labyrinth of columns! What a sequence of arches and vaults! How beautiful are the echoes circling round those domes like the rolling of waves in the ocean, like the murmur of winds in the forest or the voice of God in his temple! The architect seems to build the poet's thoughts and make them accessible to the senses. 

And yet with all my effort what had I learned until then? I had discovered nothing stable among the ancients and nothing beautiful among the moderns. The past and the present are imperfect statues—one, quite disfigured, drawn from the ruins of the ages, and the other still devoid of its future perfection.

—François-René de Chateaubriand, "René" (1802)

Dancing and Thinking

Learning to think: our schools no longer have any idea what this means. Even in our universities, even among students of philosophy themselves, the theory, the practice, the vocation of logic is beginning to die out. Read German books: no longer the remotest recollection that a technique, a plan of instruction, a will to mastery is required for thinking — that thinking has to be learned in the way dancing has to be learned, as a form of dancing. . . . Who among Germans still knows from experience that subtle thrill which the possession of intellectual light feet communicates to all the muscles! — A stiffly awkward air in intellectual matters, a clumsy hand in grasping — this is in so great a degree German that foreigners take it for the German nature in general. The German has no fingers for nuances. . . . dancing in any form cannot be divorced from a noble education, being able to dance with the feet, with concepts, with words: do I still have to say that one has to be able to dance with the pen — that writing has to be learned?

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1888; trans. R. J. Hollingdale, 1968)

'adjusted...to the most dubious mediocrity'

Great and fine things can never be common property: pulchrum est paucorum hominum.* — What is the cause of the decline of German culture? That 'higher education' is no longer a privilege — the democratism of 'culture' made 'universal' and common. . . . Not to overlook the fact that military privileges absolutely compel too great attendance at higher schools, which means their ruin. — No one is any longer free in present-day Germany to give his children a noble education: our 'higher' schools are one and all adjusted — as regards their teachers, their curricula and their instructional aims — to the most dubious mediocrity.

*beauty is for the few 

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1888; trans. R. J. Hollingdale, 1968)

'the kind of feelings most foreign to love'

Supposing that what I felt for her was really love—which will appear at least doubtful to anyone who follows the story of our relationship—how could that passion have been accompanied from its birth with the kind of feelings most foreign to love, with peace of heart, calmness, serenity, security, confidence? How, on meeting a charming woman for the first time, a polished and attractive woman superior to myself in rank, a woman unlike any I had spoken to before, a woman on whom my fate to some extent hung—for I was dependent on the amount of interest she might feel in me—how was it then, taking all this into account, that I felt as carefree and as much at my ease as if I were perfectly certain to please her? Why did I not have a moment's embarrassment, timidity, or concern? I was bashful by nature, easily put out of countenance, and had never seen the world. How was it then that from the first day, the first instant, I assumed the easy manner, the affectionate language and familiar tone of ten years later, of a time when the greater intimacy had made it natural? Is there such a thing as love, not without desire—for desire I had—but without disquietude and jealousy? Does one not wish at least to learn from the woman one loves whether one is loved in return?

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (1781; trans. J.M. Cohen 1953)

One End

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

—T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton" from The Four Quartets (1943)

'a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene'

Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, "homeostasis," i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

—Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (1946, trans. 1959)

'a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of gas'

The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living. Yet it is possible to practice the art of living even in a concentration camp, although suffering is omnipresent. To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative.

It also follows that a very trifling thing can cause the greatest of joys.

—Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (1946, trans. 1959)

Fanatics and Humor

For fanatics choose a part and parade it as though it were the whole, as the history of heresy illustrates. Factionalism is humourless.

But the saints are never the kind of killjoy spinster aunts who go in for faultfinding and lack all sense of humour...For humour is a mysterious but unmistakable charism inseparable from Catholic faith, and neither the ‘progressives’ nor the ‘integralists’ seems to possess it—the latter even less than the former. Both of these tend to be faultfinders, malicious satirists, grumblers, carping critics, full of bitter scorn, know-it-alls who think they have the monopoly of infallible judgement; they are self-legitimising prophets—in short, fanatics.

—Hans Urs von Balthasar (1974) quoted in Philip McCosker, "Blessed Tension: Barth and Von Balthasar on the Music of Mozart" (2005)