Stå fast Quotes

“It is — without a shadow of doubt — better to be an inauthentic Mother Teresa than an authentic Anders Breivik. Indeed, being yourself has no intrinsic value whatsoever. On the other hand, what does have inherent value is fulfilling your obligations to the people with whom you are interconnected (i.e. doing your duty), and whether you are yourself while doing so is essentially meaningless.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“We now talk about fast food, speed dating, power-naps and short-term therapy. Recently, I tested an app called Spritz. It only shows a single word at a time, but increases your reading speed from 250 to 500-600 words a minute. Suddenly you can read a novel in a couple of hours! But does this help you understand literature any better?”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“The central message of this book — which, in this sense, is in line with Stoicism — is that by looking at the traditions, social practices and relationships of which we form a part, and the duties arising from them, we might regain the ability to address questions about the meaning and value of life.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“It is absurd to be eternally mobile, positive and focused on the future, and to put the self at the centre of everything in life. Not only is it absurd, it also has adverse consequences for interpersonal relationships, as other people are quickly reduced to instruments to be used in the individual's pursuit of success, rather than an end in themselves, to whom we have moral obligations.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“Marcus Aurelius was also preoccupied with the insignificance of things as an antidote to anger. In general, he recommends that you consider the impermanence of all things in order to avoid anger and frustration when those things disappear. If a cup is broken, it may well be a pity — especially if it was valuable — but from the perspective of eternity, where everything is ultimately doomed to perish, it is an extremely small and insignificant matter.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“In fact, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the biggest social problems stem not from low but from high self-esteem, which is statistically associated with psychopathy and immorality.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“He describes how, as individuals in this project society, we 'book' ourselves with appointments and projects in an attempt to use our capacity fully — much like airlines do. Since our duties in life have become mere 'projects', they are, of course, temporary, and we just jettison them if something more interesting pops up on our radar.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“Everything that can possibly happen at some point, can happen today.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“She thinks positivity is particularly widespread in the USA, but has become a kind of universally accepted international pocket psychology in most Western countries — we should all 'think positively, be ‘resource-oriented and see problems as interesting ‘challenges'. This phenomenon has now reached the point where seriously ill people are expected to 'learn from their illness' and ideally emerge as a stronger person on the other side.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“In our secular world, we no longer see eternal paradise as a carrot at the end of the stick of life, but try to cram as much as possible into our relatively short time on the planet instead. This is, of course, a futile endeavour, doomed to failure. It is tempting to interpret the modern epidemics of depression and burnout as the individual's response to the unbearable nature of constant acceleration. The decelerating individual - who slows down instead of speeding up, and maybe even stops completely - seems out of place in a culture characterised by manic development, and may be interpreted pathologically (i.e. diagnosed as clinically depressed).”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze

“How can you stand firm if you're also supposed to have doubts? What can you stand firm on, when doubt is elevated to the status of a virtue? The easy answer is, of course, to stand firm on doubt itself, i.e. to affirm the right to hesitate, the right to reconsider. This may sound like a trite answer, but in my opinion it is actually quite profound and has huge ethical value. Virtually all political outrages are committed by high-powered males, confident that they know the truth. 'We know there are weapons of mass destruction!'; 'We know Jews are inferior!'; 'We know that the dictatorship of the proletariat is a necessity!' When if comes to the important issues in politics, ethics, and the art of living, it is human in itself to be hesitant and have doubts.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“O Passo Um deste guia é aceitar que você não encontrará respostas olhando para dentro. Simplesmente não há razão para dar tanta importância aos sentimentos viscerais e à introspecção.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Positividade Tóxica

“Perhaps we should learn from Leonard Cohen, who sings in ‘That Don’t Make It Junk’: ‘I know that I’m forgiven, but I don’t know how I know. I don’t trust my inner feelings. Inner feelings come and go.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze

“Modern society’s pursuit of the authentic and emotional has given us what Sennett has dubbed the ‘tyranny of intimacy’, in which the ideal of human relations has become the emotionally based, authentic encounter (in private life, in education and at work). However, this ideal just leads to people constantly hurting each other.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze

“K. E. Løgstrup pointed out in his book Den etiske fordring (The Ethical Demand) that you must use your power over others for their good, not your own.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“The finest things about human beings are our sense of duty, peace of mind and dignity.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“Fundamentally, life shouldn't be about trivial pursuits or adolescent identity crises (although these may be appropriate in certain stages of life), but about doing your duty.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“Of course, this isn't entirely correct, but it may serve as a useful corrective to the opposite dogma: that something is necessarily good because it's new.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“If, for example, you learn a craft or play an instrument, you will understand that this is only possible because the specific practice has a long history, which you help to maintain and develop whenever you recreate aspects of it. To practise living traditions is to be reminded of the historical depth of our lives. In this way, you learn that everything doesn't necessarily always move forwards. For example, it isn't possible to build violins today that are as good as the instruments built in Stradivarius' workshop more than 300 years ago.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“This is quite banal, but we often overlook it in our enthusiasm for the future: without traditions and their history, nothing is meaningful. Any meaning and significance that an action or a cultural product may have draws on historically developed practices.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“This is also why the (auto)biography so poorly encapsulates a person's life. As we saw in the previous step, it is far too linear and individualistic a genre to portray real life in all its dazzling complexity.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“In the novel All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy writes that the body's scars have the capacity to remind us that our past is real. It is an ancient practice among friends and lovers to study and compare scars, because they provide clear physical evidence of past events, and establish a link between then and now.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“We are forever being told to 'think outside the box'. Fortunately, less excitable creativity researchers have pointed out that it only makes sense to think outside the box if you know that there is a box (and what it's made of). In most cases, it's probably wiser to balance on the edge of the box, only tinkering around the edges and improvising around tried-and-tested themes. The new only makes sense within a horizon of something known. If you know nothing of the past and its traditions, it's impossible to create anything new that is useful.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“The Thomas theorem, a sociological staple, says: 'If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“Once again, we find ourselves mired in a paradox: the way in which we prepare for the future shapes the future as a reflection of the way in which we prepared for it!”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“It brings to mind Oscar Wilde, who argued in The Picture of Dorian Gray that only shallow people do not judge on the basis of the external: 'The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“Our modern understanding of life as an autobiographical project is undoubtedly linked to the emergence of the modern novel as a literary form.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“It is claimed that self-realisation results in self-sufficient adults, but it actually creates infantile, dependent adults who think that the truth lies within them.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“It's somewhat banal to say that the contemporary obsession with (auto)biographies reflects a culture of (individualisation — but if that is the case, then it is only banal in the sense of 'blindingly obvious'. I also think that there is something about the linear progression of the biography, in which events happen in chronological order, that has a reassuring effect in an accelerating culture that otherwise seems to be running amok.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast

“In other words, the trick is to learn to appreciate things that can't be 'used' for some other function.”
― Svend Brinkmann, Stå fast