Saturday, February 8, 2014

People with misspent lives.


Some are of such material that society may fashion this or that of them: do with them what one will, they will consider themselves content and find no reason to bemoan a misspent life. Others are made of too exceptional a material – it needn't be, for all that, exceptionally fine, but merely uncommon – not to consider they are sure to fare ill unless, as the sole exception, they are able to live in keeping with their sole purpose in life: in all other cases so­ciety will suffer the subsequent damages. For everything that appears to the individual as part of a misspent, failed life, his whole load of despondence, paralysis, malaise, irritability, cov­etousness, he hurls back onto society – and thus there forms around society a bad, stifling atmosphere and, in the most fa­vorable case, a storm cloud. 

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn 213