“To hold the fate of many human beings in one’s hand, to transform the world, and then constantly understand that this is a jest: aye, that is earnestness indeed! But in order that this should be possible all finite passions must be atrophied, all selfishness outrooted, both the selfishness which wants to have everything, and the selfishness which proudly turns its back on everything. But just herein sticks the difficulty, and here arises the suffering in the dying away from self; and while it is the specific criterion of the ethical that is so easy to understand in its abstract expression, it is correspondingly difficult to understand in concreto.”
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~Source: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the “Philosophical Fragments” (1846)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Johannes Climacus
