“I have a dread of mediation*. I cannot help it. The word works, not in itself, but by the perpetual monotonous application to my soul, as when day in, day out, someone files a saw, like the sound that Xantippe, according to Socrates’ testimony, produced by her perpetual scolding, the sound of pulleys (Diogenes 2, 5, 36). My build, my health, my whole constitution are not fit for mediation.”
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~Source: Prefaces: Light Reading for Certain Classes as the Occasion May Require (1844)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Nicolaus Notabene
*or “synthesis”, the third phase of Hegelian dialectic
