If self-knowledge does not lead to knowing oneself before God - well, then there is something to what purely human self-observation says, namely, thi… - Søren Kierkegaard

To be lost in spiritlessness is the most terrible thing of all.

The person who is going to preach ought to live in the Christian thoughts and ideas: they ought to be his daily life. If so – this is the view of Christianity – then you, too, will have eloquence enough and precisely that which is needed when you speak extemporaneously without specific preparation. However, it is fallacious eloquence if someone, without otherwise occupying himself with, without living in these thoughts, once in a while sits down and laboriously collects such thoughts, perhaps in the field of literature, and then works them into a well-composed discourse, which is then committed to memory and delivered superbly, with respect both to voice and diction and gestures.

To grumble about the world and its unhappiness is always easier than to beat one's breast and groan over oneself.