A note from Kierkegaard

From the concluding pages of The Concept of Irony:

Therefore, if at times someone is heard talking with great superiority about irony in the infinite striving in which it runs wild, one may certainly agree with him, but insofar as he does not perceive the infinity that moves in irony, he stands not above but below irony. So it is always wherever we disregard the dialectic of life. It takes courage not to surrender to the shrewd or sympathetic counsel of despair that allows a person to erase himself from the number of the living; but this does not necessarily mean that every sausage peddler, fed and fattened on self-confidence, has more courage than the person who succumbed to despair. It takes courage when sorrow would delude one, when it would reduce all joy to sadness, all longing to privation, every hope to recollection--it takes courage to will to be happy; but this does not necessarily mean that every full-grown adult infant with his sweet, sentimental smile, his joy-intoxicated eyes, has more courage than the person who yielded to grief and forgot to smile. So it is also with irony.

The Concept of Irony was Kierkegaard's dissertation. I don't think they write dissertations like this any more.

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