Life is short, but the day is long.
It isn’t. Or, as Goethe wrote (as cited by Spengler):
Life is short, but the day is long.
One point Kierkegaard made in his journals is that in opposition to stoicism, which contradicts itself by allowing suicide in case of mental anguish, Christianity forbids it. Meaning that someone could become a Christian and then still has thirty or even fifty years ahead of him – years in which he certainly will have great strain. For strait [is] the gate, and narrow [is] the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there that find it. (Matth. 7:13-14).
Further, if you were to be tortured for fifty years, day after day, year after year, decade after decade; say, in a concentration camp or a Gulag – you would not call this short. A Yazidi girl raped for six months by ISIL said even risking death by escaping was preferable to the abuse.
Which, again, debunks this widely held nonsensical view. A view that, unfortunately, even Schopenhauer often expressed.
Says Don Nicolás:
Stoicism is definitively the cradle of all modern errors. (Divinization of man – determinism – natural law – egalitarianism – cosmopolitanism etc.)
It is fine to demand that the imbecile respect arts, letters, philosophy, the sciences, but let him respect them in silence.
The majority of men have no right to give their opinion, but only to listen.
We should ask the majority of people not to be sincere, but mute.
Very few carry themselves with the discretion befitting their insignificance.
The modern world obliges us to refute foolish ideas, instead of silencing the fools.
Wisdom, in this century, consists above all in knowing how to put up with vulgarity without becoming upset.