Above all do not forget your duty to love yourself;
do
not permit the fact that you have been set apart from life in a way,
been
prevented from participating actively in it,
and that you are superflous in the
obtruse eyes of a busy world,
above all, do not permit this to deprive you of your
idea of yourself,
as if your life, if lived in inwardness,
did not have just as
much meaning and worth
as that of any human being in the eyes of all-wise
Governance,
and considerably more than the busy, busiest haste of busy-ness -
busy with wasting life and losing itself.
Soren Kierkegaard, in a letter to his cousin Hans Peter, 1848
