For you cannot know the world by just navel-gazing. This is why he reads history and studies philosophy: not to draw lessons and precepts, but to understand how other men have acted in the past, so that he can compare his own situation with theirs.
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One must seek another certitude beyond the world, beyond the homeland; one must refuse to join the chorus of the demonically and create one’s own homeland, one’s own world, outside the present time.
When there is more space, the soul opens up.
We too need to stand the test, to endure one of the most horrifying collapses of humanity, which follows directly one of its most magnificent periods of advancement.
For one of life's mysterious laws shows that we only notice the authentic and essential values when it's too late: youth, once it has fled, health at the moment it abandons us, freedom of the soul, that most precious essence, at the very moment when it is taken from us, or has already been taken.