Go Away

“Self-conception is the source some of our sweetest pleasures — knowing ourselves to be loved or to have done well; and our greatest (and often self-inflicted) torments — believing ourselves to be worthless, unlovely, or unlovable. A sure sense of self-worth, based on the wholehearted endorsement of our practical identities, is enough in most circumstances to make life worth living. A sense of personal worthlessness, on the other hand, can be the motive for suicide or — as Nietzsche argued — the germ from which nihilism and the rejection of all value spreads. And I believe that self-conception is, and relatedly, the source of our capacity for everyday decency as well as of heroic virtue; and of our capacity for trivial pettinesses as well as for great crimes. I think that self-conception is, in short, the root of both moral good and evil.”

“Every particular conception of God is mere gossip. But the idea of God is the Idea of ideas.”