Joshua

“How miserable must those be who complain for want of amusement! How wretched such a state! What! want matter for thought? Can a thinking being, such as man is, say thus? Look round, is not all nature about thee teeming with subjects well adapted for thy contemplation, happily prepared for thy entertainment?”
― Unca Eliza Winkfield, Female American

“Some alien substance more and more is cleaving
To all the mind conceives of grand and fair;
When this world's Good is won by our achieving,
The Better, then, is named a cheat and snare”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tombs and hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized for Love.”
― John Donne

“What makes people morally dissatisfied (and this is a dissatisfaction upon which they pride themselves) is that they do not see the present as measuring up to the goals they hold as right and good. This applies especially to contemporary ideal models of political institutions—thus contrasting the way things are with the way they ought to be.
Here it is not the particular interest, not the passion, that demands to be satisfied, but rather the demands of Reason, Justice, and Freedom. And once it is furnished with this title, the demand becomes haughty, and it is not only dissatisfied (all too easily) with world conditions, but even rebels against them.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History