Welt im kopf

“Here is a type of laziness that is very frequent. A young man is lively, gay and energetic; he is rarely idle. During the day he reads some treatise on geology, an article by Brunetiere on Racine; he glances through several journals ; rereads some notes ; makes a rough sketch of a theme, and translates a few pages of a foreign language. He has not been indolent for a single moment. His comrades admire his working power and the variety of his occupations. Yet we must brand this young man as a lazy student.

To the psychologist, this great variety of work simply indicates a certain spontaneous attention, rich in its ability, but which has not as yet become voluntary attention. This apparent power for varied work means nothing more than a great weakness of the will. Our student furnishes us a very common type of laziness which we may call the disseminated type. Such “mental excursions” are truly delightful, but they are only pleasure strolls. Nicolle describes those workers who flit ere and there to no purpose as having “buzzing minds. ” They are, to recall Fenelon’s simile, “like a lighted candle set in a
windy place.”

The great disadvantage in scattering one’s efforts is due to the fact, that no impression has time enough to become permanent. We may lay it down as an absolute law controlling all intellectual work, that if we treat all the ideas and feelings which come into our minds, as if they were transient guests in a hotel, they will never be more than strangers to us, and will soon be forgotten.”

“O Universo está certo, mas o Mundo está errado.”

«A non-religious man today ignores
what he considers sacred but,
in the structure of his consciousness,
could not be without the ideas
of being and the meaningful.
He may consider these purely human aspects
of the structure of consciousness.
What we see today is that man considers himself
to have nothing sacred, no god;
but still his life has a meaning,
because without it he could not live;
he would be in chaos.
He looks for being and
does not immediately call it being,
but meaning or goals;
he behaves in his existence
as if he had a kind of center.
He is going somewhere,
he is doing something.
We do not see anything religious here;
we just see man behaving as a human being.
But as a historian of religion,
I am not certain that there is nothing religious here. »

Mircea Eliade, absolutely great.