To pace about, looking to obtain status, looking to attain 'importance' - I can think of nothing more ridiculous.

In order to learn true humility (I use this expression to describe the state of mind under discussion), it is good for a person to withdraw from the turmoil of the world (we see that Christ withdrew when the people wanted to proclaim him king as well as when he had to walk the thorny path), for in life either the depressing or the elevating impression is too dominant for a true balance to come about. Here, of course, individuality is very decisive.

The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.

If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?

Without risk, faith is an impossibility.

...why bother remembering a past that cannot be made into a present?

No one is so terribly deceived as he who does not himself suspect it.