That Life Is No Joke

John Stuart Blackie, The Wisdom of Goethe, 1883, Preface, xi-x:

There is nothing fills me with more sorrow occasionally than to see how foolishly some people throw away their lives. It is a noble thing to live; at least a splendid chance of playing a significant game—a game which we may never have the chance to play again, and which it is surely worth the while to try to play skilfully; to bestow at least as much pains upon as many a one does on billiards or lawn-tennis. But these pains are certainly not always given; and so the game of life is lost, and the grand chance of forming a manly character is gone; for no man can play a game well who leaves his moves to chance; and so, instead of fruitful victories, brilliant blunders are all the upshot of what many a record of distinguished lives has to present. The only remedy for this evil that I know is to impress on young men with all seriousness that life, though a pleasant thing, is no joke; and that, if they will go to sea without chart, compass, or pilot, they have a fair chance to be wrecked. But who is to impress such a lesson? Some name with authority, of course; for the individual, like the great world, is governed, as Goethe well says, by wisdom, by authority, and by show; and, though wisdom is wisely put first in this triad of directing powers, it is on authority that the great masses of men have to rely, when they look out, as they must do, in nine cases out of ten, for a guidance outside of their own experience; for authority is the form that wisdom must always take, before it can be generally recognised and become permanently influential.