It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing they are not all bad.

It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

–
Stephen Fry,

Moab Is My Washpot

Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction

Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’- that is the motto of enlightenment.

–
Immanuel Kant,

An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment

This doctrine of total inability which declares that men are dead in sin does not mean that all men are equally bad, nor that any man is as

This doctrine of total inability which declares that men are dead in sin does not mean that all men are equally bad, nor that any man is as bad as he could be, nor that anyone is entirely destitute of virtue, nor that human nature is equal in itself, nor that man s spirit in inactive, and much less does it mean that the body is dead. What is does mean is that since the fall, man rests under the curse of sin, that he is actuated by wrong principles, and that he is wholly unable to love God, or to do anything meriting salvation. His corruption is extensive, but not necessarily intensive. It is in this sense that man, since the fall, is utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, wholly inclined to all evil. He possesses a fixed bias of the will against God, and instinctively and willingly and turns to evil. He is an alien by birth, and a sinner by choice. The inability under which he labors is not an inability to exercise volition, but an inability to be willing to exercise holy volitions. And it is this phase of it which led Luther to declare that free will is an empty term, whose reality is lost; and a lost liberty, according to my grammar, is no liberty at all.

–
Loraine Boettner,

The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination