A thinker erects an immense building, a system, a system which embraces the whole of existence and world-history etc. – and if we contemplate his [sic!] personal life, we discover to our astonishment this terrible and ludicrous fact, that he himself personally does not live in this immense high-vaulted palace, but in a barn alongside of it, or in a dog kennel, or at the most in the porter’s lodge.

Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (1849)