Fatalism and determinism have, after all, imagination enough to despair of possibility, possibility enough to discover the impossibility. Petty bourgeois vulgarity placates itself in the common place, in despair as much when things go well as when they go badly...Petty bourgeois vulgarity lacks possibility as an awakener from spiritlessness. For the petty bourgeois thinks he is in control of possibility, has lured this tremendous elasticity into the snare, or madhouse, of probabilities, thinks he holds it prisoner. He carries possibility about captive in the cage of probability, shows it off, fancies himself the master, does not see that in the very act of doing so he has made himself captive as a slave to spiritlessness and is the meanest of all.

 -Kierkegaard under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus from This Sickness unto Death