Life & Wisdom Quote by Fredrik Bajer

“Naturally” does a lot of quiet work here. Bajer opens by granting the obvious: people will mix work with enjoyment because that is how life is lived, not how it’s idealized. But the sentence isn’t a celebration of that blend so much as a warning label. He’s interested in permission with conditions, the kind of moral bookkeeping that lets you have your cake provided you can still justify the receipt.

The subtext is about legitimacy. “Business” stands for duty, productivity, public obligation; “pleasure” is the private, potentially suspect motive that can smear the whole enterprise if it looks like the real point. Bajer isn’t arguing that pleasure is bad. He’s arguing that pleasure is politically dangerous when it appears to be driving the machine. The phrasing “should not predominate” suggests a fear of optics as much as ethics: once pleasure reads as the main engine, the activity stops being respectable and starts being self-indulgent, or worse, corrupt.

Context matters. As a late 19th-century European writer and public intellectual (and a figure associated with reformist civic life), Bajer is speaking from an era obsessed with bourgeois self-control, temperance, and the moral architecture of modern institutions. Industrial capitalism demanded discipline; nationalism demanded seriousness; social movements demanded credibility. His line is a manual for maintaining trust: enjoy, yes, but never so openly that it threatens your claim to be doing something necessary.