Soren Kierkegaard

People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.

Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.

Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.

There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.

Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.

Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God.

Because of its tremendous solemnity death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearences.