Søren Kierkegaard

There are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.

Life must be lived forwards, but can only be understood backwards.

To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one’s self … and to venture in the highest sense is precisely to become conscious of one’s self.

The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.

Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.

Don't forget to love yourself.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

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

Prayer does not change God, but changes him who prays.

It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important.

If you marry you will regret it. If you do not marry you will regret it. If you marry or do not marry, you will regret it.

Fixed ideas are like a cramp in the foot - the best remedy against it is to tread on it.

Alas! While the speculative honourable professor explains the entire existence has he in distraction forgotten his own name, that he is a man, purely and simply a man, not a fantastic 3
8 of a paragraph.

Of all tyrannies democracy is the most agonizing, the most inane, the absolute fall of everything great and elevated.

The most painful state of living is remembering the future.

And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart it torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say. "May new sufferings torment your soul.

In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant. My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known -- no wonder, then, that I return the love.

There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves.

If a man cannot forget, he will never amount to much.

Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of potential -- for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints; possibility never.

It is possible to be below flattery as well as above it. Thomas Babington Macaulay #4885 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.

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.

The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss— an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.—is sure to be noticed.

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

Life can only be understood backwards…But it must be lived forwards.