Søren Kierkegaard

“Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.”

“Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer.”

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

“Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.”

“Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.”

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

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

“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.”

“There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life's highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.”

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

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

“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.”

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”

“God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.”

“If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.”

“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.”

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

“I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.”

“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.”

“A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.”

“Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.”

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”

“The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.”

“Don't forget to love yourself.”