“Desperate as he was, he thought: lost is lost. But he could not help turning around once more in his longing for the Good. How terribly embittered he had become against this very longing, a longing which reveals that, just as man in all his defiance has not power enough wholly to loose himself from the Good, because it is the stronger, so he has not even the power wholly to will it.”
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~Source: Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits: “Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing” (1847)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“If a child who had been very strictly brought up were to study in a class together with others, would it not be strange to say that his diligence, etc., was pride, even if it were the case that the others could not keep up with him? But such a case seldom occurs, for then the child is moved up to a higher class. But, unfortunately, for one who is in many ways developed for eternity’s class there exists only one class, that of the temporal order, where perhaps he must remain a long while.”
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~Source: The Point Of View For My Work As An Author (1848)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“First comes despair over the earthly or something earthly, then despair over oneself about the eternal. Then comes defiance, which really is despair by the aid of the eternal, the despairing abuse of the eternal in the self to the point of being despairingly determined to be oneself. But just because it is despair by the aid of the eternal it lies in a sense very close to the true, and just because it lies very close to the true it is infinitely remote. The despair which is the passageway to faith is also by the aid of the eternal: by the aid of the eternal the self has courage to lose itself in order to gain itself. Here on the contrary it is not willing to begin by losing itself, but wills to be itself.”
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~Source: The Sickness Unto Death (1849)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus

“There is no follower [of Christ] at second hand. The first and the latest generation are essentially alike, except that the latter generation has the occasion in the report of the contemporary generation, whereas the contemporary generation has the occasion in its immediate contemporaneity and therefore owes no generation anything.”
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~Source: Philisophical Fragments (1844)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Johannes Climacus

“So to despair over something is not yet properly despair. It is the beginning, or it is as when the physician says of a sickness that it has not yet declared itself. The next step is the declared despair, despair over oneself.” ——— ~Source: The Sickness Unto Death (1849) Author: Soren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus

“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so foaming, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!”
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~Source: Either/Or (1843)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“To forget–all men wish to forget, and when something unpleasant happens, they always say: Oh, that one might forget! But forgetting is an art that must be practiced beforehand. The ability to forget is conditioned upon the method of remembering, but this again depends upon the mode of experiencing. Whoever plunges into his experiences with the momentum of hope, will remember so that he cannot forget. Nil admirari* is therefore the real philosophy. No moment must be permitted a greater significance than that it can be forgotten when convenient; each moment ought, however, to have so much significance that it can be recollected at will.” ——————————————————- ~Source: Either/Or: A Fragment Of Life (1843) Author: Soren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Victor Eremita *Nil admirari: To wonder at nothing.

Thus it is that the whole literary activity turns upon the problem of becoming a Christian in Christendom; and this is the expression of the share Governance had in the authorship, that it is the author himself who has been educated, yet with consciousness of this from the very first.” ——————————————————————- ~Source: The Point Of View For My Work As An Author (1848) Author: Soren Kierkegaard

“Ethically the ideality is the real within the individual himself. The real is an inwardness that is infinitely interested in existing; this is exemplified in the ethical individual.” —————————————- ~Source: Concluding Unscientific Postscript To The “Philosophical Fragments” Author: Soren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Johannes Climacus (1846)

“When a man has a toothache the world says, ‘Poor man’; when a man’s wife is unfaithful to him the world says, ‘Poor man’; when a man is in financial embarrassment the world says, ‘Poor man’; when it pleased God in the form of a lowly servant to suffer in this world the world says, ‘Poor man’; when an Apostle with a divine commission has the honor to suffer for the truth the world says, ‘Poor man.’ — Poor world!” ——————————————– ~Source: The Attack Upon “Christendom” (1854-1855) Author: Soren Kierkegaard