“If one would have a common name for this *despair, one might call it Stoicism — yet without thinking only of this philosophic sect. And to illuminate this sort of despair more sharply one would do well to distinguish between the active and the passive self, showing how the self is related to itself in suffering when it is passive, and showing that the formula constantly is: in despair to will to be oneself.”
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~Source: The Sickness Unto Death (1849)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus

“It seems to me that Christian dogmatics must be an explication of Christ’s activity, the more so since Christ established no teaching but was active. He didn’t teach that there was redemption for man, he redeemed men….Christ’s nature was imparted through that activity, Christ’s relation to God, human nature, man’s situation conditioned by Christ’s activity (which was really the main thing). All the rest would then be regarded as mere introduction.”
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~Source: The Journals, I (1834)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possiblity, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs in this dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain.” ——————————————————– ~Source: The Concept of Anxiety (1844) Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis

“For although there is only one situation in which either/or has absolute significance, namely when truth, righteousness, and holiness are lined up on one side, and lust and base propensities and obscure passions and perdition on the other; yet it is always important to choose rightly, even as between things which one may innocently choose; it is important to test oneself, lest some day one might have to beat a retreat to the point from which one started, and might have reason to thank God if one had to reproach oneself for nothing worse than a waste of time.”
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~Source: Either/Or (1843)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“Aye, just as it must be terrible for one who is thought to be dead while he still lives, and has the power of sensation, and can hear what those present say about him, but is unable in any way to express that he is still alive, so also for the religious individual is the suffering of his annihilation a fearful thing, when he has the absolute conception present with him in his nothingness, but no mutuality.”
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~Source: Concluding Unscientific Postscript To The “Philosophical Fragments” (1846)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Johannes Climacus

“For God’s wisdom is incomparable with respect to your own, and God’s providence is not obliged to be responsible for your cleverness. You have only to obey in love. A man, on the contrary, you must only — yet, no, this is the highest — you must love a man as yourself; if you can better perceive his best than he can, then you will not be able to excuse yourself by the fact that the harmful thing was his own wish, was what he himself asked for.”
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~Source: Works of Love (1847)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“And now consider Him, who is eternally unchangeable — and this human heart! O this human heart, what is not hidden in your secret recesses, unknown to others — and that is the least of it — but sometimes almost unknown to the individual himself! When a man has lived a few years it is almost as if it were a burial-plot, this human heart!”
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~Source: The Changelessness of God (1855)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“In the case of a man it may justly enough be said that the consequences of his life are more important than his life. When a person then seeks to find out who Christ was, and essays to draw a logical conclusion from the consequences of His life–he makes Him out eo ipso to be a man, a man who like other men has to pass his examination in history… [however] Christ’s return in glory is somethign entirely different, something that is believed.”
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~Source: Training in Christianity (1850)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“What an individual is capable of may be measured by how far his understanding is from his willing. What a person can understand he must also be able to make himself will. Between understanding and willing lie the excuses and evasions.”
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~Source: The Journals (1846)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“Would it not be better to stop with faith, and is it not revolting that everybody wants to go further?… Would it not be better that they should stand still at faith, and that he who stands should take heed lest he fall? For movements of faith must constantly be made by virtue of the absurd, yet in such a way, be it observed, that one does not lose the finite but gains it every inch. For my part I can well describe the movements of faith, but I cannot make them.”
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~Source: Fear And Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric (1843)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio