“The present book, which I hereby send out, has been written as I believe one wrote books in former times. The one who has written it is one who has thought a good deal over the matter about which he speaks and believes himself, as a result of that, to know a bit more about it than is generally known. Nor is he entirely unacquainted with what has been written previously on the subject, and endeavors to be just to everyone. In default of the huge task of understanding all people, he has chosen what one will perhaps call narrow-minded and foolish, to understand himself.”
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~Source: Prefaces: Light Reading for Certain Classes as the Occasion May Require (1844)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Nicolaus Notabene

“The present book, which I hereby send out, has been written as I believe one wrote books in former times. The one who has written it is one who has thought a good deal over the matter about which he speaks and believes himself, as a result of that, to know a bit more about it than is generally known. Nor is he entirely unacquainted with what has been written previously on the subject, and endeavors to be just to everyone. In default of the huge task of understanding all people, he has chosen what one will perhaps call narrow-minded and foolish, to understand himself.”
——————————————————–

~Source: Prefaces: Light Reading for Certain Classes as the Occasion May Require (1844)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Nicolaus Notabene

“The present book, which I hereby send out, has been written as I believe one wrote books in former times. The one who has written it is one who has thought a good deal over the matter about which he speaks and believes himself, as a result of that, to know a bit more about it than is generally known. Nor is he entirely unacquainted with what has been written previously on the subject, and endeavors to be just to everyone. In default of the huge task of understanding all people, he has chosen what one will perhaps call narrow-minded and foolish, to understand himself.”
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~Source: Prefaces: Light Reading for Certain Classes as the Occasion May Require (1844)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Nicolaus Notabene

“I have a dread of mediation*. I cannot help it. The word works, not in itself, but by the perpetual monotonous application to my soul, as when day in, day out, someone files a saw, like the sound that Xantippe, according to Socrates’ testimony, produced by her perpetual scolding, the sound of pulleys (Diogenes 2, 5, 36). My build, my health, my whole constitution are not fit for mediation.”
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~Source: Prefaces: Light Reading for Certain Classes as the Occasion May Require (1844)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Nicolaus Notabene

*or “synthesis”, the third phase of Hegelian dialectic

“It is, in the literary world, customary to take a holy vow… Accordingly I swear: as soon as possible to realize a plan contemplated for thirty years to publish a logical System, as soon as possible to honor my vow taken ten years ago concerning an aesthetic System; furthermore I promise an ethical and dogmatic System, and finally the System. As soon as this has been published, future generations will not even need to learn to write, for there will be nothing further to write, but only to read — the System.”
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~Source: Prefaces: Light Reading for Certain Classes as the Occasion May Require (1844)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Nicolaus Notabene