“Most of all I like to talk with old women who retail family gossip, after them lunatics — least of all with very sensible people.”
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~Source: The Journals (1836)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“That Christianity is antithetical to pantheism can also be seen from the caricature that accompanies it. Clearly, the caricature of pantheism is the evaporation of the person through sensuality, the poetic world projected by the individual in which true conscious existence is surrendered and everything is poetry, in which at most the individual is like the flower in woven damask. The antithesis of Christianity is hypocrisy, but this is clearly based on the reality of moral concepts: personality, accountability.”
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~Source: The Journals (1839)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“When I was a child I was taught that they spat upon Christ. Now I am a poor and lowly person and a sinner, so will no doubt get off more lightly. This, you see, is the Christian syllogism, not the priestly nonsense which says: Be good, amicable, and unselfish and people will love you — for Christ, who was love, was loved by men… In eternity, there are none who will be judged as severely as these professional priests. They are, from an eternal point of view, what prostitutes are in temporality.”
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~Source: The Journals (1848)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“Experience, it is said, makes a man wise. That is very silly talk. If there were nothing beyond experience it would simply drive him mad.”
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~Source: The Journals (1842)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“Everyone takes his revenge on the world. My revenge consists in bearing my distress and anguish enclosed deeply within me while my laughter entertains everyone. If I see someone suffer I give him my sympathy, console him as best I can, and listen to him calmly when he assures me that I am fortunate. If I can only keep this up until the day I die I shall have had my revenge.”
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~Source: The Journals (1837)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“Every step it takes, philosophy casts a slough and into it creep the more foolish adherents.”
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~Source: The Journals (1837)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“There is an indescribable joy that is kindled in us just as inexplicably as the apostle’s unmotivated exclamation: ‘Rejoice, and again I say, Rejoice’. — Not a joy over this or that, but a full-bodied shout of the soul ‘with tongue and mouth and from the bottom of the heart’: ‘I rejoice in my joy, of, with, at, for, through, and with my joy’ — a heavenly refrain which suddenly interrupts our other songs, a joy which like a breath of air cools and refreshes, a puff from the trade winds which blow across the plains of Mamre to the eternal mansions.”
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~Source: The Journals (1838)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“Can the transition from a quantitative to a qualitative determination occur without a leap? And doesn’t all of life lie in this?”
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~Source: The Journals (1842-43)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“Just as in a case of herrings, the top layer is crushed and spoilt, and the fruit next to the crate is bruised and worthless, so too in every generation there are certain men who are on the outside and are made to suffer from the packing case, who only protect those who are in the middle.”
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~Source: The Journals (1845)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“So and so many children are baptised every year, so many confirmed, so and so many study theology; there are a thousand parsons, professors of theology, bishops, deans, churchwardens, sextons and under-sextons: everything is as it should be — if only Christianity existed.”
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~Source: The Journals (1850)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard