A biography for Soren Kierkegaardhasn’t been written yet.
“Don't forget to love yourself.”
“The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.”
“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.”
“One can advise comfortably from a safe port.”
“What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.”
“Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.”
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
“During the first period of a man's life the greatest danger is not to take the risk.”
“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”
“People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.”
“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.”
“It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.”
“Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.”
“Be that self which one truly is.”
“The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo; the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes.”
“Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic if it is pulled out I shall die.”
“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.”
“Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.”
“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
“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.”