Søren Kierkegaard

Adversities do not make a person weak; rather, they show what strength he has. (1849)

Hope is a lovely maiden who slips away between one's fingers; recollection is a beautiful old woman with whom one is never satisfied at the moment; repetition is a beloved wife of whom one never wearies. (1843)

Even if I were to consider my life as an author altogether isolated from the rest of my life - there nevertheless is a dubious aspect to it, namely, the fact that I have had the privilege of being able to live independently. I am fully aware of this and for that reason feel exceedingly inferior to men who have been able to develop an authentic life of the mind and spirit in actual poverty. (1848)

The melancholy have the best sense of the comic, the opulent often the best sense of the rustic, the dissolute often the best sense of the moral, and the doubter often the best sense of the religious. (1843)

When someone faints, we call for water, eau de Cologne, smelling salts; but when someone wants to despair, then the word is: Get possibility, get possibility, possibility is the only salvation. A possibility - then the person in despair breathes again, he revives again, for without possibility a person seems unable to breathe. (1849)

The Truth is Naked. In order to swim, one strips naked - in order to seek the truth, one must strip in a far more inward sense, must take off a much more internal attire of thoughts, opinions, selfishness, etc. before one is sufficiently naked. (1854)

The Truth is a snare: you cannot get it without being caught yourself; you cannot get the truth by catching it yourself, but only by its catching you. (1854)

It is all very well to preach about the world being fine and wonderful - and then personally live under a cheese-bell, far removed from people and any contact with the fine world, and live in this way out of prudence and precaution, because one knows well enough what contact with this fine world would lead to. (1847)

Happy New Year! I never go calling to offer my New Year greetings -- but you are among the exceptions. In recent years I have often thought of you and I intend to do likewise in this one.

If I were to give you any advice about life, then I would say: Above all do not forget your duty to love yourself. Do not permit the fact that you have been set apart from life in a way, prevent you from participating actively in it, and that you are superfluous in the obtuse eyes of a busy world. Above all do not permit this to deprive you of your idea of yourself, as if your life, if lived in inwardness, did not have just as much meaning and worth as that of any other human being in the loving eyes of an all-wise Governance, and considerably more than the busy, busier, busiest haste of busyness -- busy with wasting life and losing itself.

Take care of yourself in the new year. If you would enjoy visiting me once in a while, please do come. You are welcome. (1848)

A year has passed, and a new one has begun; nothing has happened in it yet. In everyday life, it is customary for us to give one another some good wish. We also do not fail to show others our goodwill and sympathy by wishing them this or that good. But since on this day the thought of the future and it's unexplored possibility is so very vivid to us, our wish is usually of a more general nature in the hope that it's greater compass will more readily embrace the manifoldness of the future, because we feel the difficulty of wishing something definite with respect to what is indefinite and indefinable. (1843)

Wanting to hide in the mass or the crowd, to be a little fraction of the crowd, instead of being an individual, is the most corrupt of all escapes. It may make life easier, but it will do so by making it more thoughtless. (1846)

What really counts in life is that at some time you have seen something, felt something which is so great, so matchless, that everything else is nothing by comparison, that even if you forgot everything you would never forget this. (1837)