KIERKEGAARD18

His earthly life accompanies the race and accompanies every generation in particular, as the eternal history; His earthly life possesses the eternal contemporaneousness. And all the professional lecturing on Christianity (which lecturing has its stalking-blind and stronghold in the notion that Christianity is something past, and in the history of the 1,800 years) transforms it into the most unchristian of heresies, a fact which everyone will perceive (and therefore give up lecturing) if only he will try to imagine the generation contemporary with Christ...delivering lectures--but indeed every generation (of believers) is contemporary. [Training in Christianity]

His father is a man of not, God-fearing and strict; only once, when drunk, did he drop a few words that made the son suspect the worst. The son has no other intimation of it, and never dares ask his father or anyone else.

History makes out Christ to be another than He truly is, and so one learns to know a lot about--Christ? No, not about Christ, for about Him nothing can be known, He can only be believed. [Training in Christianity]

Honesty to Christianity demands that one call to mind the Christian requirement of poverty, which is not a capricious whim of Christianity, but is because only in poverty can it be truly served, and the more thousands a teacher of Christianity has by way of wages, the less he can serve Christianity. On the other hand, it is not honest to suppress the requirement or to perform artful tricks to produce the impression that this sort of business career is simply the Christianity of the New Testament. No--let us take money, but for God's sake not the next thing: let us not wish to gloss over the Christian requirement, so that by suppression or by falsification we may bring about an appearance of decorum which is in the very highest degree demoralizing and is a sly death-blow to Christianity. [Attack Upon "Christendom"]

How beautiful, how true and how heartfelt are the words of J. Boehme where he says: in the moment of temptation the thing is not to have many thoughts, but to hold fast to one thought. God give me strength. [1841]

How easy it is to desire when one has a wishing-rod, and it is sometimes more dreadful than to persih from want. [Stages on Life's Way]

How economically my life has been planned; I need only one girl: she has a pleading look which has affected me. That is something about her I shall never forget. [1849]

How far imagination is at work in logical thought, how far the will, how far the conclusion is a decision. [1842-3]

How fundamentally polemical by nature I am can best be seen in the fact that the only way people's attacks can affect me is through the sadness I feel on their behalf. [16 March 1846]

How inestimable thou art when attired in thy comical dressing-gown and in the way of becoming holy, when abandonment to every disgusting inclination of envy, rudeness, and vulgarity becomes an expression of the worship of God! [The Point of View]