KIERKEGAARD19

How true, therefore, the remark I have often made concerning myself, that like Scheherazade who saved her life by telling fairy-tales, I save my life, or keep myself alive, by writing. [1848]

However glad, however happy, however indescribably confident the love of impulse and inclination, the immediate love as such, can be, it still feels, even in its most beautiful moment, a need to bind itself if possible even more closely. Therefore the two take an oath; they take an oath of loyalty or friendship to each other; and when we speak most solemnly, we do not say about the two, "They love one another"; we say, "They swore fidelity to each other," or "They took an oath of friendship to each other." But by what does this love swear?...It is the poet who exacts a promise from the two, the poet who unites the two, the poet who dictates an oath to the two and lets them take it; in short, it is the poet who is the priest. Does this love then swear by something that is higher than itself? No, it does not. This is what exactly constitutes the beautiful, the moving, the mysterious, the poetical misunderstanding, that the two do not themselves discover it; and precisely because of this, the poet is their only, their beloved confidant, because neither does he discover it. [Works of Love]

Human cognition is generally busily concerned to understand and understand, but if it would also take the trouble to understand itself it must straight-away posit the paradox. [1847]

Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all the verbs are irregular. [March 1836]

Humanly I have been much too fond of peopel. I may have pretended to ignore them--alas, just because I scarcely dared admit how much they meant to me--so as not to be considered altogether mad.
Just having neglected to say good-day to a maidservant was enough to upset me as if it were a crime, as if God would have to forsake me. And I am persecuted for my pride! [1848]

I am a Janus bifrons; I laugh with one face, I weep with the other. [1837]

I am a poet. But I was made for religion long before I became a poet.

I am able by my own strength to renounce everything, and then to find peace and repose in pain. I can stand everything--even though that horrible demon, more dreadful than death, the king of terrors, even though madness were to hold up before my eyes the motley of the fool, and I understood by its look that it was I who must put it on, I still am able to save my soul, if only it is more to me than my earthly happiness that my love to God should triumph in me. A man may still be able at the last instant to concentrate his whole soul in a single glance toward that heaven from which cometh every good gift, and his glance will be intelligible to himself and also to Him whom it seeks, as a sign that he nevertheless remained true to his love. Then he will calmly put on the motley garb. He whose soul has not this romantic enthusiasm has sold his soul, whether he got a kingdom for it or a paltry piece of silver. [Fear and Trembling]

I am, as it were, a spy in the service of the highest. The police also use spies. They do not always pick out men whose lives have been the purest and the best, quite the contrary: they are cunning, crafty offenders, whose cunning the police use, while they coerce them through the consciousness of their vita ante acta. Alas, thus does God uses sinners.