KIERKEGAARD29

It still impresses people as presumptuously and overweeningly arrogant to speak of the single individual, instead of recognizing that absolute humanity means precisely that everyone is a single individual. [1847]

It was a time of terrible suffering: to have to be so cruel and at the same time to love as I did. [My relation to "her", August 24, 1849]

It was intelligence and nothing else that had to be opposed. Presumably that is why I, who had the job, was armed with an immense intelligence. [1854]

It was so completely foreign to my nature to want to terrify others that it was my pleasure, both sadly and perhaps also a little profoundly, to comfort others and be gentleness itself towards them--oblivious to the terrors in my own heart. [De Se Ipso, 1849]

It will end more and more with writing for the crowd, which understands nothing, by those who understand how to write--for the crowd. [1847]

It would help very little if one persuaded millions of men to accept the truth, if precisely by the method of their acceptance they were transferred into error. [Concluding Unscientific Postscript]

...it would never occur to anyone to say about sterling silver that it will stand the test of years, because it is sterling silver. So too with love. The love which merely has continuance, however happy, however blissful, however confident, however poetic it is, must still stand the testing of the years; but the love which underwent the change of eternity through becoming duty, won immutability; it is sterling. [Works of Love]

It's a thought as beautiful as it is profound and valid which Plato utters when he says that all knowledge is recollection, for how sad if what should reassure a human, that in which he could really find rest, lay outside him and indeed, as far as that goes, were always outside, and if hte only means of consolation were to drown out that internal need, so that it would never be satisfied, with the busy, noisy world of that external scieticity (sit venia verbo). This reminds one of the view expressed in modern philosophy in the observation that all philosophizing is a calling to mind [Sig-Besinden] of what is already given in consciousness, except that this one is more speculative and that more pious, and therefore even a little mystical, inasmuch as it gives rise to a polemic against the world in order to bring about the stillness in which these recollection become audible... we can therefore say that the finite spirit as it is, the unity of necessity and freedom (it is not meant to determine through an infinite development what it is to become, but it is to become through development what it is), and thus it is also the unity of consequence and striving (that is, it is not to produce through development a new thing, but to take possession through development of what it has). [10 July 1840]

...it's as though I experienced being a child in my relationship to God, as if the whole of my first childhood had been so dreadfully wasted just so that I could experience it all the more truly the second time in the relationship to God. [1849]