KIERKEGAARD32

Man also has wings, he has imagination.... ["The Tame Geese, A Revivalistic Meditation"]

Man hardly ever makes use of the freedoms he has, such as freedom of thought; in compensation he demands freedom of speech instead. [1838]

Man has a natural dread of walking in the dark--what wonder then that he has a dread of the absolute, of which it is true that no night and "no deepest gloom is half so dark" as this gloom and this night, where all relative ends (the common milestones and sign-posts), where all relative considerations (the lanterns which are normally a help to us), where even the tenderest and sincerest feelings of devotion--are quenched...for otherwise it is not unconditionally the absolute.

Men are not evil but misled; it's a matter of calling their attention to it. [1847]

Men of ideas, the porters of ideas, achieve absolutely nothing--except that they then achieve immortality--because everyone who patiently, gladly, and gratefully gives himself solely to carrying the idea is immortal.
But they achieve absolutely nothing... Their significance is really just to give the human race something to talk about. ["Minor Remarks", 25 September 1855]

Methinks I have written things which must move stones to tears, but my contemporaries are moved only to insults and envy. [1848]

Montaigne says somewhere that man is to his knowledge the only creature whose worth is determined by what he has on him (titles, external circumstances, and the like). It wouldn't occur to anyone, after all, to determine the worth of a horse by the saddle on its back, or a dog by the collar round its neck. [1850]

More and more individuals, owing to their bloodless indolence, will aspire to be nothing at all--in order to become the public, that abstract whole formed in the most ludicrous way, by all participants becoming a third party (an onlooker). This indolent mass which understands nothing and does nothing itself, this gallery, is on the look-out for distraction and soon abandons itself to the idea that everything that anyone does is done in order to give it (the public) soemthing to gossip about. That indolent mass sits with its legs crossed wearing an air of superiority, and anyone who tries to work, whether king, official, school teacher or the better type of journalist, the poet or the artist, has to struggle to drag the public along with it, while the public thinks in its own superior way that it is the horse. [The Present Age]

Moreover, the New Testament standard for being a human being is to be a single individual--and nowadays everything is association. ["The Standard for Being a Human Being", 1854]

Most people are subjective towards themselves and objective towards everyone else, sometimes frightfully objective--but the task is precisely to be objective to themselves and subjective towards all others. [1847]

Most people believe that the Christian commandments are intentionally a little too severe--like putting the clock on half an hour to make sure of not being late in the morning. [1837]