KIERKEGAARD34

My young friend, suppose there was no one who troubled himself to guess your riddle--what joy, then, would you have in it? [Either/Or, VOL. II: EQUILIBRIUM BETWEEN THE AESTHETICAL AND THE ETHICAL IN THE COMPOSITION OF PERSONALITY]

Nature is, indeed, the work of God, but only the handiwork is directly present, not God. Is not this to behave, in His relationship to the individual, like an illusive author who nowhere sets down his result in large type, or gives it to the reader beforehand in a preface? And why is God illusive? Precisely because He is the truth, and by being illusive desires to keep men from error. [Concluding Unscientific Postscript]

Nature, the totality of created things, is the work of God. And yet God is not there; but within the individual man there is a potentiality (man is potentially spirit) which is awakened in inwardness to become a God-relationship, and then it becomes possible to see God everywhere... Is this not as if an author wrote one hundred and sixty-six folio volumes, and a reader read and read, just as people look and look at nature, but did not discover that the meaning of this tremendous literature lay in himself; for asstonishment over the many volumes, and the number of lines to a page, which is like the astonishment over the vastness of nature and the countless forms of animal life, is not the true understanding. [Concluding Unscientific Postscript]

Next to taking off all my clothes, owning nothing in the world, not the least thing, and then throwing myself into the water, I find most pleasure in speaking a foreign language, preferably a living one, in order to become enfremdet [estranged] from myself. [1841]

No, I won't leave the world--I'll enter a lunatic asylum and see if the profundity of insanity reveals to me the riddles of life. Idiot, why didn't I do that long ago, why has it taken me so long to understand what it means when the Indians honour the insane, step aside for them? Yes, a lunatic asylum--don't you think I may end up there? [1836-7]

No matter how hopeless things have often seemed, I scrape together the most blessed thoughts I can muster of what a loving person is and say to myself: that is how God is every instant. [2 August 1847]

No, no, my reserve still cannot be broken, at least not now. The thought of wanting to break it continually occupies me so much and in such a way that it only becomes more and more chronic. [Easter Monday, 1848]

No, on a more modest scale, there are many, surely by far the majority, who are able to live without having consciousness really penetrate their lives.

No, the important thing is that you do it, do what is so infinitely easy to understand that you understand it immediately, but which flesh and blood would prevent you from doing. ["The Only Way to Read the New Testament Grippingly", 1850]