KIERKEGAARD38

One who has perfected himself in the twin arts of remembering and forgetting is in a position to play at battledore and shuttlecock with the whole of existence. [Either/Or, VOL. I: THE ROTATION METHOD]

Only through the consciousness of sin is there entrance to it, and the wish to enter in by any other way is the crime of lese-majeste against Christianity. [Training in Christianity]

Only too soon personal experience and the experience of others teaches how far most men's lives are from being what a man's life ought to be. All have great moments. They see themselves in the magic mirror of possibility which hope holds before them while the wish flatters them. But they swiftly forget this sight in the daily round of things. [Purity of Heart]

Only when a person has become unhappy, or has understood the misery of this life so profoundly that he has to say truthfully: For me life has no worth--only then can he bid for Christianity.
And then life can acquire worth in the highest degree. ["The Value of Life", 1854]

Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love everlastingly secure against every change; everlastingly emancipated in blessed independence; everlastingly happy, assured against despair. [Works of Love]

Or is not God so unnoticeable, so secretly present in His works, that a man might very well live his entire life, be married, become known and respected as citizen, father, and captain of the hunt, without ever having discovered God in His works, and without ever having received any impression of the infinitude of the ethical, because he helped himself out with what constitutes an analogy to the speculative confusion of the ethical with the historical process, because he helped himself out by having recourse to the customs and traditions prevailing in the town where he happened to live? [Concluding Unscientific Postscript]

Order the priests to hold their tongues on Sundays. What's left? Indeed the essential thing, the lives [Existentserne], everyday life, the daily life with which the priest preaches. But then, if you look at that, will you get the impression that what they preach is Christianity? ["The Test of Christendom", 1850]

People have constantly done me an indescribable wrong by constantly mistaking for pride what was intended only to protect the secret of my melancholy. But one needs no proof that I have achieved what I wanted, for sympathy is something hardly anyone has ever felt towards me. [1847]

People understand me so little that they fail even to understand my complaints that they do not understand me. [February 1836]

Perhaps I have also made a mistake in my association with others by always turning the ill-treatment I suffered into witty conversation; the dupery in that (which can also conceal a profound contempt for people) is to lead them astray too. [1850]

Perhaps you will succeed without that in accomplishing much, perhaps even in astonishing the world... and yet you will miss the highest thing, the only thing which truly has significance--perhaps you will gain the whole world and lose your own self. [Either/Or, VOL. II: EQUILIBRIUM BETWEEN THE AESTHETICAL AND THE ETHICAL IN THE COMPOSITION OF PERSONALITY]