KIERKEGAARDpoint

But all true effort to help begins with self-humiliation: the helper must first humble himself under him he would help, and therewith must understand that to help does not mean to be a sovereign but to be a servant, that to help does not mean to be ambitious but to be patient, that to help means to endure for the time being the imputation that one is in the wrong and does not understand what the other understands.

How inestimable thou art when attired in thy comical dressing-gown and in the way of becoming holy, when abandonment to every disgusting inclination of envy, rudeness, and vulgarity becomes an expression of the worship of God!

I was so deeply shaken that I understood perfectly well that I could not possibly succeed in striking the comforting and secure via media in which most people pass their lives: I had either to cast myself into perdition and sensuality, or to choose the religious absolutely as the only thing--either the world in a measure that would be dreadful, or the cloister. That it was the second I would and must choose was the bottom already determined: the eccentricity of the first movement was merely the expression for the intensity of the second; it expressed the fact that I had become thoroughly aware how impossible it would be for me to be religious only up to a certain point.

If you can do that, if you can find exactly the place whree the other is and begin there, you may perhaps have the luck to lead him to the place where you are.
For to be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, &c. No, to be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner, put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and in the way he understands it, in case you have not understood it before.

In the proper sense of the word I had not lived, except in the character of spirit; a man I had never been, and a child or youth even less....For my misfortune (almost, I might say, from birth, completed by my upbringing) was...not to be a man. But when one is a child--and the other children play or joke or whatever else they do; oh! and when one is a youth--and the other young people make love and dance or whatever else they do--and then in spite of the fact that one is a child or youth, to be spirit! What torment! I've never had any immediate experience and so, in the ordinary human sense of the word, I've never lived. I began at once with reflection... I am reflection, from first to last.

Once in a while there appears a religious enthusiast: he storms against Christendom, he vociferates and makes a loud noise, denoucing almost all as not being Christians--and accomplishes nothing. He takes no heed of the fact that an illusion is not an easy thing to dispel. Supposing now it is a fact that most people, when they call themselves Christians, are under an illusion--how do they defend themselves against an enthusiast? First and foremost, they do not bother about him at all, they do not so much as look at his book, they immediately lay it aside, ad acta; or, if he employs the living word, they go round by another street and do not hear him. As the next step, they spirit him out of the way by carefully defining the whole concept, and settle themselves securely in their illusion; they make him a fanatic, his Christianity an exaggeration--in the end he remains the only one, or one of the few, who is not seriously a Christian (for exaggeration is surely a lack of seriousness), whereas the others are all serious Christians.

...who historically died of a mortal disease, but poetically died of a longing for eternity, where he would have nothing to do save uninterruptedly to give thanks to God.