KIERKEGAARDworks4

Place a child in a den of thieves, but the child must not remain there so long that it becomes itself perverted, hence let it remain there only a very short time; then let it come home and tell of all its experiences: you will see that the child, who (like every child) is a good observer and has an excellent memory, will tell everything with the utmost detail, yet in such a way that in a sense the most important things are omitted, so that one who did not know that the child had been among bandits would least suspect it from the child's narrative. What is it then which the child omits? What is it that the child did not discover? It is the evil. And yet the child's description of what it saw and heard is absolutely accurate. What is it then the child lacks? What is it that so frequently makes a child's narration the most profound mockery of its elders? It is the sense of evil, and that the child lacks the sense of evil, so that the child finds no pleasure in wishing to understand it.

...since every miracle is one of faith, what wonder, therefore, that, along with faith, miracles too are abolished!

...the Christian teaching is to love the neighbor, to love the whole race, all men, even one's enemy, and to make no exception, either of partiality or of dislike.
There is only One whom a man may with the truth of the eternal love better than himself, that is God.

...the dynamometer of eternity, on which every man must be tested as to whether he has faith or not, remains through all hte ages absolutely unchanged.

The fact that men through rumor, through village gossip, are accustomed inquisitively, frivolously, enviously, maliciously perhaps, to learn of their neighbor's faults--that debases men.

The unchangeableness is the true independence: every change, be it the swoon of weakness or the arrogance of pride, the sighing or the self-satisfied, is dependence. If one man, when another man says to him, "I can no longer love you," proudly answers, "Then I can stop loving you," is this independence? Alas, it is only dependence, for the fact as to whether he will continue ot love or not depends on whether the other will love. But the one who answers, "Then I will still continue to love you," his love is everlastingly free in blessed independence. He does not say it proudly--dependent on his pride; no, he says it humbly, humbling himself under the "shalt" of eternity, and just for that reason he is independent.

Through forgiveness love covers a multitude of sins.

What does the one who refuses forgiveness do? He increases the sin, he makes it seem greater. And next, forgiveness takes the life from the sin; but denying forgiveness nourishes the sin. Therefore, even if no new sin appears, if the same old sin still persists, the multitude of sins is really increased. When a sin persists, a new sin really comes, for sin increases through sin; the fact that sin persists is really a new sin.

What love does, that it is; what it is, that it does--and at one and the same time: at the moment it goes out of itself (the direction outward) it is in itself (the direction inward); and at the very moment it is in itself, it thereby goes out of itself--so that this outgoing and this return, this return and this outgoing, are simultaneously one and the same.