Soren Kierkegaard

Hope is a passion for the possible.

Ulysses was not comely, but he was eloquent, Yet he fired two goddesses of the sea with love

This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.

I am convinced that God is love, this thought has for me a primitive lyrical validity. When it is present to me, I am unspeakably blissful, when it is absent, I long for it more vehemently than does the lover for his object.

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.

The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo; the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes.

Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.

Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.

I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.

Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.

There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.

Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth - look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.

Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.

It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.

A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.

Don't forget to love yourself.

Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.

People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.

Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.