Søren Kierkegaard

“I stick my finger in existence — it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world?”

“A son is a mirror in which the father sees himself reflected, and the father is a mirror in which the son sees himself as he will be in the future.”

“There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys; they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves.”

“It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.”

“The greatest danger, that of losing one's own self, may pass off as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife etc., is sure to be noticed.”

“Faith sees best in the dark.”

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”

“The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.”

“How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.”

“Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.”

“The crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.”

“It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”