I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.
Soren KierkegaardA 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.
Soren KierkegaardThis, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.
Soren KierkegaardThere is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.
Soren KierkegaardDeep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.
Soren KierkegaardAnd this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.
Soren Kierkegaard