Soren Kierkegaard

This is all that I've known for certain, that God is love. Even if I have been mistaken on this or that point: God is nevertheless love.

One is not unpopular because he uses peculiar expressions; that just so happens; such terms become a fad, and by and by everybody, down to the last simpleton, uses them. But a person who follows through an idea in his mind is, and always will be, essentially unpopular. That is why Socrates was unpopular, though he did not use any special terms, for to grasp and hold his 'ignorance' requires greater vital effort than understanding the whole of Hegel's philosophy.

There are men who are wanting in the comparative, they as a rule are the most interesting.

Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause - that it must be lived forward.

The way to love anything is to realize it might be lost.

Most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes-but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.

When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world - no matter how imperfect - becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for love.

Oh Luther, Luther; your responsibility is great indeed, for the closer I look the more clearly do I see that you overthrew the Pope - and set the public on the throne.

Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self or it is that (which accounts for it) that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but (consists in the fact) that the relation relates itself to its own self.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that the former expresses his idea most fully in death while the latter really enjoys the bitterness of failure.