Soren Kierkegaard

I am a living demonstration of the fact that a man can remain a virgin until he is 30, and yet be a man.

What is a poet? An unhappy man who in his heart harbors a profound agony, but whose lips are so fashioned that the sounds that emerge from them are like the beautiful music of an organ.

My life is an inexplicable contradiction. I am one who has been made to smile by the thought of hanging myself.

The present state of the world and the whole of life is a big consolation for me. I may not be great, but I'm not the only one who's a failure.

I am so constituted that I am always trying to get rid of myself, so that I can be myself.

What is terrible is not death, but the lives people live or don't live up to their death.

Most men live in a world that is not their own, but one in which they have been placed by others.

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

The most tremendous energy of which human nature is capable is the agony of being a self.

The crowd is untruth.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

The greatest good to a human being is to be a human being.

The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.

To be a human being is to be in a state of eternal becoming, and that is why no one can capture himself in a definition.

The unhappy man is one who has the future for his present.

The true humorist does not want to reform the world, but to enjoy it.

A man who cannot weep is a man who cannot laugh.

The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen, but, if one will, are to be lived.

The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [is] that the relation relates itself to its own self.