Soren Kierkegaard — "Despair is the sickness unto death."
Despair is the sickness unto death.
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More from Soren Kierkegaard
"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 intende…"
"The knight of faith is the only happy man, the heir of the finite, whereas the knight of infinite resignation is a stranger and a sojourner."
"What is terrible is not death, but the lives people live or don't live up to their death."
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About Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Danish philosopher and theologian considered the founder of existentialism; Either/Or (1843) and Fear and Trembling (1843) explored the leap of faith. Closely associated with Friedrich Nietzsche (his existentialist successor working in the opposite theological direction) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (literary parallel exploring faith-and-despair). For an intellectual contrast, see G.W.F. Hegel, German Idealist of the totalizing system — Kierkegaard called Hegel's system a 'palatial residence' that nobody could actually live in — his entire authorship is structured against Hegelian abstraction in favor of the existing individual's inwardness.
The standard scholarly entry points to Soren Kierkegaard's work: Joakim Garff (University of Copenhagen, Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre) — Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography (2000); Walter Lowrie (Princeton, his major postwar English translator) — A Short Life of Kierkegaard (1942); C. Stephen Evans (Baylor University, philosophy of religion) — Kierkegaard: An Introduction (2009). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Soren Kierkegaard.