Soren Kierkegaard — "The most tremendous energy of which the world is capable is the spiritual energy…"
The most tremendous energy of which the world is capable is the spiritual energy of a man who is in despair.
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More from Soren Kierkegaard
"It is not the path I have chosen, but the path I am choosing."
"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…"
"Despair is the sickness unto death, this tormenting contradiction, this sickness in the self; it is to be eternally dying, to die and yet not die, to die the death."
"The more a person has developed his mind, the more he is capable of being depressed."
"The most dreadful thing that can happen to a man is to become a number."
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.