The Essential Kierkegaard

My life is utterly meaningless

In the deepest sense you shall make yourself nothing, become nothing before God, learn to be silent. In this silence is the beginning, which is to seek first God's kingdom

How sterile my soul and my mind are, and yet constantly tormented by empty voluptuous and excruciating labor pains!

My life achievement amounts to nothing at all, a mood, a single color

People do say that now to know oneself is a deception and an imperfection, but often they are unwilling to understand that someone who actually knows himself perceives precisely that he is not capable of anything at all

Think of a sinner who is sinking in the abyss; listen to his cry of anguish when with his last groan he vindicates the justice his life has mocked and says: It is self-inflicted

What matters is to find my purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth that is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die

People's thoughts are as thin and fragile as lace, and they themselves as pitiable as lace-making girls

As soon as the single individual asserts himself in his singularity before the universal, he sins; and only by acknowledging this can he be reconciled again with the universal

Only in much fear and trembling is a human being able to speak with God, in much fear and trembling

When you read God's Word, in everything you read, continually to say to yourself: It is I to whom it is speaking, it is I about whom it is speaking—this is earnestness, precisely this is earnestness

Imitation, which corresponds to Christ as prototype, must be advanced, be affirmed, be called to our attention

The truth is: to become a Christian is to become, humanly speaking, unhappy for this life; the proportion is: the more you involve yourself with God and the more he loves you, the more you will become, humanly speaking, unhappy for this life, the more you will come to suffer in this life

Remember, one lives only once; if it is neglected, if you do not come to suffer, if you avoid it—it is eternally irreparable

There is a loss that is eternally irreparable; thus eternity—even more frightful—far from wiping out the recollection of what is lost, is an eternal recollection of what is lost!

Oh, to what degree human beings would become—human and lovable beings—if they would become single individuals before God!

Consequently, for us light-minded and unstable human beings there is sheer fear and trembling in this thought of God's changelessness