Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a Danish theologian, philosopher, poet, social critic, and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christianity, morality, ethics, psychology, love, and the philosophy of religion, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony, and parables. Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives as a "single individual", highlighting the importance of authenticity, personal choice and commitment, and the duty to love. Kierkegaard prioritized concrete human reality over abstract thinking.

Quotes

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart it torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say. "May new sufferings torment your soul."
And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
The most painful state of living is remembering the future.
Of all tyrannies democracy is the most agonizing, the most inane, the absolute fall of everything great and elevated.
Fixed ideas are like a cramp in the foot - the best remedy against it is to tread on it.
Alas! While the speculative honourable professor explains the entire existence has he in distraction forgotten his own name, that he is a man, purely and simply a man, not a fantastic 3
8 of a paragraph.
If you marry you will regret it. If you do not marry you will regret it. If you marry or do not marry, you will regret it.
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

Freedom
Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.
Prayer does not change God, but changes him who prays.
If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of potential -- for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints; possibility never.
Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.

Laziness
If a man cannot forget, he will never amount to much.
There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves.
In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant. My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known -- no wonder, then, that I return the love.
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.