Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

"Battle day and night against the guile of oblivion..."

"Hope is a passion for the possible."

"Theology sits rouged at the window and courts philosophy's favor, offering to sell her charms to it."

"He who loved himself became great in himself, and he who loved others became great through his devotion, but he who loved God became greater than all."

"For with his little secret that he cannot divulge, the poet buys this power of the word to tell everybody else's dark secrets. A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil."

"But we are curious about the result, just as we are curious about the way a book turns out. We do not want to know anything about the anxiety, the distress, the paradox. We carry on an esthetic flirtation with the result. It arrives just as unexpectedly but also just as effortlessly as a prize in a lottery, and when we have heard the result, we have built ourselves up."

"It takes a purely human courage to renounce the whole temporal realm in order to gain eternity, but this I do gain and in all eternity can never renounce—it is a self-contradiction. But it takes a paradoxical and humble courage to grasp the whole temporal realm now by virtue of the absurd, and this is the courage of faith."

"Faith is a marvel, and yet no human being is excluded from it; for that in which all human life is united is passion, and faith is a passion."

"For he who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God."

"If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin."

"If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?"