• Every estate has its traitors, so too matrimony. Naturally I do not mean the seducers, for of course they have not entered into this holy estate (I trust the mood this inquiry meets you in doesn’t cause you to smile at that expression); I do not mean those who have left it through divorce, for they have at least had the courage to be openly rebellious. No, I mean those who are rebels only in thought, who do not even dare let it be expressed in action, these wretched husbands who sit and sigh over the fact that love has long ago evaporated from their marriage, these husbands who, as you once said of them, sit like lunatics each in his matrimonial cell, and tug at the iron bars and fantasize about the sweetness of betrothal and the bitterness of marriage, these husbands who, as you rightly observe, are among those to con-gratulate, with a certain malicious glee, anyone who gets engaged. I cannot describe how despicable they appear to me, and how much unholy joy it gives me when such a husband confides in you and pours out all his sufferings, rattling off all his lies about the happy first love, and you say with a knowing look, ‘Yes, I’ll make sure not to get onto thin ice’, and he is all the more embittered that he can’t drag you with him into a common shipwreck. It is these husbands you so often refer to when you speak of a tender paterfamilias with four blessed children he would sooner see in hell.

    Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
    Søren Kierkegaard

  • For is not melancholy the defect of our time, is this not what reverberates even in its frivolous laughter, is it not melancholy that has bereft us of the courage to command, the courage to obey, the strength to act, the confidence to hope?

    Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
    Søren Kierkegaard

  • Every mood, every thought, good or evil, cheerful or sad, you pursue to its farthest limit, yet more in abstraction than concretely, so the pursuit is itself more like a mood from which nothing results except the knowledge of it, though not enough to make it more difficult or easy next time to abandon yourself to that same mood; for you keep it as a constant possibility.

    Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
    Søren Kierkegaard

  • But bear in mind your life is passing; there will come a time even for you when it draws to its close, when you are offered no further ways out in life, when recollection is all that is left. Yes, recollection, but not in the way you so much love it, this mixture of poesy and truth, but the serious and faithful recollection of conscience.

    Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
    Søren Kierkegaard

  • As an experienced sailor always looks out searchingly over the water and sees a squall far ahead, so should one always see the mood a little in advance. One must know how the mood affects oneself, and in all probability others, before putting it on.

    Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
    Søren Kierkegaard

  • One never accepts any vocational responsibility. If one does so, one simply becomes Mr Anybody, a tiny little pivot in the machinery of the corporate state; you cease to direct your own affairs, and then theories can be of little help. One acquires a title, and in it is contained all the consistency of sin and evil. The law one is then in thrall to is equally boring, whether promotion is rapid or slow. A title is something one can never be rid of again, it would have to be lost through some crime which incurs a public whipping, and even then you are not certain, for you may be pardoned and have your title restored to you by royal decree. Though one abstains from vocational responsibility, one should not be inactive but stress all occupation that is identical with idleness; one must engage in all kinds of breadless skills. Yet in this connection one should develop oneself not so much extensively as intensively, and in spite of being on in years, prove the truth of the old proverb that it takes little to please a child.

    Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
    Søren Kierkegaard

  • If one enjoys without reservation to the last, if one always takes with one the most that pleasure can offer, one will be unable either to remember or to forget.

    Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
    Søren Kierkegaard

  • The more you limit yourself, the more resourceful you become.

    Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
    Søren Kierkegaard

  • For my wisdom is really not zum für Jedermann, and it is always more prudent to keep one’s rules of prudence to oneself. Disciples, then, I have no wish for, but should someone happen to be present at my deathbed, and if I was sure it was all over with me, I might perhaps in a fit of philanthropic delirium whisper my teaching in his ear, uncertain whether I had done him a service or not.

    Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
    Søren Kierkegaard

  • This rotation is the vulgar, the inartistic method, and is based on an illusion. One is tired of living in the country, one moves to the city; one is tired of one’s native land, one travels abroad; one is europamüde, one goes to America, and so on; finally, one indulges in a dream of endless travel from star to star.

    …

    No, Antonine was wiser; he says, ‘It is in your power to review your life, to look at things you saw before, from another point of view.’ The method I propose consists not in changing the soil but, as in the real rotation of crops, in changing the method of cultivation and type of grain.

    Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
    Søren Kierkegaard