Bill Mclellan

“Only in the ethical is there immortality and an eternal life; otherwise understood, the world-historical is perhaps a spectacle, a spectacle which perhaps endures—but the spectator dies, and his contemplation of the spectacle was perhaps a highly significant way of killing time.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript: to Philosophical Fragments

“Suppose a man wished to communicate the conviction that the God-relationship of the individual is a secret. Suppose he were what we are accustomed to call a kindly soul, who loved others so much that he simply could not keep this to himself; suppose he nevertheless had sense enough to feel a little of the contradiction involved in communicating it directly, and hence told it to others only under a pledge of secrecy: what then? Then he must either have assumed that the disciple was wiser than his teacher, so that he could really keep the secret while the teacher could not (beautiful satire upon being a teacher!); or he must have become so overwhelmed with the bliss of galimatias that he did not notice the contradiction.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript: to Philosophical Fragments

“The present writer is nothing of a philosopher; he is, poetice et eleganter, an amateur writer who neither writes the System nor promises of the System, who neither subscribes to the System nor ascribes anything to it. He writes because for him it is a luxury which becomes the more agreeable and more evident, the fewer there are who buy and read what he writes. He can easily foresee his fate in an age when passion has been obliterated in favor of learning, in an age when an author who wants to have readers must take care to write in such a way that the book can easily be perused during the afternoon nap, and take care to fashion his outward deportment in likeness to the picture of that polite young gardener in the advertisement sheet, who with hat in hand, and with a good certificate from the place where he last served, recommends himself to the esteemed public.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“For it is great to give up one's wish, but it is greater to hold it fast after having given it up, it is great to grasp the eternal, but it is greater to hold fast to the temporal after having given it up.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling