Either/Or by Kierkegaard

“A kiss is a symbolic action which is unimportant when the feeling it should indicate is not present, and this feeling can only be present under certain conditions.”  (Either/Or:  VOL. I:  DIARY OF THE SEDUCER)

“A man who talks like a book is exceedingly tiresome to listen to; sometimes, however, it is quite appropriate to speak in that way.  For a book has the remarkable quality that you may interpret it as you wish.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  DIARY OF THE SEDUCER)

“A mirror hangs on the opposite wall; she does not reflect on it, but the mirror reflects her.  How faithfully it has caught her picture, like a humble slave who shows his devotion by his faithfulness, a slave for whom she indeed has significance, but who means nothing to her--who indeed dares to catch her, but not to embrace her.  Unhappy mirror, that can indeed seize her image but not herself!  Unhappy mirror, which cannot hide her image in its secret depths, hide it from the whole world, but on the contrary must betray it to others, as now to me.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  DIARY OF THE SEDUCER)

“A title can never be got rid of except by the commission of some crime which draws down on you a public whipping; even then you are not certain, for you may have it restored to you by royal pardon.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  THE ROTATION METHOD)

“Alas, there are many who are not engaged and yet have a lover; many who are engaged, and who still do not have one....”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  DIARY OF THE SEDUCER)

“...all men are bores.  Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  THE ROTATION METHOD)

“And now even if this is something which cannot be represented in art, let it be your comfort as it is mine that the highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, may be lived.”  (Either/Or, VOL. II:  THE AESTHETIC VALIDITY OF MARRIAGE)

“And this is the pitiful thing to one who contemplates human life, that so many live on in a quiet state of perdition; they outlive themselves, not in the sense that the content of life is successively unfolding and now is possessed in this expanded state, but they live their lives, as it were, outside of themselves, they vanish like shadows, their immortal soul is blown away, and they are not alarmed by the problem of its immortality, for they are already in a state of dissolution before they die.”  (Either/Or, VOL. II:  EQUILIBRIUM BETWEEN THE AESTHETICAL AND THE ETHICAL IN THE COMPOSITION OF PERSONALITY)

“But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.”  (Either/Or, VOL. II:  EQUILIBRIUM BETWEEN THE AESTHETIC AND THE ETHICAL IN THE COMPOSITION OF PERSONALITY)

“Could this lack in literature be due to the fact that philosophers do not consider such matters, or that they do not understand them?”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  DIARY OF THE SEDUCER)

“Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask?  Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked?  Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this?  Or are you not terrified by it?”  (Either/Or, VOL. II:  EQUILIBRIUM BETWEEN THE AESTHETIC AND THE ETHICAL IN THE COMPOSITION OF PERSONALITY)

“...every particular change will always come under the general categories of remembering and forgetting.  Life in its entirety moves in these two currents, and hence it is essential to have them under control.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  THE ROTATION METHOD)

“Forgetting is the shears with which you cut away what you cannot use, doing it under the supreme direction of memory.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  THE ROTATION METHOD)

“Forgetting is the true expression for an ideal process of assimilation by which the experience is reduced to a sounding-board for the soul's own music... As a result of attempting to forget only what is unpleasant, most people have a conception of oblivion as an untameable force which drowns out the past.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  THE ROTATION METHOD)

“From the beginning one should keep the enjoyment under control, never spreading every sail to the wind in any resolve; one ought to devote oneself to pleasure with a certain suspicion, a certain wariness, if one desires to give the lie to the proverb which says that no one can have his cake and eat it too.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  THE ROTATION METHOD)

“Here we have at once the principle of limitation, the only saving principle in the world.  The more you limit yourself, the more fertile you become in invention.  A prisoner in solitary confinement for life becomes very inventive, and a spider may furnish him with much entertainment.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  THE ROTATION METHOD)

“I do not see that which has been, but that which will be, in the bosom of the sea, in the kiss of the dew, in the mist that spreads over the earth and hides its fertile embrace... Everything finite and temporal is forgotten, only the eternal remains, the power of love, its longing, its happiness.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  DIARY OF THE SEDUCER)

“I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it:  That piece shall not be moved.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  DIAPSALMATA)

“I know too that the highest conceivable enjoyment lies in being loved; to be loved is higher than anything else in the world.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  DIARY OF THE SEDUCER)

“I really have conserved a certain faith in the reality of romantic love, a sort of reverence for it, accompanied by some feeling of sadness....After all, is it not beautiful to imagine that two beings are meant for one another?  How often one has felt the need of reaching out beyond the historical consciousness, a longing, a nostalgia for the primeval forest which lies behind us.  And does not this longing acquire a double significance when with it there is associated the conception of another being which also has its home in these regions.”  (Either/Or, VOL. II:  THE AESTHETIC VALIDITY OF MARRIAGE)

“Idleness is by no means as such a root of evil; on the contrary, it is a truly divine life, provided one is not himself bored.  Idleness may indeed cause the loss of one's fortune, and so on, but the high-minded man does not fear such dangers; he fears only boredom.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  THE ROTATION METHOD)

“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible.  Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.  And what wine is so foaming, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  DIAPSALMATA)

“If marriage has reality, then he is sufficiently punished by forfeiting this happiness; if it has no reality, it is absurd to abuse him because he is wiser than the rest.  When a man grows tired of his money and throws it out the window, we do not call him a scoundrel; for either money has reality, and so he is sufficiently punished by depriving himself of it, or it has none, and then he is, of course, a wise man.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  THE ROTATION METHOD)

“Let antiquity answer:  idem velle, idem nolle, ea demum firma amicitia ("To wish and not to wish the same thing--this at last is firm friendship"), and also extremely tiresome.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  THE ROTATION METHOD)

“Let others complain that the age is wicked; my complaint is that it is wretched, for it lacks passion.  Men's thoughts are thin and flimsy like lace, they are themselves pitiable like the lacemakers. The thoughts of their hearts are too paltry to be sinful... This is the reason my soul always turns back to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare.  I feel that those who speak there are at least human beings:  they hate, they love, they murder their enemies, and curse their descendants throughout all generations, they sin.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  DIAPSALMATA)

 “Music finds its way where the rays of the sun cannot penetrate.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  DIAPSALMATA)

“My either/or does not in the first instance denote the choice between good and evil, it denotes the choice whereby one chooses good and evil/or excludes them.  Here the question is under what determinants one would contemplate the whole of existence and would himself live.”  (Either/Or, VOL. II:  EQUILIBRIUM BETWEEN THE AESTHETICAL AND THE ETHICAL IN THE COMPOSTION OF PERSONALITY)

 “My young friend, suppose there was no one who troubled himself to guess your riddle--what joy, then, would you have in it?”  (Either/Or, VOL. II:  EQUILIBRIUM BETWEEN THE AESTHETICAL AND THE ETHICAL IN THE COMPOSITION OF PERSONALITY)

 “One does not enjoy the immediate, but rather something which he can arbitrarily control.  You go to see the middle of a play, you read the third part of a book.  By this means you insure yourself a very different kind of enjoyment from that which the author has been so kind as to plan for you.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  THE ROTATION METHOD)

 “One who has perfected himself in the twin arts of remembering and forgetting is in a position to play at battledore and shuttlecock with the whole of existence.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  THE ROTATION METHOD)

 “Perhaps you will succeed without that in accomplishing much, perhaps even in astonishing the world... and yet you will miss the highest thing, the only thing which truly has significance--perhaps you will gain the whole world and lose your own self.”  (Either/Or, VOL. II:  EQUILIBRIUM BETWEEN THE AESTHETICAL AND THE ETHICAL IN THE COMPOSITION OF PERSONALITY)

 “She was preoccupied not with herself, but in herself, and this preoccupation afforded infinite rest and peace to her soul.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  DIARY OF THE SEDUCER)

 “So, like a Cato, I shout at you my either/or, and yet not like a Cato, for my soul has not yet acquired the resigned coldness which he possessed.  But I know that only this incantation, if I have the strength for it, will be capable of rousing you, not to an activity of thought, for of that you have no lack, but to earnestness of spirit.”  (Either/Or, VOL. II:  EQUILIBRIUM BETWEEN THE AESTHETICAL AND THE ETHICAL IN THE COMPOSITION OF PERSONALITY)

 “Something wonderful has happened to me.  I was carried up into the seventh heaven.  There all the gods sat assembled.  By special grace I was granted the favor of a wish.  ‘Will you,’ said Mercury, ‘have youth, or beauty, or power, or a long life, or the most beautiful maiden, or any of the other glories we have in the chest?  Choose, but only one thing.’  For a moment I was at a loss.  Then I addressed myself to the gods as follows:  ‘Most honorable contemporaries, I choose this one thing, that I may always have the laugh on my side.’  Not one of the gods said a word, on the contrary, they all began to laugh.  Hence I concluded that my request was granted, and found that the gods knew how to express themselves with taste; for it would hardly have been suitable for them to have answered gravely:  ‘It is granted thee.’ "  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  DIAPSALMATA)

 “The ability to forget is conditioned upon the method of remembering, but this again depends upon the mode of experiencing... No moment must be permitted a greater significance than that it can be forgotten when convenient; each moment ought, however, to have so much significance that it can be recollected at will.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  THE ROTATION METHOD)

“The essence of pleasure does not lie in the thing enjoyed, but in the accompanying consciousness.  If I had a humble spirit in my service, who, when I asked for a glass of water, brought me the world's costliest wines blended in a chalice, I should dismiss him, in order to teach him that pleasure consists not in what I enjoy, but in having my own way.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  DIAPSALMATA)

 “The lovers are sincerely convinced that their relationship is in itself a complete whole which never can be altered.  But since this assurance is founded only upon a natural determinant, the eternal is thus based upon the temporal and thereby cancels itself.”  (Either/Or, VOL. II:  THE AESTHETIC VALIDITY OF MARRIAGE)

 “The married man, being a true conqueror, has not killed time but has saved it and preserved it in eternity.  The married man who does this truly lives poetically.  He solves the great riddle of living in eternity and yet hearing the hall clock strike, and hearing it in such a way that the stroke of the hour does not shorten but prolong his eternity.”  (Either/Or, VOL. II:  THE AESTHETIC VALIDITY OF MARRIAGE)

 “...the personality announces its inner infinity...” (Either/Or, VOL. II:  EQUILIBRIUM BETWEEN THE AESTHETICAL AND THE ETHICAL IN THE COMPOSITION OF PERSONALITY)

 “The so-called social pleasures for which we prepare a week or two in advance amount to so little; on the other hand, even the most insignificant thing may accidentally offer rich material for amusement... Even the most completely developed theory is poverty-stricken compared with the fullness which the man of genius easily discovers in his ubiquity.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  THE ROTATION METHOD)

 “There are men who have an extraordinary talent for transforming everything into a matter of business, whose whole life is business, who fall in love, marry, listen to a joke, and admire a picture with the same industrious zeal with which they labor during business hours.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  THE ROTATION METHOD)

 “Those who do not bore themselves are generally people who, in one way or another, keep themselves extremely busy; these people are precisely on this account the most tiresome, the most utterly unendurable.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  THE ROTATION METHOD)

 “Unhappy artist pair, do you know that these tones are an epitome of all the glories in the world?”  (about the song of a few poor street musicians;  Either/Or, VOL. I:  DIAPSALMATA)

“What is youth?  A dream.  What is love?  The substance of a dream.”  (Either/Or, VOL. I:  DIAPSALMATA)

"Yes, I perceive perfectly that there are two possibilities, one can either do this or that.  My sincere opinion and my friendly counsel is as follows:  Do it, or don't do it--you will regret both."  (Either/Or, VOL. II:  EQUILIBRIUM BETWEEN THE AESTHETICAL AND THE ETHICAL IN THE COMPOSITION OF PERSONALITY)

 “Your misfortune is that you recognize love simply and solely by these visible signs.”  (Either/Or, VOL. II:  THE AESTHETIC VALIDITY OF MARRIAGE)