Kierkegaard on How to Save Yourself

“I am, in the deepest sense, an unhappy individual who since my earliest days have been nailed fast to some suffering close to insanity.”

All of our creative work is our coping mechanism for life. Art is just what we call our instruments of self-salvation. It may touch other lives, salve and save them even, but it is always at bottom a private lifeline.

Søren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813–November 11, 1855) had barely set foot into his twenties when he began arriving at this recognition in his own ...