Søren Kierkegaard Quotes

“There are productive spirits who require many and great destinies or experience in order to produce a small work. There is a kind of poet who, from a hundred pounds of rose leaves, produces one drop of attar of roses. And on the other hand, there are talents whose nature is so fruitful, whose inner climate is so tropical, that from a quite plain everyday life situation, which they experience with the highest energy, they extract whole series of important works. They are like those treeless islands in the Pacific on which passengers from a passing ship leave some fruit-kernels, and which many years later are covered with mighty forests. Kierkegaard belonged to the latter kind.”
― Georg Brandes, Søren Kierkegaard

“In this relationship he was, as odd as it sounds, the passive, the young girl the active force. He approached her; in a trice her nature fertilized his inner being. From that moment on he cannot but help it that she becomes unnecessary for his life.”
― Georg Brandes, Søren Kierkegaard

“He is amazed that he longed so deeply for the young girl when she was not there, that he was really happier sitting alone and thinking about her than when she was there. He needed her not for loving her ... yes, sometimes it was as though her presence could be disturbing for him. He also wrote to her rather than spoke. He had lived far too inwardly, far too spiritually, for this sensual nearness not to be as though too much.”
― Georg Brandes, Søren Kierkegaard