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“Can a person, then, do any more than love? Have thought and language any higher expression for loving than always to give thanks? Not at all, it has a lower, a humbler expression. Even the person who is always willing to give thanks nevertheless loves according to his own perfection, and a person can truly love God only when he loves him according to his own imperfection. Which love is this? It is the love that is born of repentance, which is more beautiful than any other love, for in it you love God. It is more faithful and more fervent than all other love, for in repentance it is God who loves you.”

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Book:Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses
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“I cannot shut my eyes and plunge confidently into the absurd; that is for me an impossibility, but I do not praise myself for it. I am convinced that God is love; this thought has for me a primordial lyrical validity. When it is present to me I am unspeakably happy; when it is absent I long for it more intensely than the lover for the object of his love. But I do not believe; this courage I lack.”

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Book:Fear and Trembling
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“Love has many positionings. Cordelia makes good progress. She is sitting on my lap, her arm twines, soft and warm, round my neck; she leans upon my breast, light, without gravity; the soft contours scarcely touch me; like a flower her lovely figure twines about me, freely as a ribbon. Her eyes are hidden beneath her lashes, her bosom is dazzling white like snow, so smooth that my eye cannot rest, it would glance off if her bosom were not moving. What does this movement mean? Is it love? Perhaps. It is a presentiment of it, its dream. It still lacks energy. Her embrace is comprehensive, as the cloud enfolding the transfigured one, detached as a breeze, soft as the fondling of a flower; she kisses me unspecifically, as the sky kisses the sea, gently and quietly, as the dew kisses a flower, solemnly as the sea kisses the image of the moon. I would call her passion at this moment a naive passion. When the change has been made and I begin to draw back in earnest, she will call on everything she has to captivate me. She has no other means for this purpose than the erotic itself, except that this will now appear on a quite different scale. It then becomes a weapon in her hand which she wields against me. I then have the reflected passion. She fights for her own sake because she knows I possess the erotic; she fights for her own sake so as to overcome me. She herself is in need of a higher form of the erotic. What I taught her to suspect by arousing her, my coldness now teaches her to understand but in such a way that she thinks it is she herself who discovers it. So she wants to take me by surprise; she wants to believe that she has outstripped me in audacity, and that makes me her prisoner. Her passion then becomes specific, energetic, conclusive, dialectical; her kiss total, her embrace without hesitation.—In me she seeks her freedom and finds it the better the more firmly I encompass her. The engagement bursts. When that has happened she needs a little rest, so that nothing unseemly will emerge from this wild tumult. Her passion then composes itself once more and she is mine.” —from_Either/Or: A Fragment of Life_, (as written by his pseudonym Johannes the Seducer)”

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Author:Søren Kierkegaard
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“I am poor—you are my riches; dark—you are my light; I own nothing, need nothing. And how could I own anything? After all, it is a contradiction that he can own something who does not own himself. I am happy as a child who is neither able to own anything nor allowed to. I own nothing, for I belong only to you; I am not, I have ceased to be, in order to be yours.” —Johannes De Silentio, from_Either/Or_”

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Author:Søren Kierkegaard
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“The individual lives unperturbed, sufficient unto himself, but then the paradox of self-love is awakened through the love of another, the one desired. (Self-love lies at the foundation of, or goes to the foundation of, all love, which is why, if we would like to think of a religion of love, it would be just as epigrammatic as true that it would have to assume a condition and accept it as given: that a person loves himself in order to be able to demand that he love the neighbour as himself.) The lover is changed by this paradox of love, so that he hardly recognizes himself (this is witnessed to by poets, who are love’s spokesmen, as well as by lovers themselves, in that they allow poets to take only the floor from them, not their passion) So this imperceptibly sensed paradox of the understanding affects a person and his self-knowledge, so he who believed he knew himself is no longer certain whether he is a stranger creature than Typhon, or whether there is not in his being a milder and more divine part”

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Book:Philosophical Fragments/Johannes Climacus
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“Why can’t a night like that be longer? If Alectryon could put a foot wrong,101 why can’t the sun be compassionate enough to do the same? Still, now it is over and I want never to see her again. Once a girl has given away everything, she is weak, she has lost everything; for in the man innocence is a negative factor, while for the woman it is her whole worth. Now all resistance is impossible, and only when it is there is it beautiful to love; once it is gone, love is only weakness and habit. I do not wish to be reminded of my relation to her; she has lost her fragrance, and the time has gone when, for pain over her untrue lover, a girl is transformed into a heliotrope.102 I will not take leave of her; nothing disgusts me more than a woman’s tears and a woman’s prayers, which change everything yet are really of no consequence. I have loved her, but from now on she can no longer engage my soul. If I were a god I would do for her what Neptune did for a nymph: change her into a man. Nevertheless, it would really be worthwhile knowing whether one couldn’t poetize oneself out of a girl, whether one couldn’t make her so proud that she imagined it was she who had wearied of the relationship. It could become a quite interesting epilogue, which in its own right might be of psychological interest, and besides that, enrich one with many erotic observations.”

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Book:Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
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