Selections from the Writings of Kierkegaard

The benefits of education and of useful knowledge, generally diffused through a community, are essential to the preservation of a free government.
Sam Houston
Cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy.... It is the only dictator that freemen acknowledge and the only security that free-men desire.
Mirabeau B. Lamar
To my Father-in-Law The Reverend George Fisher, A Christian
It is the purpose of this book to remedy the defect in a measure, and by a selection from his most representative works to provide a stimulus for a more detailed study of his writings; for the present times, ruled by material considerations, wholly led by socializing, and misled by national, ideals are precisely the most opportune to introduce the bitter but wholesome antidote of individual responsibility, which is his message. In particular, students of Northern literature cannot afford to know no more than the name of one who exerted a potent and energizing influence on an important epoch of Scandinavian thought. To mention only one instance, the greatest ethical poem of our age, Brand —notwithstanding Ibsen's curt statement that he had read little of Kierkegaard and understood less —undeniably owes its fundamental thought to him, whether directly or indirectly.
Of very few authors can it be said with the same literalness as, of Kierkegaard that their life is their works: as if to furnish living proof of his untiring insistance on inwardness, his life, like that of so many other spiritual educators of the race, is notably poor in incidents; but his life of inward experiences is all the richer—witness the literature within a literature that came to be within a few years and that gave to Danish letters a score of immortal works.
Nowhere does Kierkegaard speak of his mother, a woman of simple mind and cheerful disposition; but he speaks all the more often of his father, for whom he ever expressed the greatest love and admiration and who, no doubt, devoted himself largely to the education of his sons, particularly to that of his latest born. Him he was to mould in his own image. A pietistic, gloomy spirit of religiosity pervaded the household in which the severe father was undisputed master, and absolute obedience the watchword. Little Sören, as he himself tells us, heard more of the Crucified and the martyrs than of the Christ-child and good angels. Like John Stuart Mill, whose early education bears a remarkable resemblance to his, he never had the joy to be a child. Although less systematically held down to his studies, in which religion was the be-all and end-all (instead of being banished, as was the case with Mill), he was granted but a minimum of out-door play and exercise. And, instead of strengthening the feeble body, his father threw the whole weight of his melancholy on the boy.