Well, I'm working on my PhD at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and since my thesis subject is Søren Kierkegaard, I thought it would be worthwhile to give those who aren't familiar with his writing an occasional passage to hopefully give a sense of his depth and brilliance as a philosopher, a theologian, a psychologist, and, most of all, a real person. Nothing fancy, just something from his writing that catches me as particularly worthwhile. Given, Kierkegaard isn't really meant for sound bites, but it's a start.
I'll try to let passages stand on their own, but if there's anything worth adding, I will. And I'll try to post new passages every couple days or so. Feel free to comment, ask questions, etc.
All excerpts are from the Princeton translations (Kierkegaard's Writings) by Howard and Edna Hong. If you like the passage, you can buy the related book at http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/series/kw.html
So, here we go. This first passage is from a letter Kierkegaard wrote to his brother-in-law, before his "official" writing career began. He was 22 at the time, just about to graduate from the University of Copenhagen and trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life:
"What I really need is to get clear about what I am to do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find my purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth that is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die...of what use would it be to me to be able to formulate the meaning of Christianity, to be able to explain many specific points - if it had no deeper meaning for me and for my life...I certainly do not deny that I still accept an imperative of knowledge and that through it men may be influenced, but then it must come alive in me, and this is what I now recognize as the most important of all."
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