I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; wit poured from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me–but I went away– and wan… - Søren Kierkegaard

The life-giving Spirit is the very one who slays you; the first thing the life-giving Spirit says is that you must enter into death, that you must die to – it is this way in order that you many not take Christianity in vain. A life-giving Spirit – that is the invitation; who would not willingly take hold of it! But die first – that is the halt!

An authorship that began with Either/Or and advanced step by step seeks here its decisive place of rest, at the foot of the altar, where the author, personally most aware of his own imperfections and guilt, certainly does not call himself a truth-witness but only a singular kind of poet and thinker who, without authority, has had nothing new to bring but “has wanted once again to read through, if possible in a more inward way, the original text handed down from the fathers” Preface P. 165

What we call worldliness simply consists of such people who, if one may so express it, pawn themselves to the world.