It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived f… - Søren Kierkegaard

Life can only be understood going backward, but must be lived going forward.

Anxiety and nothing always correspond to each other. As soon as the actuality of freedom and of spirit is posited, anxiety is canceled. But what then does the nothing of anxiety signify more particularly in paganism. This is fate. Fate is a relation to spirit as external. It is the relation between spirit and something else that is not spirit and to which fate nevertheless stands in a spiritual relation. Fate may also signify exactly the opposite, because it is the unity of necessity and accidental. ... A necessity that is not conscious of itself is eo ipso the accidental in relation to the next moment. Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.

If we ask what poetry is
we may say in general that it is
a victory over the world;
it is through a negation of the
imperfect actuality
that poetry opens up
a higher actuality

My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have had.