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Soren Kierkegaard, The Real Problem

Posthumous Papers, Danish edition, Volume IX B, p.10

      ALL EUROPE, with the haste of a growing passion, is losing itself in worldly problems which can only be solved by the Divine and which Christianity alone could answer, indeed which it answered a long time ago. Since the emergence of the Fourth State - that is to say, all men - it has been impossible to move even a step nearer to the solution of the problem of equality between men, in a world where diversity is the essence; yes, even if all circulation in Europe were interrupted, if we had to swim in blood, if all our ministers lost their sleep from having to think, and if ten of them lost their reason every day, while another ten took up the problem where they had left off, only to go mad themselves - that way is barred forever; and this frontier laughs at human efforts, laughs at the pettiness of the world in the face of the supreme and lordly right of the eternal when the temporal claims to explain in worldly terms that which must remain an enigma for all time, and which only the Eternal can and will explain. The problem is religious...

Kierkegaard, The Present Age -
 
Nowadays not even a suicide kills himself in desperation. Before taking the step he deliberates so long and so carefully that he literally chokes with thought. It is even questionable whether he ought to be called a suicide, since it is really thought which takes his life. He does not die with deliberation but from deliberation.
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Let others complain that the times are wicked. I complain that they are paltry; for they are without passion. The thoughts of men are thin and frail like lace, and they themselves are feeble like girl lace-makers. The thoughts of their hearts are too puny to be sinful. For a worm it might conceivably be regarded a sin to harbor thoughts such as theirs, not for a man who is formed in the image of God. Their lusts are staid and sluggish, their passions sleepy; they do their duty, these sordid minds, but permit themselves, as did the Jews, to trim the coins just the least little bit, thinking that if our Lord keep tab of them ever so carefully one might yet safely venture to fool him a bit. Fye upon them! It is therefore my soul ever returns to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There at least one feels that one is dealing with men and women; there one hates and loves, there one murders one's enemy and curses his issue through all generations—there one sins.