For the divine authority of the Gospel speaks not to one man about another man, not to you, the reader, about me, or to me about you — no, when the gospel speaks it speaks to the single individual. It does not speak about us men, you and me, but it speaks to us men, you and me, and it speaks about the requirement that love shall be known by its fruits.

How beautiful it is — what what betokens the deepest poverty likewise signifies the greatest riches! Need, to have need, and to be needy — how reluctantly a man wishes this to be said of him! And yet we pay the highest compliment when we say of a poet —“It is a need for him to write,” of a girl —“It is a need for her to love.” Alas, even the most needy person who has ever lived — if he still has love, how rich his life has been in comparison with him, the only really poor person, who lived out his life and never felt the need of anything.

For what the poet shall celebrate must have in it the anguish which is the riddle of his own life: it must blossom and, alas, must perish. But Christian love abides and for that very reason is Christian love. For what perishes blossoms and what blossoms perishes, but that which has being cannot be sung about — it must be believed and lived.

Which deception is more dangerous? Whose recover more doubtful, that of him who does not see or of him who sees and still does not see?

The majority of men are subjective towards themselves and objective towards all others, terribly objective sometimes — but the real task is in fact to be objective towards oneself and subjective towards all others.

With the invitation to all “who labor and are burdened,” Christianity did not come into the world as a showpiece of gentle comfort, as the preacher so blubberingly and falsely introduces it — but as the absolute. It is out of love that God so wills it, but it is also God who wills it, and he wills as he wills. He wills not to be transformed by human beings into a cozy — a human god; he wills to transform human beings, and he wills it out of love.

But where this humble consciousness of personally being a sinner (this single individual) is lacking — well, if a person such as that otherwise possessed all human wisdom and sagacity and all human gifts, it will be of only little benefit to him. To the same extent Christianity, terrifying, will rise up against him and transform him itself into madness or horror until he either learns to give up Christianity or — by means of what is anything but scholarly propaedeutics, apologetics, etc., by means of the anguish of a contrite conscience, all in proportion to his need — learns to enter into Christianity by the narrow way, through the consciousness of sin.