Unfortunately, my life is far too subjunctive; would to God I had some indicative power.
—Journals, 1837

I sit and listen to the sounds in my inner being, the happy intimations of music, the deep, earnestness of the organ.
—Journals, 1843

He did not belong to reality, and yet he had much to do with it.
—Diary of the Seducer, 1843

What an impression Kierkegaard makes when you first read him! Especially, I must add, if that first time happens to occur in adolescence. How electrifying, at that time of life, to encounter the statement “Subjectivity is truth.” Perhaps you had suspected that all along. But to have it indited there in black and white in the middle of a 576-page book of philosophy called Concluding Unscientific Postscript is something else again. (Actually, the book is called Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments: A Mimic-Pathetic-Dialectic Composition, An Existential Contribution, a deliberately parodic title that somehow makes the proposition that “Subjectivity is truth” even more impressive.)

In one way or another, the explosive idea that “subjectivity is truth” is the guiding theme in Kierkegaard’s thought. In an early journal entry—written in 1835, eleven years before the Concluding Unscientific Postscript was published—the twenty-two-year-old Kierkegaard decided that

What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. . . . [T]he crucial thing is to find a truth