“When one read’s Kierkegaard’s profound analyses of anxiety and despair or Nietzsche’s amazingly acute insights into the dynamics of resentment and the guilt and hostility which accompany repressed emotional powers, one might pinch oneself to realize that one is reading works written in the last century and not some new contemporary psychological analysis.”

— Rollo May

Source: The Discovery of Being (1983), p. 53

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Rollo May 135

US psychiatrist 1909–1994

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“Freud describes the neurotic personality of the late nineteenth century as one suffering from fragmentation – that is, from repression of instinctual drives, blocking off of awareness, loss of autonomy, weakness and passivity of the ego, together with the various neurotic symptoms which result from this fragmentation. “Kierkegaard-who wrote the only known book before Freud specifically devoted to the problem of anxiety-analyzes not only anxiety but particularly the depression and despair which result from the individual’s self-estrangement, an estrangement he proceeds to clarify in its different forms and degrees of severity. Nietzsche proclaims ten years before Freud’s first book that the disease of contemporary man is that “his soul had gone stale” he is – he describes how blocked instinctual powers turn within the individual into resentment, self-hatred, hostility and aggression. Freud did not know Kierkegaard’s work, but he regarded Nietzsche as one of the authentically great men of all time.””

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Discovery of Being (1983), p. 60-61

“Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

As quoted in "Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard on the ethico-religious" by Roe Fremstedal in Ideas in History Vol. 1 (2006) http://www.ideasinhistory.org/cms/index.php?page=wittgenstein-and-kierkegaard-on-the-ethico-religious
Attributed from posthumous publications

“I never read contemporary fiction – with one exception: the works of Simenon concerned with Inspector Maigret.”

Georges Simenon (1903–1989) Belgian writer

T. S. Eliot in the Sunday Times, 1952; cited from David Chinitz T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) p. 56
Criticism

“What sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which every one else is reading.”

Alice James (1848–1892) American diarist

As quoted in Alice James, Her Brothers — Her Journal (1934).

“… one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.”

Aldous Huxley book Crome Yellow

Source: Crome Yellow

“Anxiety was a philosophical concept before it taken up by psychology and psychiatry. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard (1813-1855) argued that anxiety is part of human nature. Anxiety arises where possibility and actuality come into contact and the present touches the future. Anxiety is a product of having the freedom to make choices and act, and by doing so make a commitment to one’s identity, ways of being in the world, and standing in relation to other people. For Kierkegaard, anxiety can be an avenue to stand in relation to God. This is why he wrote, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”
One can bracket out the God dimensions and still learn something valuable from Kierkegaard, namely that anxiety can cause inaction, which is, in its most basic sense, a loss of freedom. What is possible may never actualize and one may lose the present by tending to an imagined future. One becomes immobilized and unable to meet needs and realize goals and aspirations.”

Peg O'Connor (1965) American philosopher

"Anxiety Is a Part of Human Nature" https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/philosophy-stirred-not-shaken/201703/anxiety-is-part-human-nature, Psychology Today, (Mar 24, 2017).