Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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That which is truly human no generation learns from the one before it. No generation learns from another how to love. No generation has a shorter task assigned to it except insofar as the previous generation shirked its task and deluded itself.
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The greatest danger to Christianity is, I contend, not heresies, not heterodoxies, not atheists, not profane secularism - no, but the kind of orthodoxy which is cordial drivel, mediocrity served up sweet. There is nothing that so insidiously displaces the majestic as cordiality.
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There is peace and rest and comfort in sorrow.
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The truth is lived before it is understood. It must be fought for, tested, and appropriated. Truth is the way... Anyone will easily understand it if he just gives himself to it.
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One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical…for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.
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Backwards understood be only can but, forwards lived be must life.
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If you want to be loathsome to God, just run with the herd.
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My tactics were, by God's aid, to employ every means to make it clear what the requirement of Christianity truly is.
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However much one generation learns from another, it can never learn from its predecessor the genuinely human factor. In this respect every generation begins afresh. Thus no generation has learned from another how to love, no generation can begin other than at the beginning.
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Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
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No time of life is so beautiful as the early days of love, when with every meeting, every glance, one fetches something new home to rejoice over.
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The conclusions of passion are the only reliable ones.
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The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.
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Idleness, we are accustomed to say, is the root of all evil. To prevent this evil, work is recommended.... Idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; on the contrary, it is truly a divine life, if one is not bored.
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Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
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The absurd . . . the fact that with God all things are possible. The absurd is not one of the factors which can be discriminated within the proper compass of the understanding: it is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen.
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If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.
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Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.
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If anyone proposes to believe, i.e., imagines himself to believe, because many good and upright people living here on the hill have believed, i.e., have said that they believedthen he is a fool, and it is essentially indifferent whether he believes on account of his own and perhaps a widely held opinion about what good and upright people believe, or believes a Münchhausen.
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To the Christian, love is the works of love. To say that love is a feeling or anything of the kind is an unchristian conception of love. That is the aesthetic definition and therefore fits the erotic and everything of that nature. But to the Christian love is the works of love. Christ's love was not an inner feeling, a full heart and what not, it was the work of love which was his life.
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The person who praises God is on the tracks of justice.
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What a difference! Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient! when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular and infinitely boring.
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One can advise comfortably from a safe port.
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Had I to carve an inscription on my tombstone I would ask for none other than "The Individual."