Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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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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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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Every mental act is composed of doubt and belief, but it is belief that is the positive, it is belief that sustains thought and holds the world together.
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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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You wanted God's ideas about what was best for you to coincide with your ideas, but you also wanted him to be the almighty Creator of heaven and earth so that he could properly fulfill your wish. And yet, if he were to share your ideas, he would cease to be the almighty Father.
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Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.
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Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
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When you open the door which you shut in order to pray to God, the first person you meet as you go out is your neighbour whom you shall love. Wonderful!
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As I stood alone and forsaken, and the power of the sea and the battle of the elements reminded me of my own nothingness, and on the other hand, the sure flight of the birds recalled the words spoken by Christ: Not a sparrow shall fall on the ground without your Father: then, all at once, I felt how great and how small I was; then did those two mighty forces, pride and humility, happily unite in friendship.
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If you want to be loathsome to God, just run with the herd.
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I found I had less and less to say, until finally, I became silent, and began to listen. I discovered in the silence, the voice of God.
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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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Destroy your primitivity, and you will most probably get along well in the world, maybe achieve great success--but Eternity will reject you. Follow up your primitivity, and you will be shipwrecked in temporality, but accepted by Eternity.
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If I were a physician, and if I were allowed to prescribe just one remedy for all the ills of the modern world, I would prescribe silence. For even if the Word of God were proclaimed in the modern world, how could one hear it with so much noise? Therefore, create silence.
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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. If I wish to preserve myself in faith I must constantly be intent upon holding fast the objective uncertainty so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of water, still preserving my faith.
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Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
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There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves.
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Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?
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Absolute passion cannot be understood by a third party.
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Theology sits rouged at the window and courts philosophy's favor, offering to sell her charms to it.
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Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.
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A man who cannot seduce men cannot save them either.
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Jurists say that a capital crime submerges all lesser crimes; and so it is with faith. Its absurdity makes all petty difficultiesvanish.
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The meaning lies in the appropriation.