Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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To the frivolous Christianity is certainly not glad tidings, for it wishes first of all to make them serious.
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In actuality, no one ever sank so deep that he could not sink deeper, and there may be one or many who sank deeper. So it is always possible to be happy and grateful that things are not worse!
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Geniuses are like thunderstorms: they go against the wind, terrify people, clear the air.
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For like a poisonous breath over the fields, like a mass of locusts over Egypt, so the swarm of excuses is a general plaque, a ruinous infection among men, that eats off the sprouts of the Eternal.
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About as genuine as tea made from a bit of paper which once lay in a drawer beside another piece of paper which had been used to wrap up a few tea leaves from which tea had already been made three times.
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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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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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In a mathematical proposition, for example, the objectivity is given, but therefore its truth is also an indifferent truth.
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Shows itself in the notion that what may be objectively true may in the mouth of certain people become false.
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Let others mock at you, oppose you, when you are under the influence of any passion; do not be in the least offended with those who mock at or oppose you, for they do you good; crucify your self-love and acknowledge the wrong, the error of your heart. But have the deepest pity for those who mock at words and works of faith and piety, of righteousness; for those who oppose the good which you are doing... God preserve you - getting exasperated at them.
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I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing.
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The person who praises God is on the tracks of justice.
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The melancholy have the best sense of the comic, the opulent often the best sense of the rustic, the dissolute often the best sense of the moral, and the doubter often the best sense of the religious.
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Thus our own age is essentially one of understanding, and on the average, perhaps, more knowledgeable than any former generation, but it is without passion. Every one knows a great deal, we all know which way we ought to go and all the different ways we can go, but nobody is willing to move.
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To despair over one's sins indicates that sin has become or wants to be internally consistent. It wants nothing to do with the good, does not want to be so weak as to listen occasionally to other talk. No, it insists on listening only to itself, on having dealings only with itself; it closes itself up within itself, indeed, locks itself inside one more inclosure, and protects itself against every attack or pursuit by the good by despairing over sin.
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The individual, no matter how well-meaning he might be, no matter how much strength he might have, if only he would use it, does not have the passion to rip himself away from either the coils of Reflection or the seductive ambiguities of Reflection; nor do the surroundings and times have any events or passions, but rather provide a negative setting of a habit of reflection, which plays with some illusory project only to betray him in the end with a way out: it shows him that the most clever thing to do is nothing at all.
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The conclusions of passion are the only reliable ones.
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Without risk, faith is an impossibility.
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The question is not "To be or not to be," it is what we should be until we are not.
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Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.
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At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.
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In order to help another effectively, I must understand what he understands. If I do not know that, my greater understanding will be of no help to him... instruction begins when you put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and in the way he understands it.
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Any truth is only true up to a certain point. When one oversteps the mark, it becomes a non-truth.
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The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply, 'Create silence'.