Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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Maturity consists in the discovery that there comes a critical moment where everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand more and more that there is something which cannot be understood.
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Certainty... lurks at the door of faith and threatens to devour it.
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Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm and shrewdly relapsing into repose.
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Irony is the cultivation of the spirit and therefore follows next after immediacy; then comes the ethicist, then the humourist, then the religious person.
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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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Hope is passion for what is possible.
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My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have had.
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Dread is a womanish debility in which freedom swoons. Psychologically speaking, the fall into sin always occurs in impotence. But dread is at the same time the most egotistic thing.
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Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth - look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.
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It is very dangerous to go into eternity with possibilities which one has oneself prevented from becoming realities. A possibility is a hint from God. One must follow it.
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Who is also aware of the tremendous risk involved in faith - when he nevertheless makes the leap of faith - this is subjectivity ... at its height.
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The human race in the course of time has taken the liberty of softening and softening Christianity until at last we have contrived to make it exactly the opposite of what it is in the New Testament.
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Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?
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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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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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Preparation for becoming attentive to Christianity does not consist in reading many books ... but in fuller immersion in existence.
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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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A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized prayer is listening.
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When you were called, did you answer or did you not? Perhaps softly and in a whisper?
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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 there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?
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The person who praises God is on the tracks of justice.
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If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!
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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.