Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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Whoever has the world's treasures has them no matter how he got them. In the world of the spirit it is otherwise.
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The task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted.
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Without risk, faith is an impossibility.
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I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing.
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Teach me, God, not to torture myself, not to make a martyr out of myself through stifling reflection, but rather teach me to breathe deeply in faith.
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God has given each of us our "marching order." Our purpose here on Earth is to find those orders and carry them out. Those orders acknowledge our special gifts.
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Genius never desires what does not exist.
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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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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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But doubt is wily and cunning and never, as it is sometimes said to be, loud or defiant. It is unassuming and sly, not bold or assertive - and the more unassuming, the more dangerous.
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Christians remind me of schoolboys who want to look up the answers to their math problems in the back of the book rather than work them through.
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The stone that was rolled before Christ's tomb might appropriately be called the philosopher's stone because its removal gave not only the pharisees but, now for 1800 years, the philosophers so much to think about.
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It is more blessed to give than to receive, but then it is also more blessed to be able to do without than to have to have.
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It is very important in life to know when your cue comes.
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Learning to know anxiety is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known anxiety or by sinking under it. He therefore who has leaned rightly to be in anxiety has learned the most important thing.
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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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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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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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There is peace and rest and comfort in sorrow.
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Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.
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Adversity not only draws people together, but brings forth that beautiful inward friendship.
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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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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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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.