Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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One can advise comfortably from a safe port.
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It is modest of the nightingale not to require anyone to listen to it; but it is also proud of the nightingale not to care whether any one listens to it or not.
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There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse.
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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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All the shrewdness of 'man' seeks one thing: to be able to live without responsibility.
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There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life's highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.
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Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.
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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'.
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You love the accidental. A smile from a pretty girl in an interesting situation, a stolen glance, that is what you are hunting for, that is a motif for your aimless fantasy. You who always pride yourself on being an observateur must, in return, put up with becoming an object of observation. Ah, you are a strange fellow, one moment a child, the next an old man; one moment you are thinking most earnestly about the most important scholarly problems, how you will devote your life to them, and the next you are a lovesick fool. But you are a long way from marriage.
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To defend something is always to discredit it. Let a man have a warehouse full of gold, let him be willing to give away a ducat to every one of the poor - but let him also be stupid enough to begin this charitable undertaking of his with a defense in which he offers three good reasons in justification; and it will almost come to the point of people finding it doubtful whether indeed he is doing something good. But now for Christianity. Yes, the person who defends that has never believed in it.
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Prayer is a silent surrendering of everything to God.
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A good decision is our will to do everything we can within our power. It means to serve God with all we've got, be it little or much. Every person can do that.
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The resolving of the ethical, is freedom; the negative resolution also has this, but the freedom, blank and bare, is as if tongue-tied, hard to express, and generally has something hard in its nature. Falling in love, however, promptly sets it to music, even if this composition contains a very difficult passage.
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Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, who so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility.
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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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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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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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Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.
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To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking him.
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People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
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The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
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What labels me, negates me.
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It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward- looking position.
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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.