Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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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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People try to persuade us that the objections against Christianity spring from doubt. That is a complete misunderstanding. The objections against Christianity spring from insubordination, the dislike of obedience, rebellion against all authority. As a result, people have hitherto been beating the air in their struggle against objections, because they have fought intellectually with doubt instead of fighting morally with rebellion.
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But the life of freedom requires a beginning, and here a beginning is a resolution, and the resolution has its work and its pain-thus the beginning has its difficulty.
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Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.
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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 reason for this age's anxiety and unrest is because in one direction, 'truth' increases in scope and quantity - via science and technology - while in the other, certainty and confidence steadily decline. Our age is a master in developing truths while being wholly indifferent to certitude. It lacks confidence in the good.
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Without risk, faith is an impossibility.
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The most common despair is...not choosing, or willing, to be oneself...but the deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than oneself.
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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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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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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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Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, who so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility.
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Only one human being recognized as one's neighbour is necessary in order to cure a man of self-love.
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All the shrewdness of 'man' seeks one thing: to be able to live without responsibility.
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Christ has not only spoken to us by his life but has also spoken for us by his death.
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I have only one friend, and that is echo. Why is it my friend? Because I love my sorrow, and echo does not take it away from me. I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night. Why is it my confidant? Because it remains silent.
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There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse.
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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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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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The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
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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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The highest of all is not to understand the highest but to act upon it.
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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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Worldly wisdom thinks that love is a relationship between man and man. Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between man-God-man, that is, that God is the middle term.