Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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Prayer is a silent surrendering of everything to God.
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I am convinced that God is love, this thought has for me a primitive lyrical validity. When it is present to me, I am unspeakably blissful, when it is absent, I long for it more vehemently than does the lover for his object.
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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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Repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life.
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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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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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It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important.
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Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.
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To be a woman is something so strange, so confusing and so complicated that only a woman could put up with it.
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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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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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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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Those who dream must be awakened, and the deeper the people are who slumber, or the deeper they slumber, the more important it is that they be awakened, and the more powerfully must they be awakened.
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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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It is (to describe it figuratively) as if an author were to make a slip of the pen, and as if this clerical error became conscious of being such. Perhaps this was no error but in a far higher sense was an essential part of the whole exposition. It is, then, as if this clerical error were to revolt against the author, out of hatred for him, were to forbid him to correct it, and were to say, "No, I will not be erased, I will stand as a witness against thee, that thou art a very poor writer."
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Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.
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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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Men think that it is impossible for a human being to love his enemies, for enemies are hardly able to endure the sight of one another. Well, then, shut your eyes--and your enemy looks just like your neighbor.
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If the ethical - that is, social morality- is the highest ... then no categories are needed other than the Greek philosophical categories.
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Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates itself to itself.
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What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.
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In order to learn true humility (I use this expression to describe the state of mind under discussion), it is good for a person to withdraw from the turmoil of the world (we see that Christ withdrew when the people wanted to proclaim him king as well as when he had to walk the thorny path), for in life either the depressing or the elevating impression is too dominant for a true balance to come about. Here, of course, individuality is very decisive.
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What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?
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The question is asked in ignorance, by one who does not even know what can have led him to ask it.