Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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Repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life.
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I have, I believe, the courage to doubt everything; I have, I believe, the courage to fight against everything; but I do not have the courage to acknowledge anything, the courage to possess, to own anything.
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The ever increasing intensity of despair depends upon the degree of consciousness or is proportionate to this increase: the greater the degree of consciousness, the more intensive the despair. This is everywhere apparent, most clearly in despair at its maximum and minimum. The devil's despair is the most intensive despair, for the devil is sheer spirit and hence unqualified consciousness and transparency; there is no obscurity in the devil that could serve as a mitigating excuse. Therefore, his despair is the most absolute defiance. . . .
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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.
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This is the miracle of life: that each person who heeds him or herself knows what no scientist can ever know: who he or she is.
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I would have perished had I not perished.
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Nothing is as heady as the wine of possibility.
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... the more one needs God the more perfect he is. To need God is nothing to be ashamed of but is perfection itself. It is the saddest thing in the world if a human being goes through life without discovering that he needs God!
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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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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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To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self.
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Dread is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.
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Do you know of any more overwhelming and humbling expression for God's condescension and extravagance towards us human beings than that He places Himself, so to say, on the same level of choice with the world, just so that we may be able to choose; that God, if language dare speak thus, woos humankind - that He, the eternally strong one, woos sapless humanity? Yet, how insignificant is the young lover's choice between her pursuers by comparison with this choice between God and the world.
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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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Sleeping is the height of genius.
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There is something almost cruel about the Christian's being placed in a world which in every way wants to pressure him to do the opposite of what God bids him to do.
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The Bible is God's love letter to us.
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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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If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin. Even though the result may gladden the whole world, that cannot help the hero; for he knows the result only when the whole thing is over, and that is not how he became a hero, but by virtue of the fact that he began.
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Truth is not something you can appropriate easily and quickly. You certainly cannot sleep or dream yourself to the truth. No, you must be tried, do battle, and suffer if you are to acquire the truth for yourself. It is a sheer illusion to think that in relation to the truth there is an abridgement, a short cut that dispenses with the necessity for struggling for it.
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Intelligence has got the upper hand to such an extent that it transforms the real task into an unreal trick and reality into a play.
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A curiously interested observer sees a great deal, a scientifically interested observer is worthy of all honor, and anxiously interested observer sees what others do not see, but a crazy observer sees perhaps the most, his observation is more intense and more persistent, just as the senses of certain animals are sharper than those of man.
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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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Do it or don't do it - you will regret both.