Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
-
The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
-
Boredom rests upon the nothingness that winds its way through existence; its giddiness, like that which comes from gazing down into an infinite abyss, is infinite.
-
This fact, that the opposite of sin is by no means virtue, has been overlooked. The latter is partly a pagan view, which is content with a merely human standard, and which for that very reason does not know what sin is, that all sin is before God. No, the opposite of sin is faith.
-
Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.
-
Dread is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.
-
It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.
-
The highest of all is not to understand the highest but to act upon it.
-
In order to swim one takes off all one's clothes--in order to aspire to the truth one must undress in a far more inward sense, divest oneself of all one's inward clothes, of thoughts, conceptions, selfishness etc., before one is sufficiently naked.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The Bible is God's love letter to us.
-
Shows itself in the notion that what may be objectively true may in the mouth of certain people become false.
-
Sleeping is the height of genius.
-
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.
-
A 'no' does not hide anything, but a 'yes' very easily becomes a deception.
-
Irony is the birth-pangs of the objective mind (based upon the misrelationship, discovered by the I , between existence and the idea of existence). Humor is the birth -pangs of the absolute mind (based upon the misrelationship, discovered by the I , between the I and the idea of the I.
-
Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.
-
The thing that cowardice fears most is decision.
-
The most terrible fight is not when there is one opinion against another, the most terrible is when two men say the same thing -- and fight about the interpretation, and this interpretation involves a difference of quality.
-
What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.
-
Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.
-
And this is one of the most crucial definitions for the whole of Christianity; that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.
-
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.
-
Why I so much prefer autumn to spring is that in the autumn one looks at heaven--in the spring at the earth.