Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
-
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.
-
The minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion.
-
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.
-
Prayer is a silent surrendering of everything to God.
-
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.
-
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.
-
It will be easy for us the first time we receive that ball of yarn from Ariadne (love) and then go through all the mazes of the labyrinth (life) and kill the monster. But how many there are who plunge into life (the labyrinth) without taking that precaution?
-
I'm so misunderstood that people misunderstand me even when I tell them I'm misunderstood.
-
Idleness, we are accustomed to say, is the root of all evil. To prevent this evil, work is recommended.... Idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; on the contrary, it is truly a divine life, if one is not bored.
-
What a misfortune to be a woman! And yet, the worst misfortune is not to understand what a misfortune it is.
-
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."
-
Dread is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.
-
To pace about, looking to obtain status, looking to attain 'importance' - I can think of nothing more ridiculous.
-
Once you label me you negate me.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.
-
People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.
-
Most people believe that the Christian commandments, e.g. to love one's neighbor as oneself, are intentionally a little too severe - like setting a clock half an hour ahead to make sure of not being late in the morning.
-
The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
-
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.
-
And then the spirit brings hope, hope in the strictest Christian sense, hope which is hoping against hope. For an immediate hope exists in every person; it may be more powerfully alive in one person than in another; but in death every hope of this kind dies and turns into hopelessness. Into this night of hopelessness (it is death that we are describing) comes the life-giving spirit and brings hope, the hope of eternity. It is against hope, for there was no longer any hope for that merely natural hope; this hope is therefore a hope contrary to hope.
-
There can be no faith without risk.
-
And this is one of the most crucial definitions for the whole of Christianity; that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.