Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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It goes against the grain for me to do what so often happens, to speak inhumanly about the great as if a few millennia were an immense distance. I prefer to speak humanly about it, as if it happened yesterday, and let only the greatness itself be the distance.
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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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What a misfortune to be a woman! And yet, the worst misfortune is not to understand what a misfortune it is.
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And this is one of the most crucial definitions for the whole of Christianity; that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.
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I'm so misunderstood that people misunderstand me even when I tell them I'm misunderstood.
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To pace about, looking to obtain status, looking to attain 'importance' - I can think of nothing more ridiculous.
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We live as if we were unaware of our impending destruction.
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Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts.
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In the end, therefore, money will be the one thing people will desire, which is moreover only representative, an abstraction. Nowadays a young man hardly envies anyone his gifts, his art, the love of a beautiful girl, or his fame; he only envies him his money. Give me money, he will say, and I am saved...He would die with nothing to reproach himself with, and under the impression that if only he had had the money he might really have lived and might even have achieved something great.
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It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.
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Why I so much prefer autumn to spring is that in the autumn one looks at heaven--in the spring at the earth.
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What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.
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The thing that cowardice fears most is decision.
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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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There can be no faith without risk.
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If a man wants to set up as an innkeeper and he does not succeed, it is not comic. If, on the contrary, a girl asks to be allowed to set up as a prostitute and she fails, as sometimes happens, it is comic.
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When you read God's Word, you must constantly be saying to yourself, "It is talking to me, and about me".
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The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo; the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes.
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Spirit is the third, yet in such a way that one can speak of a synthesis only when the spirit is posited.
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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.
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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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This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.
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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.
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Only one deception is possible in the infinite sense, self-deception.