Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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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...my soul always reverts to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There at least one feels that it's human beings talking. There people hate, people love, people murder their enemy and curse his descendants through all generations, there people sin.
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Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.
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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.
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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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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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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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Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.
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This age will die not as a result of some evil, but from a lack of passion.
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The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.
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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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... 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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Do it or don't do it - you will regret both.
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Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.
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Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.
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Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element.
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We live as if we were unaware of our impending destruction.
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All essential knowledge relates to existence, or only such knowledge as has an essential relationship to existence is essential knowledge.
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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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In the life of the individual when love awakens it is older than everything else, because when it exists it seems as if it has existed for a long time; it presupposes itself back into the distant past until all searching ends in the inexplicable origin.