Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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Sin is in itself separation from the good, but despair over sin is separation a second time.
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Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
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I divide my time as follows: half the time I sleep, the other half I dream. I never dream when I sleep, for that would be a pity, for sleeping is the highest accomplishment of genius.
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Faith is a marvel, and yet no human being is excluded from it; for that in which all human life is united is passion, and faith is a passion.
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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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I'm so misunderstood that people misunderstand me even when I tell them I'm misunderstood.
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Nothing is as heady as the wine of possibility.
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No one may pride himself at being more than an individual, and no one despondently think that he is not an individual.
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Future is everything that past has forgotten.
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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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Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.
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With the daguerreotype, everyone will be able to have their portrait taken . . . and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same.
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The question of immortality is of its nature not a scholarly question. It is a question welling up from the interior which the subject must put to itself as it becomes conscious of itself.
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Your own tactic is to train yourself in the art of becoming enigmatic to everybody. My young friend, suppose there was no one who troubld himself to guess your riddle--what joy, then, would you have in it?
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It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.
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Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. Therefore, whenever I see a fly settling, in the decisive moment, on the nose of such a person of affairs; or if he is spattered with mud from a carriage which drives past him in still greater haste; or the drawbridge opens up before him; or a tile falls down and knocks him dead, then I laugh heartily.
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Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.
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The thing that cowardice fears most is decision.
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Choose to be who you are. . . The individual who would become a person must at some point take over his entire being - must, that is, choose herself.
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...knowing God is the condition for the sanctification of a human being by God's assistance and according to His intention. Wherever God is, there He is always creating... He wants to create a new human being. To need God is to become new. And to know God is the crucial thing.
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To love another person is to help them love God.
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It was not to save a nation that Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac, nor to appease angry gods... Then why does Abraham do it? For God's sake... He does it for the sake of God because God demands proof of his faith... He was not justified by being virtuous, but by being an individual submitted to God in faith.
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I have never fought in such a way as to say: I am the true Christian, others are not Christians.
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My scholarly expectation is then that I may succeed in becoming clever in philosophy in spite of my stupidity.