Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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Because of its tremendous solemnity death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearances.
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Any truth is only true up to a certain point. When one oversteps the mark, it becomes a non-truth.
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If someone who wanted to learn to dance were to say: For centuries, one generation after the other has learned the positions, and it is high time that I take advantage of this and promptly begin with the quadrille--people would presumably laugh a little at him, but in the world of spirit this is very plausible. What, then, is education? I believed it is the course the individual goes through in order to catch up with himself, and the person who will not go through this course is not much helped by being born in the most enlightened age.
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For the sadness in legitimate humour consists in the fact that honestly and without deceit it reflects in a purely human way upon what it is to be a child.
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My sorrow is my castle.
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It takes moral courage to grieve; it requires religious courage to rejoice.
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It occurs to me that artists go forward by going backward, something which I have nothing against intrinsically when it is a reproduced retreat - as is the case with the better artists.
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In a theatre it happened that a fire started off stage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed-amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.
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It doesn't occur to me at this moment to say more; another time, perhaps tomorrow, I may have more to say, but always the same thing and about the same, for only gypsies, robber gangs and swindlers follow the adage that where a person has once been he is never to go again.
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I am so stupid that I cannot understand philosophy; the antithesis of this is that philosophy is so clever that it cannot comprehend my stupidity. These antitheses are mediated in a higher unity; in our common stupidity.
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Above all, do not lose your desire to walk.
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...it is not the obscure passages in Scripture that bind you but the ones you understand. With these you are to comply at once. If you understood only one passage in all of Scripture, well, then you must do that first of all. It will be this passage God asks you about. Do not first sit down and ponder the obscure passages. God's Word is given in order that you shall act according to it, not that you gain expertise in interpreting it.
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Are you not aware that there comes a midnight hour when everyone must unmask...
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Geniuses are like thunderstorms: they go against the wind, terrify people, clear the air.
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My standpoint is armed neutrality.
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Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.
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Truth has always had many loud proclaimers, but the question is whether a person will in the deepest sense acknowledge the truth, allow it to permeate his whole being, accept all its consequences, and not have an emergency hiding place for himself and a Judas kiss for the consequence.
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Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all verbs are irregular.
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No one is so terribly deceived as he who does not himself suspect it.
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Now, with God's help, I shall become myself.
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The more people who believe something, the more apt it is to be wrong. The person who's right often has to stand alone.
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Therefore do not deceive yourself! Of all deceivers fear most yourself!
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Do not interrupt the flight of your soul; do not distress what is best in you; do not enfeeble your spirit with half wishes and half thoughts. Ask yourself and keep on asking until you find the answer, for one may have known something many times, acknowledged it; one may have willed something many times, attempted it - and yet, only the deep inner motion, only the heart's indescribable emotion, only that will convince you that what you have acknowledged belongs to you, that no power can take it from you - for only the truth that builds up is truth for you.
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To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.