-
It is better to try something and fail than to try nothing and succeed. The result may be the same, but you won't be. We always grow more through defeats than victories.
Soren Kierkegaard -
Christianity does not oppose debauchery and uncontrollable passions and the like as much as it opposes... flat mediocrity, this nauseating atmosphere, this homey, civil togetherness, where admittedly great crimes, wild excesses, and powerful aberrations cannot easily occur - but where God's unconditional demand has even greater difficulty in accomplishing what it requires: the majestic obedience of submission.
Soren Kierkegaard
-
What looks like politics, and imagines itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious movement.
Soren Kierkegaard -
Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer.
Soren Kierkegaard -
What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?
Soren Kierkegaard -
So to be sick unto death is, not to be able to die-yet not as though there were hope of life; no, the hopelessness in this case is that even the last hope, death, is not available. When death is the greatest danger, one hopes for life; but when one becomes acquainted with an even more dreadful danger, one hopes for death. So when the danger is so great that death has become one's hope, despair is the disconsolateness of not being able to die.
Soren Kierkegaard -
The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever.
Soren Kierkegaard -
How ironical that it is by means of speech that man can degrade himself below the level of dumb creation -- for a chatterbox is truly of a lower category than a dumb creature.
Soren Kierkegaard
-
It is a wonderful thing to see a first-rate philosopher at prayer. Tough-minded thinking and tenderhearted reverence are friends, not enemies. We have for too long separated the head from the heart, and we are the lesser for it. We love God with the mind and we love God with the heart. In reality, we are descending with the mind into the heart and there standing before God in ceaseless wonder and endless praise. As the mind and the heart work in concert, a kind of loving rationality pervades all we say and do. This brings unity to us and glory to God.
Soren Kierkegaard -
The stone that was rolled before Christ's tomb might appropriately be called the philosopher's stone because its removal gave not only the pharisees but, now for 1800 years, the philosophers so much to think about.
Soren Kierkegaard -
There are two kinds of geniuses. The characteristic of the one is roaring, but the lightning is meagre and rarely strikes; the other kind is characterized by reflection by which it constrains itself or restrains the roaring. But the lightning is all the more intense; with the speed and sureness of lightning it hits the selected particular points - and is fatal.
Soren Kierkegaard -
The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.
Soren Kierkegaard -
A genius may perhaps be a century ahead of his age and hence stands there as a paradox, but in the end, the race will assimilate what was once a paradox, so it is no longer paradoxical.
Soren Kierkegaard -
It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.
Soren Kierkegaard
-
Affliction is able to drown out every earthly voice. . . but the voice of eternity within a person it cannot drown.
Soren Kierkegaard -
...why bother remembering a past that cannot be made into a present?
Soren Kierkegaard -
Every human being is tried this way in the active service of expectancy. Now comes the fulfillment and relieves him, but soon he is again placed on reconnaissance for expectancy; then he is again relieved, but as long as there is any future for him, he has not yet finished his service. And while human life goes on this way in very diverse expectancy, expecting very different things according to different times and occasions and in different frames of mind, all life is again one nightwatch of expectancy.
Soren Kierkegaard -
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.
Soren Kierkegaard -
To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc.
Soren Kierkegaard -
The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.
Soren Kierkegaard
-
As my prayer became more attentive and inward, I had less and less to say. I finally became completely silent... This is how it is. To pray does not mean to listen to oneself speaking. Prayer involves becoming silent, and being silent, and waiting until God is heard.
Soren Kierkegaard -
Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all verbs are irregular.
Soren Kierkegaard -
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.
Soren Kierkegaard -
This is all that I've known for certain, that God is love. Even if I have been mistaken on this or that point: God is nevertheless love.
Soren Kierkegaard