Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
-
How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it and why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought by a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn't it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager—I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?
-
The more people who believe something, the more apt it is to be wrong. The person who's right often has to stand alone.
-
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.
-
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.
-
When all combine in every way to make everything easier, people will want difficulty. I conceived it as my task to make difficulties everywhere.
-
Affliction is able to drown out every earthly voice. . . but the voice of eternity within a person it cannot drown.
-
Don't you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this?
-
Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.
-
Christ was crucified because he would have nothing to do with the crowd (even though he addressed himself to all). He did not want to form a party, an interest group, a mass movement, but wanted to be what he was, the truth, which is related to the single individual. Therefore everyone who will genuinely serve the truth is by that very fact a martyr. To win a crowd is no art; for that only untruth is needed, nonsense, and a little knowledge of human passions. But no witness to the truth dares to get involved with the crowd.
-
Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner; put yourself in his place so that you may understand . . . what he learns and the way he understands it.
-
Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do.
-
Now, with God's help, I shall become myself.
-
The more men believe an idea to be true the greater the likelihood that the idea is mistaken. Those who are right usually stand alone.
-
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.
-
The truth is a trap: you cannot get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.
-
To have faith is precisely to lose one's mind so as to win God.
-
The paradox in Christian truth is invariably due to the fact that it is the truth that exists for God. The standard of measure and the end is superhuman; and there is only one relationship possible: faith.
-
No one is so terribly deceived as he who does not himself suspect it.
-
... all comparisons injure.
-
How could it occur to anyone to demonstrate that God exists unless one has already allowed Himself to ignore Him? A king's existence is demonstrated by way of subjection and submissiveness. Do you want to try and demonstrate that the king exists? Will you do so by offering a string of proofs, a series of arguments? No. If you are serious, you will demonstrate the king's existence by your submission, by the way you live. And so it is with demonstrating God's existence. It is accomplished not by proofs but by worship. Any other way is but a thinker's pious bungling.
-
Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.
-
One could construe the life of man as a great discourse in which the various people represent different parts of speech (the same might apply to states).
-
Ulysses was not comely, but he was eloquent, Yet he fired two goddesses of the sea with love.
-
There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.