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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 -
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
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To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc.
Soren Kierkegaard -
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.
Soren Kierkegaard -
To grumble about the world and its unhappiness is always easier than to beat one's breast and groan over oneself.
Soren Kierkegaard -
To have faith is precisely to lose one's mind so as to win God.
Soren Kierkegaard -
It is more blessed to give than to receive, but then it is also more blessed to be able to do without than to have to have.
Soren Kierkegaard -
An individual in despair despairs over something. . . . In despairing over something, he really despairs over himself, and now he wants to get rid of himself. Consequently, to despair over something is still not despair proper. . . . To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself-this is the formula for all despair.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Are you not aware that there comes a midnight hour when everyone must unmask...
Soren Kierkegaard -
One should be an enigma not just to others but to oneself too. I study myself. When I'm tired of that I light a cigar to pass the time, and think: God only knows what the good Lord really meant with me, or what He meant to make of me.
Soren Kierkegaard -
People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.
Soren Kierkegaard -
During the first period of a man's life the greatest danger is not to take the risk.
Soren Kierkegaard -
No grand inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest; nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared as anxiety knows how, and no sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused, as anxiety does, which never lets him escape.
Soren Kierkegaard -
...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.
Soren Kierkegaard
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My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have had.
Soren Kierkegaard -
Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally and happily secured against despair.
Soren Kierkegaard -
It is tragic-comic to see that all this knowledge and understanding exercises no power at all over men's lives, that their lives do not express in the remotest way what they have understood, but rather the opposite.
Soren Kierkegaard -
It requires courage not to surrender oneself to the ingenious or compassionate counsels of despair that would induce a man to eliminate himself from the ranks of the living; but it does not follow from this that every huckster who is fattened and nourished in self-confidence has more courage than the man who yielded to despair.
Soren Kierkegaard -
Where unclarity resides, there is temptation, and there it proves only too easily the stronger. Wherever there is ambiguity, wherever there is wavering, there is disobedience down at the bottom.
Soren Kierkegaard -
Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause - that it must be lived forward. The more one thinks through this clause, the more one concludes that life in temporality never becomes properly understandable, simply because never at any time does one get perfect repose to take the stance - backward.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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.
Soren Kierkegaard -
Most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes--but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.
Soren Kierkegaard -
It is only all too easy to understand the requirements contained in God's Word ('Give all your goods to the poor.' 'If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the left.' 'If anyone takes your coat, let him have your cloak also. Rejoice always.' 'Count it sheer joy when you meet various temptations' etc.). The most ignorant, poor creature cannot honestly deny being able to understand God's requirements. But it is tough on the flesh to will to understand it and to then act accordingly. It is not a question of interpretation, but action.
Soren Kierkegaard -
The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.
Soren Kierkegaard