Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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For he who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God.
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All moral elevation consists first and foremost of being weaned from the momentary.
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It is easy to see, though it scarcely needs to be pointed out, since it is involved in the fact that Reason is set aside, that faith is not a form of knowledge; for all knowledge is either a knowledge of the eternal, excluding the temporal and historical as indifferent, or it is pure historical knowledge. No knowledge can have for its object the absurdity that the eternal is the historical.
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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.
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Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content; it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.
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Reflection is not the evil; but a reflective condition and the deadlock which it involves, by transforming the capacity for action into a means of escape from action, is both corrupt and dangerous, and leads in the end to a retrograde movement.
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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.
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The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.
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Compared with the person who is conscious of his despair, the despairing individual who is ignorant of his despair is simply a negativity further away from the truth and deliverance. . . . Yet ignorance is so far from breaking the despair or changing despair to nondespairing that it can in fact be the most dangerous form of despair. . . . An individual is furthest from being conscious of himself as spirit when he is ignorant of being in despair. But precisely this-not to be conscious of oneself as spirit-is despair, which is spiritlessness. . . .
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No, I won't leave the world--I'll enter a lunatic asylum and see if the profundity of insanity reveals to me the riddles of life. Idiot, why didn't I do that long ago, why has it taken me so long to understand what it means when the Indians honour the insane, step aside for them? Yes, a lunatic asylum--don't you think I may end up there?
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It is the normal state of the human heart to try to build its identity around something besides God.
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To grumble about the world and its unhappiness is always easier than to beat one's breast and groan over oneself.
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You train yourself in the art of being mysterious to everyone. My dear friend! What if there were no one, who cared about guessing your riddle, what pleasure would you then take in it?
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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.
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In the Christianity of Christendom the Cross has become something like the child’s hobby-horse and trumpet.
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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.
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Ulysses was not comely, but he was eloquent, Yet he fired two goddesses of the sea with love.
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Above all, do not lose your desire to walk.
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One is not unpopular because he uses peculiar expressions; that just so happens; such terms become a fad, and by and by everybody, down to the last simpleton, uses them. But a person who follows through an idea in his mind is, and always will be, essentially unpopular. That is why Socrates was unpopular, though he did not use any special terms, for to grasp and hold his 'ignorance' requires greater vital effort than understanding the whole of Hegel's philosophy.
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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.
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The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.
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Geniuses are like thunderstorms: they go against the wind, terrify people, clear the air.
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...why bother remembering a past that cannot be made into a present?
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The God that can be named is not God.