Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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I have never fought in such a way as to say: I am the true Christian, others are not Christians.
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As the arrow, loosed from the bow by the hand of the practiced archer, does not rest till it has reached the mark, so men pass from God to God. He is the mark for which they have been created, and they do not rest till they find their rest in him.
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...the person who surrenders absolutely to God, with no reservations, is absolutely safe. From this safe hiding-place he can see the devil , but the devil cannot see him.
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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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And this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.
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There are men who are wanting in the comparative, they as a rule are the most interesting.
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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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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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Christendom has done away with Christianity without being quite aware of it.
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It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.
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The idea of demonstrating that this unknown something God exists, could scarcely suggest itself to Reason. For if God does not exist it would of course be impossible to prove it, and if he does exist it would be folly to attempt it.
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About as genuine as tea made from a bit of paper which once lay in a drawer beside another piece of paper which had been used to wrap up a few tea leaves from which tea had already been made three times.
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Absolute passion cannot be understood by a third party.
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Thus our own age is essentially one of understanding, and on the average, perhaps, more knowledgeable than any former generation, but it is without passion. Every one knows a great deal, we all know which way we ought to go and all the different ways we can go, but nobody is willing to move.
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What labels me, negates me.
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People generally think that it is the world, the environment, external relationships, which stand in one's way, in the way of ones' good fortune... and at bottom it is always man himself that stands in his own way.
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All moral elevation consists first and foremost of being weaned from the momentary.
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What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?
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I would rather be a swineherd, understood by the swine, than a poet misunderstood by men.
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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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In actuality, no one ever sank so deep that he could not sink deeper, and there may be one or many who sank deeper. So it is always possible to be happy and grateful that things are not worse!
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Busyness, keeping up with others, hustling hither and yon, makes it almost impossible for an individual to form a heart.
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The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.
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God creates everything out of nothing. And everything which God is to use, he first reduces to nothing.