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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A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.
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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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There is peace and rest and comfort in sorrow.
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It is not a gain that guilt should be wholly forgotten. On the contrary, it is loss and perdition. But it is a gain to win an inner intensity of heart through a deeper and deeper inner sorrowing over guilt.
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It is very dangerous to go into eternity with possibilities which one has oneself prevented from becoming realities. A possibility is a hint from God. One must follow it.
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This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness...they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.
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What a difference! Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient! when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular and infinitely boring.
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I found I had less and less to say, until finally, I became silent, and began to listen. I discovered in the silence, the voice of God.
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Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.
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If anyone proposes to believe, i.e., imagines himself to believe, because many good and upright people living here on the hill have believed, i.e., have said that they believedthen he is a fool, and it is essentially indifferent whether he believes on account of his own and perhaps a widely held opinion about what good and upright people believe, or believes a Münchhausen.
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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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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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I would rather be a swineherd, understood by the swine, than a poet misunderstood by men.
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A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized prayer is listening.
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God is present in the moment of choice, not in order to watch but in order to be chosen. Therefore, each person must choose. Terrible is the battle, in a person's innermost being, between God and the world. The crowning risk involved lies in the possession of choice.
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Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
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No time of life is so beautiful as the early days of love, when with every meeting, every glance, one fetches something new home to rejoice over.
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But doubt is wily and cunning and never, as it is sometimes said to be, loud or defiant. It is unassuming and sly, not bold or assertive - and the more unassuming, the more dangerous.
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If you want to be loathsome to God, just run with the herd.
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Theology sits rouged at the window and courts philosophy's favor, offering to sell her charms to it.
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Had I to carve an inscription on my tombstone I would ask for none other than "The Individual."
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That which is truly human no generation learns from the one before it. No generation learns from another how to love. No generation has a shorter task assigned to it except insofar as the previous generation shirked its task and deluded itself.