Quotes from Soren Kierkegaard

Our age reminds one of the dissolution of the Greek city-state: Everything goes on as usual and yet there is no longer anyone who believes in it. The invisible spiritual bond which gives it validity, no longer exists, and so the whole age is at once comic and tragic--tragic because it is perishing, comic because it goes on.

Those who bore others are the plebians, the mass, the endless train of humanity in general. Those who bore themselves are the elect, the nobility; and how strange it is that those who don't bore themselves usually bore others, while those who do bore themselves amuse others. The people who do not bore themselves are generally those who are busy in the world in one way or another, but that is just why they are the most boring, the most insufferable, of all.

Birkaç aÄŸlama nöbetinin ard?ndan ÅŸimdi ÅŸu dingin ruh haliyle ne kadar güzelleÅŸti. Varl??? hüzünle ac?n?n güzel bir uyumu

Life's existential tasks have lost the interest of reality; illusion cannot build a sanctuary for the divine growth of inwardness which ripens to decisions. One man is curious about another, every one is undecided, and their way of escape is to say that some one must come who will do something--and then they will bet on him.

No one shall be forgotten who was great in this world; but everyone was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion to the greatness of what he loved.

Sitting calmly on a ship in fair weather is not a metaphor for having faith; but when the ship has sprung a leak, then enthusiastically to keep the ship afloat by pumping and not to seek the harbor--that is the metaphor for having faith. (Concluding Unscientific Postscript)

Deep within every man there lies the dread of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the household of millions upon millions.

a bad conscience is indeed able to make life interesting.

To be isolated is always to assert oneself numerically; when you assert yourself as one, that is isolation.

If we ask what poetry is we may say in general that it is a victory over the world; it is through a negation of the imperfect actuality that poetry opens up a higher actuality

The levelling process is the victory of abstraction over the individual. The levelling process in modern times, corresponds, in reflection, to fate in antiquity.

Boredom is the only continuity the ironist has.

The person whose joy is dependant upon certain conditions is not himself joyful; his joy, after all, is that of the conditions and is conditional upon them.

To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking Him.

The task is not to find the lovable object, but to find the object before you lovable – whether given or chosen – and to be able to continue finding this one lovable, no matter how that person changes. To love is to love the person one sees.

for our times are not satisfied with faith and not even with the miracle of changing water into wine - they 'go right on,' changing wine into water.

I am courteous enough to assume that everyone in this so aesthetically voluptuous age, so potent and aroused that conception occurs as easily as with the partridge which, Aristotle says, needs only to hear the voice of the cock or its flight overhead - to assume that at the mere sound of the word 'concealment' everyone can easily shake a dozen romances and comedies from his sleeve.

To believe is indeed to lose the understanding in order to gain God.

Sin is: in despair not wanting to be oneself before God.

When I get up in the morning I go straight back to bed again. I feel best in the evening, the moment I dowse the candle, pull the eiderdown over my head. I raise myself up once more, look about the room with an indescribable peace of mind, and then it's goodnight, down under the eiderdown.

It isn't at all difficult for philosophy to begin. Far from it: it begins with nothing and can accordingly always begin. What seems so difficult to philosophy and the philosophers is to stop.

No, like worldly contempt, worldly honor is a whirlpool, a play of confused forces, an illusory moment in the flux of opinions. It is a sense-deception, as when a swarm of insects at a distance seem to the eye like one body; a sense-deception, as when the noise of the many at a distance seems to the ear like a single voice.

A superstitious belief which embraces an error keeps the possibility open that the truth may come to arouse it; but when the truth is there, and the superstitious mode of apprehending it transforms it into a lie, no saving awakening is possible.

What is youth? A dream. What is love? The dream's content.