Quotes from Soren Kierkegaard

Only the lower natures forget themselves and become something new. For instance, the butterfly has entirely forgotten that it was a caterpillar; perhaps in turn it can forget that it was a butterfly so completely that it can become a fish. The

seems to me that Christian dogmatics must be an explication of Christ's activity, the more so since Christ established no teaching but was active. He didn't teach that there was a redemption for man, he redeemed men. A Muhammadan dogmatics (sit venia verbo)21 would be an explication of Muhammad's teaching, but a Christian dogmatics is an explication of Christ's activity.

On aina arveluttavaa leimata absurdiksi, käsittämättömäksi jokin, minkä joku toinen voi selittää helposti ymmärrettäväksi.

Think of a sinner who is sinking in the abyss; listen to his cry of anguish when with his last groan he vindicates the justice his life has mocked and says: It is self-inflicted

For me, nothing is more dangerous than recollection. Once I have recalled some life-situation it ceases to exist. People say that separation helps to revive love. That is quite true, but it revives it purely in a poetic way. A life in recollection is the most perfect imaginable; memory gives you your fill more abundantly than all of reality and has a security which no reality possesses.

The unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself. The unhappy man is always absent from himself, never present to himself. But one can be absent, obviously, either in the past or in the future. This adequately circumscribes the entire territory of the unhappy consciousness.

Subjectivity is truth

let us speak of the wish and thereby of the sufferings; let us properly linger over this, convinced that one may learn more profoundly and more reliably what the highest is by considering suffering than by observing achievements, where so much that is distracting is present.

What is to come? What does the future hold? I don't know, I have no idea. When from a fixed point a spider plunges down as is its nature, it sees always before it an empty space in which it cannot find a footing however much it flounders. That is how it is with me: always an empty space before me, what drives me on is a result that lies behind me. This life is back-to-front and terrible, unendurable.

My reflection on life altogether lacks meaning. I take it some evil spirit has put a pair of spectacles on my nose, one glass of which magnifies to an enormous degree, while the other reduces to the same degree.

People do say that now to know oneself is a deception and an imperfection, but often they are unwilling to understand that someone who actually knows himself perceives precisely that he is not capable of anything at all

What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I must know…What matters is to find a purpose…to find a truth that is true for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die…This is what my soul thirsts for as the African desert thirsts for water.

If a person does not become what he understands, then he does not understand it either.

For when an old man relives his life, he lives it only by dwelling upon his memories; and when wisdom in an old man has outgrown the immediate impressions of life, the past viewed from the quiet of memory is something different from the present in all its bustle. The

From earliest childhood, an arrow of grief has been embedded in my heart. As long as it remains there, I am ironic — if it is drawn out, I will die.

How sterile my soul and my mind are, and yet constantly tormented by empty voluptuous and excruciating labor pains!

True, fear deceptively offers to help us. It too offers to keep us on the right track. Yet the one who strives in fear never becomes God's friend. Fear is a deceitful aid. It can sour your delight, make life arduous and miserable, make you old and decrepit; but it is never able to help you toward the Good. The Good will not tolerate any alien helper.

For faith is this paradox, that the particular is higher than the universal

El compromiso es, desde luego, el más ridículo de todos los estados y situaciones ridículas. El matrimonio, por lo menos, tiene un sentido, aunque traiga aparejadas muchas molestias. Pero el compromiso es un invento que se debe únicamente al hombre y no honra, desde luego, a su inventor.

Freedom is always in communication (even taking the religious meaning of the word into consideration does no harm); unfreedom withdraws ever more in its reserve and will not communicate.

Doubt is conquered by faith, just as it is faith which has brought doubt into the world.

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it. They fare as did that dwarf who kept guard over a captured princess in his castle. One day he took midday nap. When he woke up an hour later, the princess was gone. Quickly he pulled on his seven-league boots; with one stride he was far beyond her.

When the discoveries of possibility are honestly administered, possibility will discover all finitudes but idealize them in the shape of infinity, in anxiety overwhelm the individual, until the individual again overcomes them in the anticipation of faith.

However, a self, every instant it exists, is in process of becoming, for the self [potentially] does not actually exist, it is only that which it is to become. In so far as the self does not become itself, it is not its own self; but not to be one's own self is despair.