Quotes from Soren Kierkegaard

Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. A person keeps this anxiety at distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin as friends, but the anxiety is still there.

The philistine tranquillises himself with the trivial.

Is this the same teaching, when Christ says to the rich young man, Sell all that thou hast, and give it to the poor; and when the pastor says, Sell all that thou hast and – give it to me?

Only the Eternal is always appropriate and always present, is always true. Only the Eternal applies to each human being

As the Good itself is only one thing, so it alone wishes to be what helps us along. But the Good is not something external to us, like a slave who comes against his will when the master uses the whip. The place and the path are within each of us. And just as the place is the blessed state of the striving soul, so the path is the striving soul's continual transformation.

This sectarianism is an attempt to leap away from the narrow path of the paradox and become a tragic hero at a cheap price. The tragic hero expresses the universal and sacrifices himself for it. The sectarian punchinello, instead of that, has a private theatre, i.e. several good friends and comrades who represent the universal

There are handbooks for everything, and very soon education, all the world over, will consist in learning a greater or lesser number of comments by heart, and people will excel according to their capacity for singling out the various facts like a printer singling out the letters, but completely ignorant of the meaning of anything.

por muchas que sean las cosas espantosas y repugnantes que hayas visto en el mundo, cosas que desearías poder olvidar porque quebrantan tu ánimo, tu confianza, te causan hastío de vivir y repulsión por la vida, ¡basta con que consideres cómo el amor edifica para que quedes edificado en las ganas de vivir! Hay infinitos objetos de que poder hablar, pero solo hay uno edificante: cómo edifica el amor.

Christianity is incendiarism; Christ Himself says, 'I am come to set fire on the earth'…official Christianity is not the Christianity of the New Testament.

So despair, then, and your frivolity shall never more cause you to roam like an inconstant spirit, like a ghost among the ruins of a world which is yet lost to you; despair, and your spirit shall become beautiful and joyous to you once more, though you now look at it with different eyes, and your spirit, now liberated, shall vault up into the world of freedom.

But a sad fatality hung over this young girl. She had been given to seven husbands, all of whom had perished in the bride-chamber.

The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing. But because he wants to do it in his own strength, he is fighting not with man, but with God. — Søren Kierkegaard

The Attack is a funny book which the reader has the option of taking seriously. For when the laughter subsides we realize that SK has set before us a stark either-or proposition: either follow the gospel according to Christ and the apostles, or follow the gospel according to the clergy. There can be no dialectical synthesis between these contraries.

Jeg kommer netop nu fra et Selskab, hvor jeg var Sjælen; Vittigheder strømmede ud fra min Mund, alle loe, beundrede mig - men jeg gik, ja den Tankestreg bør være ligesaa lang som Jordbanens Radier ------------------------------- hen og ville skyde mig selv.

None has more contempt for what it is to be a man than they who make it their profession to lead the crowd.

la fe […] es lo más grande que se pueda poseer; por eso al filosofía comete un fraude cuando nos ofrece otra cosa a cambio y habla despectivamente de la fe. La filosofía no puede ni debe darnos la fe, sino que debe comprenderse a sí misma, saber lo que está en grado de ofrecer, no ocultar nada y mucho menos birlarnos una cosa determinada, considerándola una nadería

La fe […] comienza con los movimientos del infinito, y sólo más tarde pasa a los de lo infinito.

A man can wish to slink away from many things in life, and he may even succeed, so that life's favored one can say in the last moment, "I slipped away from all the cares under which other men suffered." But if such a person wishes to bluster out of, to defy, or to slink away from remorse, alas, which is indeed the most terrible to say of him, that he failed, or — that he succeeded?

I am by nature so polemically constituted that I only feel myself really in my element when I am surrounded by human mediocrity and paltriness.

Love from the soul is a continuation in time, sensual love a disappearance in time (pp 101)

The truth is that to become a Christian is to become unhappy for this life. The situation is this: the more thou hast to do with God, and the more He loves thee, the more wilt thou become, humanly speaking, unhappy for this life, the more thou wilt have to suffer in this life.

But as it befell thee (according to what thou sayest in thy Defense, as ironically enough thou hast called the crudest satire upon any generation), that thou didst bring down upon thee many enemies by making it evident that they were ignorant; and as they imputed to thee the inference that thou thyself must be what thou wert able to show the others were not, they therefore out of envy conceived a grudge against thee; so it has also befallen me.

How far removed in time must an event be for us to remember it? How far for memory's longing to be no longer able to seize it? Most people have a limit in this respect: what lies too near them in time they cannot remember, nor what lies too remote. I know no limit. What was experienced yesterday, I push back a thousand years in time, and remember as if it were yesterday. ?Johannes de Silentio, from_Either/Or_

he who loves God without faith reflects upon himself he who loves God believingly reflects upon God.