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Soren Kierkegaard Quotes - Page 12

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Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore

Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.

Soren Kierkegaard
Roots, Bores You, Evil
"Either/Or" by Soren Kierkegaard, ‎Howard Vincent Hong, ‎Edna Hatlestad Hong, Princeton University Press, Vol. 1, (p. 286), 2013.

When you say 'Yes' or promise something, you can very easily deceive yourself and others also, as if you had already done what you promised. It is easy to think that by making a promise you have at least done part of what you promised to do, as if the promise itself were something of value. Not at all! In fact, when you do not do what you promise, it is a long way back to the truth.

Soren Kierkegaard
Christian, Thinking, Long

And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.

Soren Kierkegaard
Running, Despair, Noise

It is tragic-comic to see that all this knowledge and understanding exercises no power at all over men's lives, that their lives do not express in the remotest way what they have understood, but rather the opposite.

Soren Kierkegaard
Exercise, Men, Thinking

Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.

Soren Kierkegaard
Men, Personality, Made
Soren Kierkegaard (2015). “The Prayers of Kierkegaard”, p.134, University of Chicago Press

If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin. Even though the result may gladden the whole world, that cannot help the hero; for he knows the result only when the whole thing is over, and that is not how he became a hero, but by virtue of the fact that he began.

Soren Kierkegaard
Hero, Judging, World

You wanted God's ideas about what was best for you to coincide with your ideas, but you also wanted him to be the almighty Creator of heaven and earth so that he could properly fulfill your wish. And yet, if he were to share your ideas, he would cease to be the almighty Father.

Soren Kierkegaard
Father, Ideas, Heaven
"Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses". Book by Soren Kierkegaard, p. 37, 1843.

I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing.

Soren Kierkegaard
Smell, Sticks, Fingers

Busyness, keeping up with others, hustling hither and yon, makes it almost impossible for an individual to form a heart.

Soren Kierkegaard
Christian, Heart, Hustle

In the end, therefore, money will be the one thing people will desire, which is moreover only representative, an abstraction. Nowadays a young man hardly envies anyone his gifts, his art, the love of a beautiful girl, or his fame; he only envies him his money. Give me money, he will say, and I am saved...He would die with nothing to reproach himself with, and under the impression that if only he had had the money he might really have lived and might even have achieved something great.

Soren Kierkegaard
Beautiful, Girl, Art

With respect to love we speak continually about perfection and the perfect person. With respect to love Christianity also speaks continually about perfection and the perfect person. Alas, but we men talk about finding the perfect person in order to love him. Christianity speaks about being the perfect person who limitlessly loves the person he sees.

Soren Kierkegaard
Men, Order, Perfect

I am convinced that God is love, this thought has for me a primitive lyrical validity. When it is present to me, I am unspeakably blissful, when it is absent, I long for it more vehemently than does the lover for his object.

Soren Kierkegaard
Long, Doe, Lovers
Soren Kierkegaard (2013). “The Wisdom of Kierkegaard”, p.22, Simon and Schuster

The most common despair is...not choosing, or willing, to be oneself...[but] the deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than oneself.

Soren Kierkegaard
Despair, Common, Form

Christians remind me of schoolboys who want to look up the answers to their math problems in the back of the book rather than work them through.

Soren Kierkegaard
Faith, Christian, Religious

I believe that there is a longing in my soul that searches the whole world.

Soren Kierkegaard
Believe, Soul, World

Every human being is tried this way in the active service of expectancy. Now comes the fulfillment and relieves him, but soon he is again placed on reconnaissance for expectancy; then he is again relieved, but as long as there is any future for him, he has not yet finished his service. And while human life goes on this way in very diverse expectancy, expecting very different things according to different times and occasions and in different frames of mind, all life is again one nightwatch of expectancy.

Soren Kierkegaard
Long, Mind, Different
"Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses". Book by Soren Kierkegaard, 1844.

How ironical that it is by means of speech that man can degrade himself below the level of dumb creation -- for a chatterbox is truly of a lower category than a dumb creature.

Soren Kierkegaard
Mean, Men, Dumb

Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.

Soren Kierkegaard
War, Flower, Adversity

For he who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God.

Soren Kierkegaard
God Love, Persons

The reign of the tyrant ends with his death, and the reign of the martyr starts with it.

Soren Kierkegaard
Martyr
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Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

Soren Kierkegaard
Childhood, Kind, Scene
"On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates". Book by Soren Kierkegaard, 1841.

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

Soren Kierkegaard
Thanking Him, Legs, Knees
"Journals". Book by Soren Kierkegaard, Harper (1841), 1959.

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.

Soren Kierkegaard
Understanding, Trouble, Paradox
"Journals". Book by Søren Kierkegaard, Harper (1847), 1959.

The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity.

Soren Kierkegaard
Feelings, Mediocrity, Lovers
Soren Kierkegaard (2017). “Philosophical Fragments”, p.24, Jovian Press

In my great melancholy, I loved life, for I love my melancholy.

Soren Kierkegaard
Melancholy

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