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Soren Kierkegaard Quotes - Page 13

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With the daguerreotype, everyone will be able to have their portrait taken . . . and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same.

With the daguerreotype, everyone will be able to have their portrait taken . . . and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same.

Soren Kierkegaard
Taken, Portraits, Daguerreotypes

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.

Soren Kierkegaard
Doubt, Sometimes, Loud
Soren Kierkegaard, George Pattison (2010). “Spiritual Writings: A New Translation and Selection”, p.13, Harper Collins

Knowledge of the truth I may perhaps have attained to; happiness certainly not. What shall I do? Accomplish something in the world, men tell me. Shall I then publish my grief to the world, contribute one more proof for the wretchedness and misery of existence, perhaps discover a new flaw in human life, hitherto unnoticed? I might then reap the rare reward of becoming famous, like the man who discovered the spots on Jupiter. I prefer, however, to keep silent.

Soren Kierkegaard
Grief, Knowledge, Men
Soren Kierkegaard (1959). “Either/ Or”

Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.

Soren Kierkegaard
Observers, Earnestness
The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, (Pap VI B 120:13), 1845.

Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.

Soren Kierkegaard
Birthday, Ideas, Age

You love the accidental. A smile from a pretty girl in an interesting situation, a stolen glance, that is what you are hunting for, that is a motif for your aimless fantasy. You who always pride yourself on being an observateur must, in return, put up with becoming an object of observation. Ah, you are a strange fellow, one moment a child, the next an old man; one moment you are thinking most earnestly about the most important scholarly problems, how you will devote your life to them, and the next you are a lovesick fool. But you are a long way from marriage.

Soren Kierkegaard
Girl, Children, Pride

...a human being not only can choose but... he must choose... for in this way God retains His honor while at the same time has a fatherly concern for humankind. Though God has lowered Himself to being that which can be chosen, yet each person must on his part choose. God is not mocked. Therefore the matter stands thus: If a person avoids choosing, this is the same as the presumption of choosing the world.

Soren Kierkegaard
Christian, Honor, World

This is the miracle of life: that each person who heeds him or herself knows what no scientist can ever know: who he or she is.

Soren Kierkegaard
Self, Miracle, Scientist

A man's personality is matured only when he appropriates the truth, whether it is spoken by Balaam's ass or a sniggering wag or an apostle or an angel.

Soren Kierkegaard
Angel, Men, Personality
"Søren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers: Autobiographical, 1829-1848". Book by Søren Kierkegaard and Gregor Malantschuk, p. 226, Journals IV A 87 (1843), 1978.

...even the richest personality is nothing before he has chosen himself, and on the other hand even what one might call the poorest personality is everything when he has chosen himself; for the great thing is not to be this or that but to be oneself, and this everyone can be if he wills it.

Soren Kierkegaard
Hands, Personality, Might

Oh, can I really believe the poet's tales, that when one first sees the object of one's love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love like all knowledge is remembrance, that love too has its prophecies in the individual.

Soren Kierkegaard
Believe, Long Ago, Remembrance

Death is not earnest in the same way the eternal is. To the earnestness of death belongs precisely that remarkable capacity for awakening, that resonance of a profound mockery which, detached from the thought of the eternal, is an empty and often brash jest, but together with the thought of the eternal is just what it should be, utterly different from the insipid solemness which least of all captures and holds a thought with tension like that of death.

Soren Kierkegaard
Profound, Together, Different

To the Christian, love is the works of love. To say that love is a feeling or anything of the kind is an unchristian conception of love. That is the aesthetic definition and therefore fits the erotic and everything of that nature. But to the Christian love is the works of love. Christ's love was not an inner feeling, a full heart and what not, it was the work of love which was his life.

Soren Kierkegaard
Christian, Nature, Heart

What I really need is to get clear out about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge precedes every act.

Soren Kierkegaard
Needs, Clear, Knows

Death induces the sensual person to say: Let us eat and drink, because tomorrow we shall die - but this is sensuality's cowardly lust for life, that contemptible order of things where one lives in order to eat and drink instead of eating and drinking in order to live.

Soren Kierkegaard
Drinking, Order, Lust
"Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions". Book by Soren Kierkegaard, p. 83, 1845.

The task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted.

Soren Kierkegaard
Inspire, Tasks, Noble
"Soren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers Vol. 1 A-E" edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, (p. 303), 1967.

During the first period of our lives the greatest danger is not to take the risk. When once the risk has been taken, then the greatest danger is to risk too much. By not risking at first one turns aside and serves trivialities; in the second case, by risking too much, one turns aside to the fantastic and perhaps to presumption.

Soren Kierkegaard
Taken, Risk, Too Much

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

Soren Kierkegaard
Beautiful, Sky, Differences

Purity of heart is to will one thing.

Soren Kierkegaard
Heart, Focus, Purity
Soren Kierkegaard (2013). “The Wisdom of Kierkegaard”, p.91, Simon and Schuster

Irony is the birth-pangs of the objective mind (based upon the misrelationship, discovered by the I , between existence and the idea of existence). Humor is the birth -pangs of the absolute mind (based upon the misrelationship, discovered by the I , between the I and the idea of the I .

Soren Kierkegaard
Ideas, Mind, Irony
"Journals and Papers". Book by Søren Kierkegaard, 1967.

I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away - yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.

Soren Kierkegaard
Party, Long, Soul
Soren Kierkegaard's journal entry, March 1836.

I am so fed up and joyless that not only have I nothing to fill my soul, I cannot even conceive of anything that could possibly satisfy it - alas, not even the bliss of heaven.

Soren Kierkegaard
Heaven, Soul, Bliss

The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.

Soren Kierkegaard
Friendship, Karma, Way
SOREN KIERKEGAARD (1965). “THE LAST YEARS”

In the life of the individual when love awakens it is older than everything else, because when it exists it seems as if it has existed for a long time; it presupposes itself back into the distant past until all searching ends in the inexplicable origin.

Soren Kierkegaard
Past, Long, Individual
"Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions" by Soren Kierkegaard, 1844.

Nowadays not even a suicide kills himself in desperation. Before taking the step he deliberates so long and so carefully that he literally chokes with thought. It is even questionable whether he ought to be called a suicide, since it is really thought which takes his life. He does not die with deliberation but from deliberation.

Soren Kierkegaard
Suicide, Suicidal, Long

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