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Soren Kierkegaard Quotes - Page 14

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One is not unpopular because he uses peculiar expressions; that just so happens; such terms become a fad, and by and by everybody, down to the last simpleton, uses them. But a person who follows through an idea in his

One is not unpopular because he uses peculiar expressions; that just so happens; such terms become a fad, and by and by everybody, down to the last simpleton, uses them. But a person who follows through an idea in his mind is, and always will be, essentially unpopular. That is why Socrates was unpopular, though he did not use any special terms, for to grasp and hold his 'ignorance' requires greater vital effort than understanding the whole of Hegel's philosophy.

Soren Kierkegaard
Philosophy, Ignorance, Expression

Faith is precisely the paradox that the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal, is justified before it, not as inferior to it but superior - yet in such a way, please note, that it is the single individual who, after being subordinate as the single individual to the universal, now by means of the universal becomes the single individual who as the single individual is superior, that the single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute.

Soren Kierkegaard
Mean, Atheism, Way

Choose to be who you are. . . The individual who would become a person must at some point take over his entire being - must, that is, choose herself.

Soren Kierkegaard
Be Who You Are, Individual, Persons

My sorrow is my castle.

Soren Kierkegaard
Sorrow, Castles
Soren Kierkegaard (1946). “Either/or”

Knowledge is an attitude, a passion, actually an illicit attitude. For the compulsion to know is like dipsomania, erotomania, and homicidal mania, in producing a character that is out of balance. It is not at all that the scientist goes after the truth.

Soren Kierkegaard
Attitude, Passion, Character

Out of love for mankind, and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.

Soren Kierkegaard
Despair, Tasks, Easy

Men are not on such intimate terms with the sublime that they really can believe in it

Soren Kierkegaard
Believe, Men, Sublime

Dread is a womanish debility in which freedom swoons. Psychologically speaking, the fall into sin always occurs in impotence. But dread is at the same time the most egotistic thing.

Soren Kierkegaard
Fall, Sin, Dread

You should therefore say: alone in one's boat, alone with one's care, alone with one's despair, which one is craven enough to want rather to keep than submit to the pain of being healed.

Soren Kierkegaard
Pain, Despair, Care

You train yourself in the art of being mysterious to everyone. My dear friend! What if there were no one, who cared about guessing your riddle, what pleasure would you then take in it?

Soren Kierkegaard
Art, What If, Guessing

I have only one friend, and that is echo. Why is it my friend? Because I love my sorrow, and echo does not take it away from me. I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night. Why is it my confidant? Because it remains silent.

Soren Kierkegaard
Night, Echoes, Silence

The absurd . . . the fact that with God all things are possible. The absurd is not one of the factors which can be discriminated within the proper compass of the understanding: it is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen.

Soren Kierkegaard
Understanding, Facts, Unexpected
Fear and Trembling "Problemata: Preliminary Expectoration" (1843)

When you were called, did you answer or did you not? Perhaps softly and in a whisper?

Soren Kierkegaard
Answers

What our age lacks is not reflection, but passion.

Soren Kierkegaard
Passion, Reflection, Age

The conclusions of passion are the only reliable ones.

Soren Kierkegaard
Passion, Thinking, Conclusion
Soren Kierkegaard (2013). “Fear and Trembling”, p.75, Simon and Schuster

Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all verbs are irregular.

Soren Kierkegaard
Numbers, Verbs, Language
Soren Kierkegaard (2015). “Papers and Journals”, p.62, Penguin UK

The thing is to understand myself: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. That is what I now recognize as the most important thing.

Soren Kierkegaard
Ideas, Important, Dies

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward- looking position.

Soren Kierkegaard
Life, Inspiring, Wisdom
Diary (1843)

In a mathematical proposition, for example, the objectivity is given, but therefore its truth is also an indifferent truth.

Soren Kierkegaard
Science, Objectivity, Example

Most people live dejectedly in worldly joys or sorrows. They sit on the sidelines and do not join the dance.

Soren Kierkegaard
Sadness, People, Dancing

That which is truly human no generation learns from the one before it. No generation learns from another how to love. No generation has a shorter task assigned to it except insofar as the previous generation shirked its task and deluded itself.

Soren Kierkegaard
Tasks, Generations, How To Love

No grand inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest; nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared as anxiety knows how, and no sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused, as anxiety does, which never lets him escape.

Soren Kierkegaard
Men, Judging, Anxiety

I do not lack the courage to think a thought whole.

Soren Kierkegaard
Thinking, Whole
Soren Kierkegaard (2013). “Fear and Trembling”, p.20, Simon and Schuster

So to be sick unto death is, not to be able to die-yet not as though there were hope of life; no, the hopelessness in this case is that even the last hope, death, is not available. When death is the greatest danger, one hopes for life; but when one becomes acquainted with an even more dreadful danger, one hopes for death. So when the danger is so great that death has become one's hope, despair is the disconsolateness of not being able to die.

Soren Kierkegaard
Life, Hope, Sick
Soren Kierkegaard (2013). “Sickness Unto Death”, p.12, Simon and Schuster

Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.

Soren Kierkegaard
Fate, Anxiety
"The Concept of Anxiety". Book by Soren Kierkegaard, p. 96-97, 1844.

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