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Soren Kierkegaard Quotes - Page 16

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Learning to know anxiety is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known anxiety or by sinking under it. He therefore who has leaned rightly to be in anxiety has

Learning to know anxiety is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known anxiety or by sinking under it. He therefore who has leaned rightly to be in anxiety has learned the most important thing.

Soren Kierkegaard
Adventure, Men, Anxiety

In actuality, no one ever sank so deep that he could not sink deeper, and there may be one or many who sank deeper. So it is always possible to be happy and grateful that things are not worse!

Soren Kierkegaard
Gratitude, Grateful, May

If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?

Soren Kierkegaard
Passion, Dark, Men
Soren Kierkegaard (2005). “Fear and Trembling”, p.18, Penguin UK

I have, I believe, the courage to doubt everything; I have, I believe, the courage to fight against everything; but I do not have the courage to acknowledge anything, the courage to possess, to own anything.

Soren Kierkegaard
Believe, Fighting, Doubt

Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do

Soren Kierkegaard
Ironic, Rejuvenation, Irony

Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content; it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.

Soren Kierkegaard
Yield, Discipline, Consistency
"On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates". Book by Soren Kierkegaard, 1841.

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.

Soren Kierkegaard
Life, Passion, Soul

What the philosophers have to say about reality is often as disappointing as a sign you see in a shop window, which reads Pressing Done Here. If you brought your clothes in to be pressed, you would be fooled: for the sign is only for sale.

Soren Kierkegaard
Reality, Clothes, Would Be
Soren Kierkegaard (1959). “Either/ Or”

Compared with the person who is conscious of his despair, the despairing individual who is ignorant of his despair is simply a negativity further away from the truth and deliverance. . . . Yet ignorance is so far from breaking the despair or changing despair to nondespairing that it can in fact be the most dangerous form of despair. . . . An individual is furthest from being conscious of himself as spirit when he is ignorant of being in despair. But precisely this-not to be conscious of oneself as spirit-is despair, which is spiritlessness. . . .

Soren Kierkegaard
Ignorance, Negativity, Individuality

It is the normal state of the human heart to try to build its identity around something besides God.

Soren Kierkegaard
Heart, Trying, Identity

Sleeping is the height of genius

Soren Kierkegaard
Sleep, Genius, Height
Soren Kierkegaard (2004). “Either/Or: A Fragment of Life”, p.42, Penguin UK

It is not a gain that guilt should be wholly forgotten. On the contrary, it is loss and perdition. But it is a gain to win an inner intensity of heart through a deeper and deeper inner sorrowing over guilt.

Soren Kierkegaard
Heart, Loss, Winning
Soren Kierkegaard (2013). “Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

It will be easy for us the first time we receive that ball of yarn from Ariadne (love) and then go through all the mazes of the labyrinth (life) and kill the monster. But how many there are who plunge into life (the labyrinth) without taking that precaution?

Soren Kierkegaard
Yarn, Labyrinth, Mazes
"Søren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers: Autobiographical, 1829-1848". Book by Søren Kierkegaard and Gregor Malantschuk, p. 36, Journal entry (August 1, 1835), 1978.

Sin is in itself separation from the good, but despair over sin is separation a second time.

Soren Kierkegaard
Time, Despair, Separation

It goes against the grain for me to do what so often happens, to speak inhumanly about the great as if a few millennia were an immense distance. I prefer to speak humanly about it, as if it happened yesterday, and let only the greatness itself be the distance.

Soren Kierkegaard
Distance, Greatness, Yesterday
"Fear and Trembling". Book by Soren Kierkegaard, translation by S. Walsh, p. 28, 2006.

Spiritual superiority only sees the individual. But alas, ordinarily we human beings are sensual and, therefore, as soon as it is a gathering, the impression changes - we see something abstract, the crowd, and we become different. But in the eyes of God, the infinite spirit, all the millions that have lived and now live do not make a crowd, He only sees each individual.

Soren Kierkegaard
Life, Spiritual, Eye

Human justice is very prolix, and yet at times quite mediocre; divine justice is more concise and needs no information from the prosecution, no legal papers, no interrogation of witnesses, but makes the guilty one his own informer and helps him with eternity's memory.

Soren Kierkegaard
Memories, Divine Justice, Paper
"Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Against Cowardliness". Book by Soren Kierkegaard, p. 351,

There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life's highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.

Soren Kierkegaard
Joy, Moments, Splendid
"Either/or, Vol. 1". Book by Søren Kierkegaard, Howard Vincent Hong, Edna Hatlestad Hong, Princeton University Press, p. 20, 1987.

My tactics were, by God's aid, to employ every means to make it clear what the requirement of Christianity truly is.

Soren Kierkegaard
Mean, Requirements, Tactics

The present generation, wearied by its chimerical efforts, relapses into complete indolence. Its condition is that of a man who has only fallen asleep towards morning: first of all come great dreams, then a feeling of laziness, and finally a witty or clever excuse for remaining in bed.

Soren Kierkegaard
Dream, Witty, Morning

In the deepest sense, the being in a state of sin is the sin, the particular sins are not the continuation of sin, they are expressions of its continuation.

Soren Kierkegaard
Expression, Sin, States

Only one human being recognized as one's neighbour is necessary in order to cure a man of self-love

Soren Kierkegaard
Men, Self, Order

Thus our own age is essentially one of understanding, and on the average, perhaps, more knowledgeable than any former generation, but it is without passion. Every one knows a great deal, we all know which way we ought to go and all the different ways we can go, but nobody is willing to move.

Soren Kierkegaard
Moving, Passion, Average

It seems to be my destiny to discourse on truth, insofar as I discover it, in such a way that all possible authority is simultaneously demolished.

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

Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world?

Soren Kierkegaard
World

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