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Soren Kierkegaard Quotes - Page 17

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Every mental act is composed of doubt and belief, but it is belief that is the positive, it is belief that sustains thought and holds the world together.

Every mental act is composed of doubt and belief, but it is belief that is the positive, it is belief that sustains thought and holds the world together.

Soren Kierkegaard
Doubt, Together, World

He who does not know how to encircle a girl so that she loses sight of everything he does not want her to see, he who does not know how to poetize himself into a girl so that it is from her that everything proceeds as he wants it-he is and remains a bungler

Soren Kierkegaard
Girl, Sight, Doe

To despair over one's sins indicates that sin has become or wants to be internally consistent. It wants nothing to do with the good, does not want to be so weak as to listen occasionally to other talk. No, it insists on listening only to itself, on having dealings only with itself; it closes itself up within itself, indeed, locks itself inside one more inclosure, and protects itself against every attack or pursuit by the good by despairing over sin.

Soren Kierkegaard
Listening, Despair, Doe

The individual (no matter how well-meaning he might be, no matter how much strength he might have, if only he would use it) does not have the passion to rip himself away from either the coils of Reflection or the seductive ambiguities of Reflection; nor do the surroundings and times have any events or passions, but rather provide a negative setting of a habit of reflection, which plays with some illusory project only to betray him in the end with a way out: it shows him that the most clever thing to do is nothing at all.

Soren Kierkegaard
Clever, Rip, Passion

Your own tactic is to train yourself in the art of becoming enigmatic to everybody. My young friend, suppose there was no one who troubld himself to guess your riddle--what joy, then, would you have in it?

Soren Kierkegaard
Art, Young Friends, Joy

Silence is the demon's trap, and the more one is silenced, the more terrible the demon; but silence is also the divinity's mutual understanding with the single individual.

Soren Kierkegaard
Silence, Understanding, Divinity

Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do. He who does not understand irony and has no ear for its whispering lacks of what might called the absolute beginning of the personal life. He lacks what at moments is indispensable for the personal life, lacks both the regeneration and rejuvenation, the cleaning baptism of irony that redeems the soul from having its life in finitude though living boldly and energetically in finitude.

Soren Kierkegaard
Soul, Baptism, Ironic

Preparation for becoming attentive to Christianity does not consist in reading many books ... but in fuller immersion in existence.

Soren Kierkegaard
Book, Reading, Preparation

The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.

Soren Kierkegaard
Mean, Doe, Assistants
"Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments". Book by Soren Kierkegaard, February 28, 1846.

Imagine hidden in a simpler exterior a secret receptacle wherein the most precious treasure is deposited - there is a spring which has to be pressed, but the spring is hidden, and the pressure must have a certain strength, so that an accidental pressure would not be sufficient. So likewise is the hope of eternity hidden in man's inmost parts, and affliction is the pressure. When it presses the hidden spring, and strongly enough, then the contents appear in all their glory.

Soren Kierkegaard
Spring, Men, Secret

An individual in despair despairs over something. . . . In despairing over something, he really despair[s] over himself, and now he wants to get rid of himself. Consequently, to despair over something is still not despair proper. . . . To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself-this is the formula for all despair.

Soren Kierkegaard
Individuality, Despair, Want

Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm and shrewdly relapsing into repose.

Soren Kierkegaard
Passion, Reflection, Understanding

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.

Soren Kierkegaard
Fighting, Pride, Men

Intelligence has got the upper hand to such an extent that it transforms the real task into an unreal trick and reality into a play.

Soren Kierkegaard
Real, Hands, Play

If anyone proposes to believe, i.e., imagines himself to believe, because many good and upright people living here on the hill have believed, i.e., have said that they believedthen he is a fool, and it is essentially indifferent whether he believes on account of his own and perhaps a widely held opinion about what good and upright people believe, or believes a Münchhausen.

Soren Kierkegaard
Believe, People, Fool

My life is absolutely meaningless. When I consider the different periods into which it falls, it seems like the word Schnur in the dictionary, which means in the first place a string, in the second, a daughter-in-law. The only thing lacking is that the word Schnur should mean in the third place a camel, in the fourth, a dust-brush.

Soren Kierkegaard
Daughter, Fall, Mean
Soren Kierkegaard (1959). “Either/ Or”

About as genuine as tea made from a bit of paper which once lay in a drawer beside another piece of paper which had been used to wrap up a few tea leaves from which tea had already been made three times.

Soren Kierkegaard
Tea Leaves, Three, Pieces

...knowing God is the condition for the sanctification of a human being by God's assistance and according to His intention. Wherever God is, there He is always creating... He wants to create a new human being. To need God is to become new. And to know God is the crucial thing.

Soren Kierkegaard
Christian, Creating, Knowing

Shows itself in the notion that what may be objectively true may in the mouth of certain people become false.

Soren Kierkegaard
People, Mouths, May

Most people believe that the Christian commandments are intentionally a little too severe

Soren Kierkegaard
Christian, Believe, People

The paradox in Christian truth is invariably due to the fact that it is the truth that exists for God. The standard of measure and the end is superhuman; and there is only one relationship possible: faith.

Soren Kierkegaard
Christian, Truth, Facts

Do you know of any more overwhelming and humbling expression for God's condescension and extravagance towards us human beings than that He places Himself, so to say, on the same level of choice with the world, just so that we may be able to choose; that God, if language dare speak thus, woos humankind - that He, the eternally strong one, woos sapless humanity? Yet, how insignificant is the young lover's choice between her pursuers by comparison with this choice between God and the world.

Soren Kierkegaard
Christian, Strong, Expression

This fact, that the opposite of sin is by no means virtue, has been overlooked. The latter is partly a pagan view, which is content with a merely human standard, and which for that very reason does not know what sin is, that all sin is before God. No, the opposite of sin is faith.

Soren Kierkegaard
Mean, Opposites, Views
"The Sickness unto Death". Book by Soren Kierkegaard, Part Two: Despair Is Sin, pp. 114 - 115, 1849.

The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.

Soren Kierkegaard
Believe, Men, Suffering
"Stages on Life's Way". Book by Søren Kierkegaard, 1845.

Certainty... lurks at the door of faith and threatens to devour it.

Soren Kierkegaard
Doors, Certainty

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