Inspirational Quotes by Soren Kierkegaard

“هر كس به قدر عظمت آن چه با آن زورآزمايى كرد بزرگى يافت: آن كس كه با جهان ستيز كرد با چيرگى بر جهان بزرگ شد؛ و آن كس كه با خويشتن نبرد كرد با چيرگى بر خويشتن بزرگ شد؛ امّا آن كس كه با خدا زورآزمايى كرد از همه بزرگ تر بود.”

“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.”

“I opened my eyes and saw the real world, and I began to laugh, and i haven't stopped since.”

“Faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off.”

“Faith is namely this paradox that the single individual is higher than the universal”

“People have an idea that the preacher is an actor on a stage and they are the critics, blaming or praising him. What they don't know is that they are the actors on the stage; he (the preacher) is merely the prompter standing in the wings, reminding them of their lost lines.”

“Be that self that one is”

“In relationship to God one can not involve himself to a certain degree. God is precisely the contradiction to all that is 'to a certain degree'.”

“The Highest, after all, is not to the Highest, but to do it.”

“This is the way a person always gains courage; when he fears a greater danger, he always has the courage to face a lesser one; when he is exceedingly afraid of one danger, it is as if the others did not exist at all.”

“What distinguishes all love from lust is the fact that it bears an impress of eternity.”

“My soul is like the dead sea, over which no bird can fly; when it gets halfway, it sinks down spent to its death and destruction.”

“In our own day anonymity has acquired a far more pregnant significance than is perhaps realized: it has an almost epigrammatic significance. People not only write anonymously, they sign their anonymous works: they even talk anonymously...Nowadays one can talk with any one, and it must be admitted that people's opinions are exceedingly sensible, yet the conversation leaves one with the impression of having talked to an anonymity. The same person will say the most contradictory things and, with the utmost calm, make a remark, which coming from him is a bitter satire on his own life. The remark itself may be sensible enough, and of the kind that sounds well at a meeting, and may serve in a discussion preliminary to coming to a decision, in much the same way that paper is made out of rags. But all these opinions put together do not make one human, personal opinion such as you may hear from quite a simple man who talks about very little but really does talk. People's remarks are so objective, so all all-inclusive, that it is a matter of complete indifference who expresses them, and where human speech is concerned that is the same as acting 'on principle'. And so our talk becomes like the public, a pure abstraction. There is no longer any one who knows how to talk, and instead, objective thought produces an atmosphere, an abstract sound, which makes human speech superfluous, just as machinery makes man superfluous. In Germany they even have phrase-books for the use of lovers, and it will end with lovers sitting together talking anonymously. In fact there are hand-books for everything, and very soon education, all the world over, will consist in learning a greater or lesser number of comments by heart, and people will excel according to their capacity for singling out the various facts like a printer singling out the letters, but completely ignorant of the meaning of anything.”

“To be human, is not a fact, but a task.”

“I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it...but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill.”

“The greatest danger to Christianity is, I contend, not heresies, heterodoxies, not atheists, not profane secularism – no, but the kind of orthodoxy which is cordial drivel, mediocrity served up sweet.”

“There is something frightful in the fact that the most dangerous thing of all, playing at Christianity, is never included in the list of heresies and schisms.”

“If then, if you have lived in despair, then whatever else you won or lost, for you everything is lost, eternity does not acknowledge you, it never knew you, or, still more dreadful, it knows you as you are known, it manacles you to your self in despair.”

“That God lets himself be born and becomes a human being, is no idle whim, something that occurs to him so as to have something to do, perhaps to put a stop to the boredom that has brashly been said to be bound up with being God-it is not to have an adventure. No, the fact that God does this is the seriousness of existence. And the seriousness in this seriousness is, in turn, that each have an opinion about it.”

“Come, sleep and death; you promise nothing, you hold everything.”