Inspirational Quotes by Soren Kierkegaard
“I am convinced that God is love, this thought has for me a primitive lyrical validity. When it is present to me, I am unspeakably blissful, when it is absent, I long for it more vehemently than does the lover for his object; but I do not believe, this courage I lack. For me the love of God is, both in a direct and in an inverse sense, incommensurable with the whole of reality. I am not cowardly enough to whimper and complain, but neither am I deceitful enough to deny that faith is something much higher. I can well endure living in my way, I am joyful and content, but my joy is not that of faith, and in comparison with that it is unhappy.”
“Metaphorically speaking, a person's ideas must be the building he lives in - otherwise there is something terribly wrong.”
“- a bad conscience is indeed able to make life interesting.”
― Soren Kierkegaard ,
from The Seducer's Diary
“On the whole, the longing for solitude is a sign that there still is spirit in a person and is the measure of what spirit there is. [...] In antiquity as well as in the Middle Ages there was an awareness of this longing for solitude and a respect for what it means; whereas in the constant sociality of our day we shrink from solitude to the point (what a capital epigram!) that no use for it is known other than as a punishment for criminals.”
“خود بودن، ماجراجویانه است. مانند دیگران بودن، نسخه ی تقلیدی بودن، تبدیل شدن به یک عدد در میان جمعیت، بسیار آسان تر و امن تر است.”
“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.”
“He cannot become old, for he has never been young; he cannot become young, for he has already become old; in a way he cannot die, for he has never lived; in a way he cannot live, for he is already dead.”
“Ulysses was not comely, but he was eloquent, Yet he fired two goddesses of the sea with love”
“How empty life is and without meaning. - We bury a man, we follow him to the grave, we throw three spades of earth on him, we ride out in a coach, we ride home in a coach, we take comfort in the thought that a long life awaits us. But how long is threescore years and ten? Why not finish it at once?”
“They were not unfortunate girls who, as outcasts or in the belief that they were cast out by society, grieved wholesomely and intensely and, once in a while at times when the heart was too full, ventilated it in hate or forgiveness. No visible change took place in them; they lived in the accustomed context, were respected as always, and yet they were changed, almost unaccountably to themselves and incomprehensibly to others. Their lives were not cracked or broken, as others' were, but were bent into themselves; lost to others, they futilely sought to find themselves.”
topics: deceit , life-lessons , love , passion , seduction , temptation , the-seducer-s-diary , young-girls
“Great Shakespeare!, you who can say everything, everything, everything exactly as it is – and yet why was this torment one you never gave voice to? Was it perhaps that you kept it to yourself, like the beloved whose name one still cannot bear the world to mention? For a poet buys this power of words to utter all the grim secrets of others at the cost of a little secret he himself cannot utter.”
“No one shall be forgotten who was great in this world; but everyone was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion to the greatness of what he loved.”
topics: love
“The speculative thinker makes Christianity into theology, instead of recognizing that a living relationship to Christ involves passion, struggle, decision, personal appropriation, and inner transformation.' (Moore's summary of Kierkegaard)”
topics: spirituality
“Birkaç ağlama nöbetinin ardından şimdi şu dingin ruh haliyle ne kadar güzelleşti. Varlığı hüzünle acının güzel bir uyumu”
― Soren Kierkegaard ,
from The Seducer's Diary
“Sitting calmly on a ship in fair weather is not a metaphor for having faith; but when the ship has sprung a leak, then enthusiastically to keep the ship afloat by pumping and not to seek the harbor--that is the metaphor for having faith. (Concluding Unscientific Postscript)”
topics: faith
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Kierkegaard left the task of discovering the meaning of his works to the reader, because "the task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted". Scholars have interpreted Kierkegaard variously as an existentialist, neo-orthodoxist, postmodernist, humanist, and individualist.
Crossing the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, and literature, he is an influential figure in contemporary thought.