Inspirational Quotes by Soren Kierkegaard
“A choice that is not used is worse than nothing; it is a snare in which a person has trapped himself as a slave who did not become free”
“What Christendom needs at every moment is someone who expresses Christianity uncalculatingly or with absolute recklessness.”
“The matter is quite simple. The bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world?”
“... joy and refreshment in contemplating the great men who have found that precious stone for which they sell all, even their lives... proceeding on their chosen course without vacillating...absorbed in themselves and in working towards their higher goal.”
“Existen dos maneras de ser engañados: una es creer lo que no es verdad y la otra es negarse a aceptar lo que sí lo es".”
“He writes because for him it is a luxury which becomes the more agreeable and more evident, the fewer there are who buy and read what he writes.”
topics: writing
“To be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain understanding must precede every action. 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.”
“... when the ambitious man whose slogan is 'Either Caesar or nothing' does not get to be Caesar, he despairs over it. But this also means something else: precisely because he did not get to be Caesar, he now cannot bear to be himself.”
“If man were a beast or an angel, he would not be able to be in anxiety. Since he is both beast and angel, he can be in anxiety, and the greater the anxiety, the greater the man.”
topics: theconceptofanxiety
“Şcoala suferinţei e cea mai lungă, căci te pregăteşte pentru eternitate”
“There is so much talk about being offended by christianity because it is so dark and gloomy, offended because it is so rigorous etc. But it would be best of all to explain for once that the real reason that men are offended by christianity is that it is too high, because its goal is not man's goal, because it wants to make man into something so extraordinary that he cannot grasp the thought.”
“Is it not possible that my activity as an objective observer of nature will weaken my strength as a human being?”
“In a theater it happened that a fire stated offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed- amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.”
“Unless you grasp that it requires all the strength of spirit to die, that the hero always dies before his death, you will not come particularly far in your observations on life.”
topics: death
“Do not fly so high with your decisions that you forget that a decision is but a beginning. How wretched and miserable it is to find in a person many good intentions but few good deeds. And there are other dangers too, dangers of sin. With all your good intentions, you must not forget your duty, neither should you forget to do it with joy. And strive to carry your burdens and responsibilities in a surrendered way. If you don’t, there is a danger of losing your decisiveness; of going through life without courage and fading away in death.”
topics: provocations
“A poet is an unhappy being whose heart it torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music.”
“The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly one you can never have.”
“The majority of men are curtailed "I's"; what was planned by nature as a possibility capable of being sharpened into an I is soon dulled into a third person.”
“That one is in despair is not a rarity; no, it is rare, very rare, that one is…not in despair.”
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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.