Soren Kierkegaard
Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.
Because of its tremendous solemnity death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearences.
Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.
I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.
During the first period of a man's life the greatest danger is not to take the risk.
There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.Collection: Inspirational
People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.Collection: People
It is better to try something and fail than to try nothing and succeed. The result may be the same, but you won't be. We always grow more through defeats than victories.Collection: Victory
The most common form of despair is not being who you are.Collection: Despair
I found I had less and less to say, until finally, I became silent, and began to listen. I discovered in the silence, the voice of GodCollection: Voice
Take a chance and you may lose. Take not a chance and you have lost already.Collection: May
Christ was crucified because he would have nothing to do with the crowd (even though he addressed himself to all). He did not want to form a party, an interest group, a mass movement, but wanted to be what he was, the truth, which is related to the single individual. Therefore everyone who will genuinely serve the truth is by that very fact a martyr. To win a crowd is no art; for that only untruth is needed, nonsense, and a little knowledge of human passions. But no witness to the truth dares to get involved with the crowd.Collection: Art
The unhappy person is never present to themself because they always live in the past or the future.Collection: Past
Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. 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, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.Collection: Sitting Still
The door to happiness opens outward.Collection: Doors
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.Collection: Bible
It's better to get lost in the passion than to lose the passionCollection: Passion
It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand.Collection: Understanding
A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized prayer is listening.Collection: Love
Confidence is the present tense of hope.Collection: Tense
The more people who believe something, the more apt it is to be wrong. The person who's right often has to stand alone.Collection: Believe
Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.Collection: Crowds
The minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion.Collection: Stronger
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.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Moving
Only one human being recognized as one's neighbour is necessary in order to cure a man of self-loveCollection: Men
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.Collection: Distance
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.Collection: Memories
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 bunglerCollection: Girl
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.Collection: Silence
Preparation for becoming attentive to Christianity does not consist in reading many books ... but in fuller immersion in existence.Collection: Book
As I stood alone and forsaken, and the power of the sea and the battle of the elements reminded me of my own nothingness, and on the other hand, the sure flight of the birds recalled the words spoken by Christ: Not a sparrow shall fall on the ground without your Father: then, all at once, I felt how great and how small I was; then did those two mighty forces, pride and humility, happily unite in friendship.Collection: Father
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.Collection: Doubt
The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Adventure
It is intelligent to ask two questions: (1) Is it possible? (2) Can I do it?. But it is unintelligent to ask these questions: (1) Is it real? (2) Has my neighbor done it?Collection: Real
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.Collection: Clever
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.Collection: Fighting
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.Collection: Individuality
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.Collection: Soul
Every human being is tried this way in the active service of expectancy. Now comes the fulfillment and relieves him, but soon he is again placed on reconnaissance for expectancy; then he is again relieved, but as long as there is any future for him, he has not yet finished his service. And while human life goes on this way in very diverse expectancy, expecting very different things according to different times and occasions and in different frames of mind, all life is again one nightwatch of expectancy.Collection: Long
Where unclarity resides, there is temptation, and there it proves only too easily the stronger. Wherever there is ambiguity, wherever there is wavering, there is disobedience down at the bottom.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Real
The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity.Collection: Feelings
Shows itself in the notion that what may be objectively true may in the mouth of certain people become false.Collection: People
It is only all too easy to understand the requirements contained in God's Word ('Give all your goods to the poor.' 'If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the left.' 'If anyone takes your coat, let him have your cloak also. Rejoice always.' 'Count it sheer joy when you meet various temptations' etc.). The most ignorant, poor creature cannot honestly deny being able to understand God's requirements. But it is tough on the flesh to will to understand it and to then act accordingly. It is not a question of interpretation, but action.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Daughter
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.Collection: Christian
To be lost in spiritlessness is the most terrible thing of all.Collection: Lost