Soren Kierkegaard
Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, who so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility.Collection: Wine
For like a poisonous breath over the fields, like a mass of locusts over Egypt, so the swarm of excuses is a general plaque, a ruinous infection among men, that eats off the sprouts of the Eternal.Collection: Men
Humor (is) intrinsitc to Christianity.Collection: Christianity
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.Collection: Believe
There are men who are wanting in the comparative, they as a rule are the most interesting.Collection: Men
Backwards understood be only can but, forwards lived be must life.Collection: Creativity
To venture causes anxiety. Not to venture is to lose oneself.Collection: Anxiety
Spirit is the third, yet in such a way that one can speak of a synthesis only when the spirit is posited.Collection: Way
No one may pride himself at being more than an individual, and no one despondently think that he is not an individual.Collection: Pride
Who is also aware of the tremendous risk involved in faith - when he nevertheless makes the leap of faith - this [is] subjectivity ... at its height.Collection: Philosophical
The only analogy I have before me is Socrates. My task is a Socratic task, to revise the definition of what it is to be a Christian. For my part I do not call myself a "Christian" (thus keeping the ideal free), but I am able to make it evident that the others are still less than I.Collection: Christian
At one time my only wish was to be a police official. It seemed to me to be an occupation for my sleepless intriguing mind. I had the idea that there, among criminals, were people to fight: clever, vigorous, crafty fellows. Later I realized that it was good that I did not become one, for most police cases involve misery and wretchedness-not crimes and scandals.Collection: Clever
No, I won't leave the world--I'll enter a lunatic asylum and see if the profundity of insanity reveals to me the riddles of life. Idiot, why didn't I do that long ago, why has it taken me so long to understand what it means when the Indians honour the insane, step aside for them? Yes, a lunatic asylum--don't you think I may end up there?Collection: Taken
A poet is an unhappy creature whose heart is tortured by deepest suffering but whose lips are so formed that when his sighs and cries stream out over them, their sound beomes like the sound of beautiful music . . . . And men flock about the poet saying, Sing for us soon again; that is to say, may new sufferings torture your soul, and may your lips continue to be formed as before.Collection: Beautiful
Most people believe that the Christian commandments, e.g. to love one's neighbor as oneself, are intentionally a little too severe - like setting a clock half an hour ahead to make sure of not being late in the morning.Collection: Christian
In the Christianity of Christendom the Cross has become something like the child’s hobby-horse and trumpet.Collection: Horse
And if something should be found, particularly in the first part of the dissertation, that one is generally not accustomed to come across in scholarly writings, the reader must forgive my jocundity, just as I, in order to lighten the burden, sometimes sing at my work.Collection: Work
To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc.Collection: Teacher
Because of its tremendous solemnity death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearances.Collection: Death
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?Collection: Art
...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.Collection: Christian
Irony is a qualification of subjectivity.Collection: Subjectivity
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.Collection: Believe
The question of immortality is of its nature not a scholarly question. It is a question welling up from the interior which the subject must put to itself as it becomes conscious of itself.Collection: Immortality
Most people believe that the Christian commandments are intentionally a little too severeCollection: Christian
The resolving of the ethical, is freedom; the negative resolution also has this, but the freedom, blank and bare, is as if tongue-tied, hard to express, and generally has something hard in its nature. Falling in love, however, promptly sets it to music, even if this composition contains a very difficult passage.Collection: Life
Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world?Collection: World
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.Collection: Mean
It occurs to me that artists go forward by going backward, something which I have nothing against intrinsically when it is a reproduced retreat - as is the case with the better artists.Collection: Artist
The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.Collection: Secret
Repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life.Collection: Life
One could construe the life of man as a great discourse in which the various people represent different parts of speech (the same might apply to states).Collection: Men
My scholarly expectation is then that I may succeed in becoming clever in philosophy in spite of my stupidity.Collection: Clever
It doesn't occur to me at this moment to say more; another time, perhaps tomorrow, I may have more to say, but always the same thing and about the same, for only gypsies, robber gangs and swindlers follow the adage that where a person has once been he is never to go again.Collection: May
Worship isn't God's show. God is the audience. God's watching. The congregation, they are the actors in this drama. Worship is their show. And the minister is just reminding the people of their forgotten lines.Collection: Drama
Theology sits rouged at the window and courts philosophy's favor, offering to sell her charms to it.Collection: Philosophy
Absolute passion cannot be understood by a third party.Collection: Party
If someone who wanted to learn to dance were to say: For centuries, one generation after the other has learned the positions, and it is high time that I take advantage of this and promptly begin with the quadrille--people would presumably laugh a little at him, but in the world of spirit this is very plausible. What, then, is education? I believed it is the course the individual goes through in order to catch up with himself, and the person who will not go through this course is not much helped by being born in the most enlightened age.Collection: Order
Those who dream must be awakened, and the deeper the people are who slumber, or the deeper they slumber, the more important it is that they be awakened, and the more powerfully must they be awakened.Collection: Dream
For the sadness in legitimate humour consists in the fact that honestly and without deceit it reflects in a purely human way upon what it is to be a child.Collection: Children
In actuality, no one ever sank so deep that he could not sink deeper, and there may be one or many who sank deeper. So it is always possible to be happy and grateful that things are not worse!Collection: Gratitude
Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm and shrewdly relapsing into repose.Collection: Passion
The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.Collection: Self
Ulysses was not comely, but he was eloquent, Yet he fired two goddesses of the sea with loveCollection: Love
People generally think that it is the world, the environment, external relationships, which stand in one's way, in the way of ones' good fortune... and at bottom it is always man himself that stands in his own way.Collection: Honesty
You live life looking forward, you understand life looking backward.Collection: Live Life
Above all, do not lose your desire to walk.Collection: Hiking
Teach me, 0 God, not to torture myself, not to make a martyr out of myself through stifling reflection, but rather teach me to breathe deeply in faith.Collection: Reflection
Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates itself to itself.Collection: Men