Søren Kierkegaard quotes - page 3

You wanted God's ideas about what was best for you to coincide with your ideas, but you also wanted him to be the almighty Creator of heaven and earth so that he could properly fulfill your wish. And yet, if he were to share your ideas, he would cease to be the almighty Father. (Søren Kierkegaard)
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. View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
Death induces the sensual person to say: Let us eat and drink, because tomorrow we shall die – but this is sensuality's cowardly lust for life, that contemptible order of things where one lives in order to eat and drink instead of eating and drinking in order to live. View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read-ultimately you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books. View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
The truth is a trap: you can not get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you. View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant... My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known - no wonder, then, that I return the love. View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth. View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings. View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts. View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown. View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference. (Søren Kierkegaard)
The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have. View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
Oh, can I really believe the poet's tales, that when one first sees the object of one's love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love like all knowledge is remembrance, that love too has its prophecies in the individual. View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
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. View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
A 'no' does not hide anything, but a 'yes' very easily becomes a deception. View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
Idleness, we are accustomed to say, is the root of all evil. To prevent this evil, work is recommended.... Idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; on the contrary, it is truly a divine life, if one is not bored.... View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
Now, with God's help, I shall become myself. View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
Hope is a passion for the possible. View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
I'm so misunderstood that people misunderstand me even when I tell them I'm misunderstood. View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
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. (Søren Kierkegaard)
A white spot is on the horizon. There it is. A terrible storm is brewing. But no one sees the write spot or has any inkling of what it might mean. But no (this would not be the most terrible situation either), no, there is one person who sees it and knows what it means-but he is a passenger. He has no authority on the ship, can take no action. ... The fact that in Christendom there is visible on the horizon a white speck which means that a storm is threatening-this I knew; but, alas, I was an am only a passenger. View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
There is no one at the Communion table who retains against you even the least of your sins, no one, unless you yourself do it. So cast them away from yourself, and the recollection of them, lest in it your retain them; and cast the recollection of your having cast your sins away, lest in it you retain them. P. 170. View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
He was extremely important to his contemporaries, who wanted nothing more than to see in his the Expected One; they wanted almost to press it upon him and and to force him into the role - but that he then refuses to be that! View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
This is approximately the way Christendom relates to the essentially Christian, the unconditioned. After seventeen, eighteen detours and running all around someone finally has his finite existence assured, and then we receive a sermon about Seek first the kingdom of God. Is this sobriety or is this intoxication? p. 112. View quote
Søren Kierkegaard