Quotes from Soren Kierkegaard

What good would it do me if truth stood before me, cold and naked, not caring whether I recognized her or not?

Everyone take his revenge on the world. My revenge consists in bearing my distress and anguish enclosed deeply within me while my laughter entertains everyone. If I see someone suffer I give him my sympathy, console him as best I can, and listen to him calmly when he assures me that I am fortunate. If only I can keep this up until the day I die I shall have had my revenge

When indeed does the temporal suffering oppress a man most terribly? Is it not when it seems to him that it has no significance, that it neither secures nor gains anything for him? Is it not when the suffering, as the impatient man expresses it, is without meaning or purpose?

If anything is to be done, one must try to introduce Christianity into Christendom.

I am poor—you are my riches; dark—you are my light; I own nothing, need nothing. And how could I own anything? After all, it is a contradiction that he can own something who does not own himself. I am happy as a child who is neither able to own anything nor allowed to. I own nothing, for I belong only to you; I am not, I have ceased to be, in order to be yours." —Johannes De Silentio, from_Either/Or_

Let the thunder of a hundred cannon remind you three times daily to resist the force of habit.

After all, it is the best time of one's life, the first period of falling in love, when with every meeting, every glance, one brings home something new to rejoice over.

A Reflexão é o anjo exterminador da espontaneidade… Se fosse verdade que a reflexão devesse controlar a inclinação amorosa, nunca haveria casamento.

In every generation that man is a rarity who exercises such a power over himself that he can will what is not pleasant to him, that he can hold fast that truth which does not please him, hold that it is the truth although it does not please him, hold that it is the truth precisely because it does not please him, and then nevertheless, in spite of the fact that it does not please him, can commit himself to it. pp 151-2

Most Christians have at some point faced the question, "Which church should I attend?" After reading Attack Upon Christendom the question becomes, "Is it OK for a Christian to go to church?

My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known — no wonder, then, that I return the love.

So wonderful a power is remorse, so sincere is its friendship that to escape it entirely is the most terrible thing of all.

It is comic that a mentally disordered man picks up any piece of granite and carries it around because he thinks it is money, and in the same way it is comic that Don Juan has 1,003 mistresses, for the number simply indicates that they have no value. Therefore, one should stay within one's means in the use of the word love.

It is terrifying when God takes out the instruments for the surgery for which no human being has the strength: to take away a person's human zest for life, to slay him – in order that he can live as one who has died to the world and to the flesh.

Truth always rests with the minority … because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion" – Soren Kierkegaard

There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true. The other is to refuse to accept what is true.

The only fundamental basis for understanding is that one himself becomes what he understands and one understands only in proportion to becoming himself that which he understands.

Love is the unfathomable ground that is hidden in darkness, but the resolution is the triumphant victor who, like Orpheus, fetches the infatuation of falling in love to the light of day, for the resolution is the true form of love, the true explanation and transfiguration.

This emphasis on the situation was particularly important in order to show that what was central for Socrates was not a fixed point but an ubique et nusquam . It was needed in order to point up the Socratic sensibility which under the subtlest and weakest contact immediately discerned the presence of the Idea, immediately felt the electricity pervading the whole existence.

Although in this life one may find solace in the crowd from God's radical demands, "In eternity you will look in vain for the crowd. You will listen in vain to find where the noise and the gathering is, so that you can run to it." In actual fact, "For the Infinite One, there is no place, the individual is himself the place.

With the daguerreotype everyone will be able to have their portrait taken—formerly it was only the prominent—and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same, so we shall only need one portrait.

If a pastor's activity in the church is merely a once-a-week attempt to tow the congregation's cargo ship a little closer to eternity, the whole thing comes to nothing. A human life, unlike a cargo ship, cannot lie in the same place until the next Sunday.

Oleminen ei ole mukavuuskysymys.

Better well hanged than ill wed.