Quotes About Kierkegaard

Chronocanine Envy: Sadness experienced when one realized that, unlike one's dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, Life must be lived forward.

The very names Kierkegaard, Luther, Calvin, Paul and Jeremiah suggest what Schleiermacher never possessed, a clear and direct apprehension of the truth that man is made to serve God and not God to serve man.

Kierkegaard writes, "…riches and abundance come hypocritically clad in sheep's clothing pretending to be security against anxieties and they become then the object of anxiety…they secure a man against anxieties just about as well as the wolf which is put to tending the sheep secures them…against the wolf.

Existentialism dates back to Soren Kierkegaard, and, in his case, represented (1) a rejection of the abstract terms beloved by most Western philosophers, (2) a preference for defining words and concepts in relation to concrete individuals and their concrete choices in real-life situations, and (3) a new and tricky way of defending Christianity against the onslaughts of rationalists.

And although this (marital love) cannot be portrayed artistically, then let your consolation be, as it is mine, that we are not to read about or listen to or look at what is highest and the most beautiful in life, but are, if you please, to live it. Therefore, when I readily admit that romantic love lends itself much better to artistic portrayal than marital love, this does not at all mean that it is less esthetic than the other - on the contrary, it is more esthetic.

The self must be destroyed, brought down to nothing, in order for self-transcendence to begin. Then the self can begin to relate itself to powers beyond itself. It has to thrash around in its finitude, it has to die, in order to question that finitude, in order to see beyond it. To what? Kierkegaard answers: to infinitude, to absolute transcendence, the the Ultimate Power of Creation which made finite creatures.

As Kierkegaard sums it up "The loss of possibility signifies either that everything has become necessary to man or that everything has become trivial. Actually, in the extreme of depressive psychosis, we seem to see the merger of these two. Everything becomes necessary and trivial at the same time, which leads to complete despair.

Nietzsche was not an Existentialist. Existentialism emerged out of the conflict between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, the Danish religious writer.

And this is one of the most crucial definitions for the whole of Christianity; that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.

In the deepest sense, the being in a state of sin is the sin, the particular sins are not the continuation of sin, they are expressions of its continuation.

She was a riddle, who mysteriously possessed her own solution, a secret, and what are all diplomats' secrets compared with this, an enigma, and what in all the world is so beautiful as the word that solves it?

Anyone not wanting to sink in the wretchedness of the finite is obliged in the most profound sense to struggle with the infinite.

The best proof adduced of the wretchedness of life is that derived from contemplating its glory.

That one is in despair is not a rarity; no, it is rare, very rare, that one is…not in despair.

But still he must have recourse to the paradox. For when the individual by his guilt has gone outside the universal he can return to it only by virtue of having come as the individual into an absolute relationship with the absolute.

So despair, then, and your frivolity shall never more cause you to roam like an inconstant spirit, like a ghost among the ruins of a world which is yet lost to you; despair, and your spirit shall become beautiful and joyous to you once more, though you now look at it with different eyes, and your spirit, now liberated, shall vault up into the world of freedom.

La melancolía le permite a Kierkegaard ser él mismo, Convierte a la persona en el corazón de la realidady rechaza toda mediación entre el individuo y el mundo que lo rodea, un mundo que es absurdo y, además, aburrido. En 1845 escribió: "¿Cuál es mi enfermedad? Melancolía. ¿Dónde se asienta esta enfermedad? En el poder de la imaginación".

Anxiety is the state of man…when he confronts his freedom…Whenever possibility is visualized by an individual, anxiety is potentially present in the same experience…Such possibilities, like roads ahead which cannot be known since one has not yet traversed and experienced them, involve anxiety…To Kierkegaard, the more possibility…an individual has, the more potential anxiety he has at the same time.

Jer kad ?emo mi civilizirana bi?a postati ozbiljni? upitao je Kierkegaard. Tek pošto dokraja i temeljito upoznamo pakao. Bez toga ?e hedonizam i lakomislenost proširiti pakao na sve naše dane.

Anxiety," Kierkegaard said, "is the dizziness of freedom.

It was reading Hamlet that ruined the concept of authenticity for me, not because Hamlet lacked existentialist credentials himself - indeed, as an earlier discontented Dane, he could be said to have laid the ground for Kierkegaard - but because the line 'to thine own self be true' was spoken by that humourless old ninny, Polonius.

For the universal will constantly torture him and say, 'You ought to have talked. Where will you find the certainty that it was not after all a hidden pride which governed your resolution?

The good is by virtue my willing it. Otherwise it has no existence.

If I have a system it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called 'the infinite qualitative distinction' between time and eternity