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Søren Kierkegaard quotes (in contextless, note-taking form)| | Journals
"It is as though one were to say to some one in love, yes, but you might have fallen in love with another girl; to which he would have to answer: there is no answer to that, for I only know that she is my love. The moment a lover can answer that objection he is eo ipso not a lover; and if a believer can answer that objection he is eo ipso not a believer."
"Should a great man be judged according to different principles from other men? People have often answered this question with Yes, but I think No. For a great man is great because he is a chosen instrument in the hand of God; but the moment he imagines that it is he himself who is acting, that he can look into the future and with that in mind let the end ennoble the means -- then he is small. Rights and duties are valid for all and their transgression can no more be excused in the great than in politics, though people imagine that states are allowed to do wrong. Certainly wrongs such as these have often produced beneficial results, but for that we have to thank providence and not this man or that state."
"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."
"the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die."
"That is what I lack, and that is why I am left standing like a man who has rented a house and gathered all the furniture and household things together, but has not yet found the beloved with whom to share the joys and sorrows of his life..."
"I will work on with energy and not waste time grieving, like the man caught in the quicksands who began by calculating how far down he had already sunk, forgetting that all the while he was sinking still deeper."
"I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; wit poured from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me -- but I went away -- and the dash should be as long as the earth's orbit ------------------------- and wanted to shoot myself."
"A man wishes to write a novel in which one of the characters goes mad; while working on it he himself goes mad by degrees, and finishes it in the first person."
"It is the duty of the human udnerstanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are... The paradox is not a concession but a category, an ontological definition which expresses the relation between an existing cognitive spirit and eternal truth."
"The world is so weak that, when it thinks that a man who serves Christianity is one who is aesthetically incapable, they look down upon religion."
Either/Or
Vol. I: Diapsalmata
"This is the reason my soul always turns back to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. I feel that those who speak there are at least human beings: they hate, they love, they murder their enemies, and curse their descendants throughout all generations, they sin."
"pleasure consists not in what I enjoy, but in having my own way."
"Something wonderful has happened to me. I was carried up into the seventh heaven. There all the gods sat assembled. By special grace I was granted the favor of a wish. "Will you," said Mercury, "have youth, or beauty, or power, or a long life, or the most beautiful maiden, or any of the other glories we have in the chest? Choose, but only one thing." For a moment I was at a loss. Then I addressed myself to the gods as follows: "Most honorable contemporaries, I choose this one thing, that I may always have the laugh on my side." Not one of the gods said a word, on the contrary, they all began to laugh. Hence I concluded that my request was granted, and found that the gods knew how to express themselves with taste; for it would hardly have been suitable for them to have answered gravely: "It is granted thee.""
Vol. I: Diary of the Seducer
"To poetize oneself into a young girl is an art, to poetize oneself out of her is a masterpiece."
"...Spring is the most beautiful time of the year to fall in love; autumn the most beautiful to reach the goal of one's desires. There is a sadness in the autumn"
Vol. II: Equilibrium Between the Aesthetical and the Ethical in the Composition of Personality
"But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all."
"The choice itself is decisive for the content of the personality."
"there comes at last an instant when there is no longer any question of an either/or, not because he has chosen but because he has neglected to choose, which is equivalent to saying, because others have chosen for him, because he has lost his self."
"Your choice is an aesthetic choice, but an aesthetic choice is no choice."
"The only absolute either.or is the choice between good and evil, but that is also absolutely ethical."
"He who would define his life task ethically has ordinarily not so considerable a selection to choose from; on the other hand, the act of choice has far more importance for him"
"Therefore, even if a man were to choose the wrong, he will nevertheless discover, precisely by reason of the energy with which he chose, that he has chosen the wrong. For, the choice being made with the whole inwardness of his personality, his nature is purified and he himself brought into immediate relation to the eternal Power whose omnipresence interpenetrates the whole of existence. This transfiguration, this higher consecration, is never attained by that man who chooses merely aesthetically. The rhythm in that man's soul, in spite of all its passion, is a spiritus levis."
"And this is the pitiful thing to one who contemplates human life, that so many live on in a quiet state of perdition; they outlive themselves, not in the sense that the content of life is successively unfolding and now is possessed in this expanded state, but they live their lives, as it were, outside of themselves, they vanish like shadows, their immortal soul is blown away, and they are not alarmed by the problem of its immortality, for they are already in a state of dissolution before they die."
"My either/or does not in the first instance denote the choice between good and evil, it denotes the choice whereby ones chooses good and evil/or excludes them."
Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric
The Knight of Faith and the Knight of Infinite Resignation
"faith does the opposite: after having made the movements of infinity, it makes those of finiteness."
"the man has made and every instant if making the movements of infinity. With infinite resignation he has drained the cup of life's profound sadness, he knows the bliss of the infinite, he senses the pain of renouncing everything, the dearest things he possesses in the world, and yet finiteness tastes to him just as good as to one who never knew anything higher..."
"He resigned everything infinitely, and then he grasped everything again by virtue of the absurd."
"He feels a blissful rapture in letting love tingle through every nerve, and yet his soul is as solemn as that of the man who has drained the poisoned goblet and feels how the juice permeates every drop of blood -- for this instant is life and death."
"Faith therefore is not an aesthetic emotion but something far higher, precisely because it has resignation as its presupposition; it is not an immediate instinct of the heart, but is the paradox of life and existence."
Problem I
"The difference between the tragic hero and Abraham is clearly evident. The tragic hero still remains within the ethical. He lets one expression of the ethical find its telos in a higher expression of the ethical; the ethical relation between father and son, or daughter and father, he reduces to a sentiment which has its dialectic in the idea of morality. Here there can be no question of a teleological suspension of the ethical.
With Abraham the situation was different. By his act he overstepped the ethical entirely and possessed a higher telos outside of it, in relation to which he suspended the former. For I should very much like to know how one would bring Abraham's act into relation with the universal, and whether it is possible to discover any connection whatever between what Abraham did and the universal -- except the fact that he transgressed it. It was not for the sake of saving a people, not to maintain the idea of the state, that Abraham did this, and not in order to reconcile any angry deities. If there could be a question of the deity beign angry, he was angry only with Abraham, and Abraham's whole action stands in no relation to the universal; it is a purely personal udnertaking. Therefore, whereas the tragic hero is great by reason of his moral virtue, Abraham is great by reason of his personal virtue."
"Why then did Abraham do it? For God's sake, and (in complete identity with this) for his own sake. He did it for God's sake because God required proof of his faith; for his own sake he did it in order that he might furnish the proof."
"Such a relationship to the deity paganism did not know. The tragic hero does not enter into any private relationship with the diety, but for him the ethical is the divine, hence the paradox implied in his situation can be mediated in the universal."
"But he who gives up the universal in order to grasp something still higher which is not the universal -- what is he doing?"
Philosophical Fragments
A Project of Thought
"But for whom it is thinkable, for one who is born, or for one who is not born? This latter supposition is an absurdity which could never have entered anyone's head... When one who has experienced birth think so f himself as born, he conceives this transition fron non-being to being."
God as Teacher and Saviour: An Essay of the Imagination
"The man who cannot feel at least some faint intimation of this grief is a paltry soul of base coinage, bearing neither the image of Caesar nor the image of God."
"Alas, and this might have satisfied the maiden, but it could not satisfy the king, who desired not his own glorification, but hers."
"Hence they do not even dream that there is sorrow in heaven as well as joy, the deep grief of having to deny the learner what he yearns for with all his heart, of having to deny him precisely because he is the beloved."
"For this is the unfathomable nature of love, that it desires equality with the beloved, not in jest merely, but in earnest and truth."
Stages on Life's Way
In Vino Veritas: A Recollection
"I have forgotten the day of the month and even the year; such things are the concern of memory, not of recollection. The only thing that properly concerns recollection is mood and what pertains to mood; and just as a generous wine gains by passing over the line because the watery particles evaporate, so too does recollection gain by losing the watery particles of memory -- yet by this recollection no more becomes a mere fancy than does the generous wine."
Lowrie's Introduction to the Stages
"None of this was at variance with S.K.'s philosophy, for his mature judgment was that the aesthetic has not to be superseded, but "dethroned" --i.e. that it must cease to be the end or motivating power of one's existence. We need, in fact, to be warned not to regard the three stages as a prescribed curriculum which one must pass through in advancing from youth to age. Such is not S.K.'s meaning... Neither does he represent that one stage must be definitely left behind before a man enters upon the next... There is (almost) no definite delimitation of the spheres, and in 'existence' they overlap... The logical delimitation... is confounded by the movement in which each individual is involved, the direction of this movement is the prime consideration, and this is aptly indicated by the word 'stages.' There are many ways which lead to the same truth, and each man takes his own."
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