Søren Kierkegaard

“Men think that it is impossible for a human being to love his enemies, for enemies are hardly able to endure the sight of one another. Well, then, shut your eyes--and your enemy looks just like your neighbor.”

“I am courteous enough to assume that everyone in this so aesthetically voluptuous age, so potent and aroused that conception occurs as easily as with the partridge which, Aristotle says, needs only to hear the voice of the cock or its flight overhead - to assume that at the mere sound of the word 'concealment' everyone can easily shake a dozen romances and comedies from his sleeve.”

“Now, it is of course well known that Christ continually uses the expression 'imitators.' He never says that he asks for admirers, adoring admirers, adherents; and when he uses the expression 'follower' he always explains it in such a way that one perceives that 'imitators' is meant by it, that is not adherents of a teaching but imitators of a life....”

“The profundity of Christianity is that Christ is both our redeemer and our judge, not that one is our redeemer and another is our judge, for then we certainly come under judgement, but that the redeemer and the judge are the same.”

“Let us speak of this in purely human terms. Oh! how pitiable a person who has never felt the loving urge to sacrifice everything for love, who has therefore been unable to do so!”

“The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think.”

“You love the accidental. A smile from a pretty girl in an interesting situation, a stolen glance, that is what you are hunting for, that is a motif for your aimless fantasy. You who always pride yourself on being an observateur must, in return, put up with becoming an object of observation. Ah, you are a strange fellow, one moment a child, the next an old man; one moment you are thinking most earnestly about the most important scholarly problems, how you will devote your life to them, and the next you are a lovesick fool. But you are a long way from marriage.”

“You train yourself in the art of being mysterious to everyone. My dear friend! What if there were no one, who cared about guessing your riddle, what pleasure would you then take in it?”

“sessizliklerin en kesini susmak değil, konuşmaktir.”

“Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.”

“Mutismul cel mai sigur nu-i să taci, ci să vorbeşti.”

“This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.”

“The slaves of paltriness, the frogs in life’s swamp, will naturally cry out, “Such a love is foolishness. The rich brewer’s widow is a match fully as good and respectable.” Let them croak.”

“Aşk için her şey imgedir; ama imge de hakikattir.”

“Bir genç kızı ne korkutur? Tin. Neden? Çünkü tin onun tüm dişi varlığının yadsınmasına yol açar. Erkeksi güzel bakışlar, çekici bir kişilik vs. iyi özelliklerdir ve bunlarla fetihler yapılabilir; ama asla kesin bir zafer kazanılamaz. Neden? Çünkü o zaman kızla, kızın kendi alanında savaş edilmiştir ve orda kız daima daha güçlüdür. Bu yöntemlerle bir kızın yüzü kızartılabilir, mahcup duruma düşürülebilir; ama güzelliğini ilginç hale getiren o anlatılması olanaksız, büyüleyici endişe uyandırılamaz.”

“Bulutların hızlı uçuşları, ışık ve karanlığın birbirini kovalaması beni öylesine sarhoş eder ki uyanık olduğum halde düş görürüm”

“Birkaç ağlama nöbetinin ardından şimdi şu dingin ruh haliyle ne kadar güzelleşti. Varlığı hüzünle acının güzel bir uyumu”

“ماذا لو أن كل شيء في هذا العالم هو عبارة عن سوء فهم؟ماذا لو أن الضحك في الحقيقة هو بكاء؟”

“At vove er at miste fodfæstet et kort øjeblik - ikke at vove er at miste sig selv.”

“It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.”

“Therefore do not deceive yourself! Of all deceivers fear most yourself!”

“Just as a physician might say that there very likely is not one single living human being who is completely healthy, so anyone who really knows mankind might say that there is not one single living human being who does not despair a little, who does not secretly harbor an unrest, an inner strife, a disharmony, an anxiety about an unknown something or a something he does not even dare try to know, an anxiety about some possibility in existence or an anxiety about himself, so that, just as the physician speaks of going around with an illness in the body, he walks around with a sickness, carries around a sickness of the spirit that signals its presence at rare intervals in and through an anxiety he cannot explain.”

“The difference between an admirer and a follower still remains, no matter where you are. The admirer never makes any true sacrifices. He always plays it safe. Though in words, phrases, songs, he is inexhaustible about how highly he prizes Christ, he renounces nothing, gives up nothing, will not reconstruct his life, will not be what he admires, and will not let his life express what it is he supposedly admires.”

“There is something frightful in the fact that the most dangerous thing of all, playing at Christianity, is never included in the list of heresies and schisms.”

“In relationship to God one can not involve himself to a certain degree. God is precisely the contradiction to all that is 'to a certain degree'.”

“To grumble about the world and its unhappiness is always easier than to beat one's breast and groan over oneself.”

“With respect to love we speak continually about perfection and the perfect person. With respect to love Christianity also speaks continually about perfection and the perfect person. Alas, but we men talk about finding the perfect person in order to love him. Christianity speaks about being the perfect person who limitlessly loves the person he sees.”

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

“Now, with God's help, I shall become myself.”

“But doubt is wily and cunning and never, as it is sometimes said to be, loud or defiant. It is unassuming and sly, not bold or assertive - and the more unassuming, the more dangerous.”

“Faith is the highest passion in a man.”

“It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward- looking position.”

“It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”

“People understand me so little that they do not even understand when I complain of being misunderstood.”

“The Highest, after all, is not to comprehend the Highest, but to do it.”

“Deep within every man there lies the dread of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the tremendous household of millions and millions.”

“Whatever the one generation may learn from the other, that which is genuinely human no generation learns from the foregoing...Thus no generation has learned from another to love, no generation begins at any other point than at the beginning, no generation has a shorter task assigned to it than had the previous generation.”

“What ability there is in an individual may be measured by the yardstick of how far there is between his understanding and his will. What a person can understand he must also be able to force himself to will. Between understanding and willing is where excuses and evasions have their being.”

“My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have had.”

“But the eternal is not a thing which can be had regardless of the way in which it is acquired; no, the eternal is not really a thing, but is the way in which it is acquired.”

“I might be tempted to make to Christendom a proposal different from that of the Bible society. Let us collect all the New Testaments we have, let us bring them out to an open square or up to the summit of a mountain, and while we all kneel let one man speak to God thus: 'Take this book back again; we men, such as we now are, are not fit to go in for this sort of thing, it only makes us unhappy,' This is my proposal, that like those inhabitants in Gerasa we beseech Christ to depart from our borders. This would be an honest and human way of talking -- rather different from the disgusting hypocritical priestly fudge...”

“Instead of proclaiming the ideals, they educe what experience teaches, what the experience of all the centuries has taught, that the millions get no further than mediocrity.”

“A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.”

“The task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted.”

“As I stood alone and forsaken, and the power of the sea and the battle of the elements reminded me of my own nothingness, and on the other hand, the sure flight of the birds recalled the words spoken by Christ: Not a sparrow shall fall on the ground without your Father: 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.”

“Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in everygeneration may not come that far, but none comes further.”

“Only the noble of heart are called to difficulty.”

“Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element.”

“...my soul always reverts to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There at least one feels that it's human beings talking. There people hate, people love, people murder their enemy and curse his descendants through all generations, there people sin.”

“Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.”