Quotes from Soren Kierkegaard

Zealousness to learn from life is seldom found, but all the more frequently a desire, inclination, and reciprocal haste to be deceived by life.

My views are the fleeting observations of a 'travelling scholar'9 rushing through life in the greatest haste. People say the good Lord fills the stomach before the eyes. I haven't noticed; my eyes have had enough and I am weary of everything, and yet I hunger.

They make Christ a speculative unity of God and man; or they throw Christ away altogether and take His teaching; or for sheer seriousness they make Christ a false god. Spirit is the negation of direct immediacy. If Christ is very God, He must also be unrecognizable, He must assume recognizableness, which is the negation of all directness. Direct recognizableness is precisely the characteristic of the pagan god.

By faith he was a stranger in the land of promise, and there was nothing to recall what was dear to him, but by its novelty everything tempted his soul to melancholy yearning — and yet he was God's elect, in whom the Lord was well pleased!

What is certain is that to become of interest, for one's life to be interesting, has nothing to do with what you can turn your hand to but is a fateful privilege which, like every privilege in the world of spirit, can only be purchased in deep pain.

The one knight of faith can render no aid to the other.

for he who loves God without faith reflects upon himself, he who loves God believingly reflects upon God. Upon

Either the individual becomes a knight of faith by assuming the burden of the paradox, or he never becomes one.

He writes because for him doing so is a luxury, the more agreeable and conspicuous the fewer who but and read what he writes.

Algo de un rey se encuentra en mi ser; pero tú no puedes siquiera imaginar cuál es mi reino.

Fortvivlelsens Misforhold er ikke et simpelt Misforhold, men et Misforhold i et Forhold, der forholder sig til sig selv, og er sat af et Andet, saa Misforholdet i hiint for sig værende Forhold tillige reflekterer sig uendeligt i Forholdet til den Magt, som satte det.

Behind the world we live in, in the distant background, lies another world standing in roughly the same relation to the former as the stage one sometimes sees in the theatre behind the real stage stands to the latter.