Quotes from Soren Kierkegaard

The writer] can easily foresee his fate ... in an age when an author who wants to have readers must take care to write in such a way that the book can easily be perused during an afternoon nap ....

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?

What is the New Testament? A handbook for those who are to be sacrificed.

There is not a single human being who does not despair at least a little, in whose innermost being there does not dwell an uneasiness, an unquiet, a discordance, an anxiety in the face of an unknown something.

Now we will let the knight of faith appear in the rôle just described. He makes exactly the same movements as the other knight, infinitely renounces claim to the love which is the content of his life, he is reconciled in pain; but then occurs the prodigy, he makes still another movement more wonderful than all, for he says, "I believe nevertheless that I shall get her, in virtue, that is, of the absurd, in virtue of the fact that with God all things are possible.

It costs a man just as much or even more to go to hell than to come to heaven. Narrow, exceedingly narrow is the way to perdition!

He who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God.

That in which all human life is unified is passion, and faith is a passion.

One must see it close up, the callousness with which otherwise kind people act in the capacity of the public because their participation or non-participation seems to them a trifle - a trifle that with the contributions of the many becomes the monster.

The lyrical author is only concerned with his production, enjoys the pleasure of producing, often perhaps only after pain and effort; but he has nothing to do with others, he does not write in order that: in order to enlighten men or in order to help them along the right road, in order to bring about something; in short he does not write in order that.

There are two ways to be fooled: one is to believe what isn't true, the other is to refuse to believe what is true." Another translation says:"There are two ways to be fooled: one is to believe what isn't so; the other is to refuse to believe what is so.

God creates everything out of nothing. And everything which God is to use, he first reduces to nothing.