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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Herein lies true freedom: the ability to fulfill one’s duty, to move from what is to what ought to be.
A “bad choice,” therefore, is better than no choice at all. The aesthetic person drifts along with the currents around him.
For Kierkegaard, where there is the crowd, “there is
externality, and comparison, and indulgence, and evasion.”
“It is true that a mirror has the quality of enabling a person to see his image in it, but to do this he must stand still.”
Decision lays its demanding hand on us from start to finish. Cowardice, on the other hand, wants only to concern itself with the really important,
To forget is to have made your choice.
When you say “Yes” or promise something, you can very easily deceive yourself and others also, as if you had already done what you promised.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
As an alcoholic constantly requires stronger and stronger drink, so the one who has fallen under the spell of good intentions and smooth-sounding declaration constantly requires more and more good intentions.
Every life that is preoccupied with being like others is a wasted life, a lost life.
The person who in truth wills only one thing can will only the Good, and the person who wills only one thing when he wills the good can will only the Good in truth.
In fact, the pure in heart understands that here on earth the Good is often rewarded by ingratitude, by lack of appreciation, by poverty, by contempt, by many afflictions, and now and then by death.
In fact, he who does wrong, yet sincerely wills the Good, actually desires to face the consequences – so that the punishment, like medicine, may heal him.
On the other hand, the one who is divided considers punishment or hardship as a sickness. He fears all worldly setback for there is nothing eternal in him.
For in the eleventh hour one understands life in a wholly different way than in the days of youth or in the busy time of adulthood or in the final days of old age.
Sudden, quick repentance wants only to drink down the bitterness of sorrow in a single draught and then hurry on. It wants to get away from guilt, away from every reminder of it, and fortify itself by imagining that it does not want to be held back in the pursuit of the Good.
His self-improvement had never led him to surrender to God so that in the humility of repentance he might remember what he had once been.
Repentance must not only have its time, but also its time of preparation.
The all-knowing One does not get to know something
about those who confess, rather those who confess find out something about themselves.
But there is one thing God requires unconditionally at every moment – integrity – that one does not reverse the
relationship and try to prove his relationship to God or the truth of his cause by good fortune, prosperity, and the like.
You may perhaps be cunning enough to avoid suffering and adversity in this life, you may perhaps be clever
enough to evade ruin and ridicule and instead enjoy all the earth’s goods, and you may perhaps be fooled into the vain delusion that you are on the right path just because you have won worldly benefits, but beware, you will have an eternity in which to repent!
