Fear and Trembling

by Søren Kierkegaard

greater than all this it is that the knight of faith dares to say even to the noble man who would weep for him, “Weep not for me, but weep for thyself.”

The paradox of faith is this, that the individual is higher than the universal, that the individual (to recall a dogmatic distinction now rather seldom heard) determines his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute, not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the universal.