Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing Quotes

“In eternity it will be asked whether you may not have damaged a good thing, in order that you also might judge with them that did not know how to judge, but who possessed the crowd's strength, which in the temporal sense is significant, but to which eternity is wholly indifferent.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession

“The reward of the good man is to be allowed to worship in truth.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession

“No, like worldly contempt, worldly honor is a whirlpool, a play of confused forces, an illusory moment in the flux of opinions. It is a sense-deception, as when a swarm of insects at a distance seem to the eye like one body; a sense-deception, as when the noise of the many at a distance seems to the ear like a single voice.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession

“When a peculiar thinker, who just by his peculiarity is more tied up with the Eternal and less with time’s moment, addresses his speech to men, he is rarely understood or listened to.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing

“Oh Thou that givest both the beginning and the completion, give Thou victory in the day of need so that what neither a man's burning wish nor his determined resolution may attain to, may be granted unto him in the sorrowing of repentance: to will only one thing.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession

“Only the Eternal is always appropriate and always present, is always true. Only the Eternal applies to each human being, whatever his age may be.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, PURITY OF HEART is to Will One Thing - Spiritual Preparation for the Feast of Confession

“,,,all clannishness is divisive...For all clannishness is the enemy of universal humanity. But to will only one thing, genuinely to will the Good, as an individual, to will to hold fast to God, which things each person without exception is capable of doing, this is what unites.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, PURITY OF HEART is to Will One Thing - Spiritual Preparation for the Feast of Confession

“What shall it profit the sick man to imagine himself, as all men do, to be well, if the physician says he is sick!”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing

“For as the Good is only a single thing, so all ways lead to the Good, even the false ones: when the repentant one follows the same way back.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession

“let us speak of the wish and thereby of the sufferings; let us properly linger over this, convinced that one may learn more profoundly and more reliably what the highest is by considering suffering than by observing achievements, where so much that is distracting is present.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing

“If a man in truth wills the Good then he must be willing to suffer all for the Good.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing

“Each one who is not more ashamed before himself than before all others, if he is placed in difficulty and much tried in life, will in one way or another end by becoming the slave of men. For to be more ashamed in the presence of others than when alone, what else is this than to be more ashamed of seeming than of being? And turned about, should not a man be more ashamed of what he is than of what he seems? For otherwise he cannot in truth will one thing, since by trying to appear well in the eyes of others he is only striving after a changing shimmer and its reflection in human favor.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing

“One dare not say of repentance and remorse that it has its time; that there is a time to be carefree and a time to be prostrated in repentance. Such talk would be: to the anxious urgency of repentance—unpardonably slow; to the grieving after God—sacrilege; to what should be done this very day, in this instant, in this moment of danger—senseless dela y. For there is indeed danger. There is a danger that is called delusion. It is unable to check itself. It goes on and on: then it is called perdition.”
― Kierkegaard Sören, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession

“For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul. 24”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing

“There is, however, a power that is called memory. It should be dear to all the good ones as well as to all lovers. Yes, it may even be so dear to lovers that they almost prefer this whisper of memory to the sight of each other, as when they say, “Do you remember that time, and do you remember that time?”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing

“So wonderful a power is remorse, so sincere is its friendship that to escape it entirely is the most terrible thing of all. A man can wish to slink away from many things in life, and he may even succeed, so that life’s favored one can say in the last moment, “I slipped away from all the cares under which other men suffered.” But if such a person wishes to bluster out of, to defy, or to slink away from remorse, alas, which is indeed the most terrible to say of him, that he failed, or—that he succeeded? A Providence watches over each man’s wandering through life. It provides him with two guides. The one calls him forward. The other calls him back.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing

“For whether it be the lightly armed desire of youth which it is presumed will press forward to victory, or whether it be the mature man s determination that will fight its way through life, they both count on having a long time at their disposal. They presuppose, in the plans for their efforts, a generation or at least a number of years, and therefore they waste a great deal of time and on that account the whole thing so readily ends in delusion.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing

“But just for that reason, precipitate repentance is false and is never to be sought after. For it may not be the inner anxiety of heart but only the momentary feeling that presents the guilt so actively. This kind of repentance is selfish, a matter of the senses, sensually powerful for the moment, excited in expression, impatient in the most diverse exaggerations — and, just on this account, is not real repentance. Sudden repentance would drink down all the bitterness of sorrow in a single draught and then hurry on. It wants to get away from guilt. It wants to banish all recollection of it, fortifying itself by imagining that it does this in order not to be held back in the pursuit of the Good. It is its wish that guilt, after a time, might be wholly forgotten. And once again, this is impatience. Perhaps a later sudden repentance may make it apparent that the former sudden repentance lacked true inwardness.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing

“So wonderful a power is remorse, so sincere is its friendship that to escape it entirely is the most terrible thing of all.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing

“But there is a concerned guide, a knowing one, who attracts the attention of the wanderer, who calls out to him that he should take care. That guide is remorse. He is not so quick of foot as the indulgent imagination, which is the servant of desire. He is not so strongly built as the victorious intention. He comes on slowly afterwards. He grieves. But he is a sincere and faithful friend.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession

“For when an old man relives his life, he lives it only by dwelling upon his memories; and when wisdom in an old man has outgrown the immediate impressions of life, the past viewed from the quiet of memory is something different from the present in all its bustle. The”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing

“Of a man who only wills the Good out of fear of punishment, it is necessary to say with special emphasis, that he fears what a man should not and ought not to fear: loss of money, loss of reputation, misjudgment by others, neglect, the world’s judgment, the ridicule of fools, the laughter of the frivolous, the cowardly whining of consideration, the inflated triviality of the moment, the fluttering mist-forms of vapor.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing

“What then in eternity will conscience demand of you by the consciousness that you are an individual? It will teach you that if you judge (for in very many cases it will restrain you from judging), you must bear the responsibility for your judgment. It will teach you that you should examine what you understand and what you do not understand... For many fools do not make a wise man, and the crowd is doubtful recommendation for a cause. ...But the man who, conscious of himself as an individual, judges with eternal responsibility, he is slow to pass judgment upon the unusual. For it is possible that it is falsehood and deceit and illusion and vanity. But it is also possible that it is true.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession

“But that man is slow to pass judgment who bears in mind, that he is an individual, and that the final and highest responsibility for the judgement rests solely upon him.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession

“If you do not live in some out-of-the-way place in the world, if you live in a populous city, and you direct your attention outwards, sympathetically engrossing yourself in this way into the world around you, that in this relation, you relate yourself to yourself as an individual with eternal responsibility? Or do you press yourself into the crowd, where the one excuses himself with the others, where at one moment there are, so to speak, many, and where in the next moment, each time that the talk touches upon responsibility, there is no on? Do you judge like the crowd, in its capacity as a crowd? You are not obliged to have an opinion about what you do not understand. No, on the contrary, you are eternally excused from that. But you are eternally responsible as an individual to render and account for your opinion, and for your judgement. And in eternity, you will not be asked inquisitively and professionally, as though by a newspaper reporter, whether there were many that had the same--wrong opinion. You will be asked only whether have held it, whether you have spoiled your soul by joining in this frivolous and thoughtless judging, because the others, because the many judged thoughtlessly. You will be asked only whether you may not have ruined the best within you by joining the crowd in its defiance, thinking that you were many and therefore you had the prerogative, because you were many, that is, because you were many who were wrong. In eternity it will be asked whether you may not have damaged a good thing in order that you also might judge with them that did not know how to judge, but who possessed the crowd's strength, which in the temporal sense is significant but to which eternity is wholly indifferent.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession

“Only the Eternal is always appropriate and always present, is always true. Only the Eternal applies to each human being,”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing

“As Lord Tennyson so truly says: Put down the passions that make earth Hell! Down with ambition, avarice, pride, Jealousy, down! Cut off from the mind The bitter springs of anger and fear; Down too, down at your own fireside, With the evil tongue and the evil ear, For both are at war with mankind!”
― Patricia Wentworth, The Listening Eye

“it is not worth while to remember that past which cannot become a present.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Writings of Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling; Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing; The Sickness Unto Death

“In the old days they said, “What a pity things don’t go on in the world as the parson preaches” — perhaps the time is coming, especially with the help of philosophy, when they will say, “Fortunately things don’t go on as the parson preaches;”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Writings of Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling; Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing; The Sickness Unto Death

“he was a cithara-player, not a man.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Writings of Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling; Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing; The Sickness Unto Death