Papers and Journals Quotes

“Everyone takes his revenge on the world. My revenge consists in bearing my distress and anguish enclosed deeply within me while my laughter entertains everyone. If I see someone suffer I give him my sympathy, console him as best I can, and listen to him calmly when he assures me that I am fortunate. If I can only keep this up until the day I die I shall have had my revenge.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“What I lack is physical energy – to be lazy. My energy is spiritual and all I can do with it is work.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“seems to me that Christian dogmatics must be an explication of Christ’s activity, the more so since Christ established no teaching but was active. He didn’t teach that there was a redemption for man, he redeemed men. A Muhammadan dogmatics (sit venia verbo)21 would be an explication of Muhammad’s teaching, but a Christian dogmatics is an explication of Christ’s activity.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals

“So the philosophers, then, are worse than the Pharisees, of whom we read that they bind large burdens yet do not move a finger to lift them. If the philosophers did not lift them even though they could be lifted, their case would be the same. But the philosophers ask the impossible. And when a young man who takes philosophizing not to be talking or writing, but in secret doing honestly and with exactitude what the philosophers say one should do, they let him waste several years of his life and it turns out to be impossible, yet it has engaged him so deeply that maybe his deliverance is impossible too.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“In our time book-scribbling is so wretched and people write about things they have never really given thought to, let alone experienced. So I’ve decided to read only the writings of those who were executed or faced danger in some other way.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“I repudiate all reviews. To me a reviewer is just as loathsome as a streetwalking assistant barber who comes running with the shaving water which is used for all customers and fumbles about my face with his clammy fingers.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“It is said that experience makes a man wise. That is a very unreasonable thing to say. If there were nothing still higher than experience, experience would make him mad.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“It takes moral courage to sorrow; it takes religious courage to be glad.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“Besides my other numerous circle of acquaintance, with whom I am in the main on very superficial terms, I have still one close confidant – my melancholy – and in the midst of my joy, in the midst of my work, she waves to me, calls me to one side, even though physically I stay put; she is the most faithful mistress I have known; what wonder, then, that I must also be ready to follow her on the instant.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“When the individual, having given up all efforts to find himself in life outside himself, in relation to his surroundings, turns now after this shipwreck towards the highest, then after this emptiness the absolute rises not only in its fullness before him but also in the responsibility he feels is his.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“As everyone knows, there are insects which die in the moment of fertilization. Thus it is with all joy: life’s supreme and most voluptuous moment of pleasure is attended by death.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“Next to taking off all my clothes, owning nothing in the world, not the least thing, and then throwing myself into the water, I find most pleasure in speaking a foreign language, preferably a living one, in order to become estranged from myself.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“I am living now just about like a distilled copy of an original edition of my authentic I.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“My consciousness is at certain moments far too roomy, far too general. While usually it can contract convulsively (and feelingly) around each of my thoughts, just now it is so huge, hanging so loose about me that it would suffice for several of us.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“The sad thing with me is that the crumb of joy and reassurance I slowly distil in the painstakingly dyspeptic process of my thought-life I use up straightaway in just one despairing step.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“Fear and trembling are not the mainspring of the Christian life, for that is love. But it is the balance in the watch – it is the Christian life’s balance spring.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“Longing is the umbilical cord of the higher life.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“Since earliest childhood an arrow of grief has been buried in my heart. As long as it stays there I am ironic – if it is drawn out I’ll die.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“Every step it takes, philosophy casts a slough and into it creep the more foolish adherents.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“I prefer talking with old women who babble about family matters, next with lunatics – and last of all with people who are extremely sensible.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“... how often we see people who either from spiritual laziness live on the crumbs that fall from other people’s tables, or for more egotistical reasons try to identify themselves with others until they resemble the liar who, through frequent repetition of his stories, ends up believing them himself.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do, not what I must know, except in the way knowledge must precede all action. It is a question of understanding my destiny, of seeing what the Deity really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“One must be careful not to enter too early into the holy matrimony of the sciences; it does one good to stay unwed a while, even if it is also not good to end up a bachelor.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“It’s quite strange that, to my knowledge, it has occurred to no one to conjure authors from the grave and let them attend an auction of their own immortal works.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“Damn and hell, I can abstract from everything but not from myself; I can’t even forget myself when I sleep.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“I have just come back from a party where I was the life and soul. Witticisms flowed from my lips. Everyone laughed and admired me – but I left, yes, that dash should be as long as the radii of the earth’s orbit — and wanted to shoot myself.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“People understand me so little that they fail even to understand my complaints that they do not understand me.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“It is indeed often rather sad and depressing if one wants to produce an effect in the world by talking, and yet sees in the end that one has had no effect and the person in question remains set intransigently in his view: but there is also on the other hand something great in the fact that the other person, and thus always every individual, is a world unto himself, has his holy of holies into which no alien hand can reach.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“We often dazzle ourselves by adopting as our own many an idea and observation which either leaps vividly to mind from a time when we have read it, or else is present in the total consciousness of the age – yes, even as I write this observation now – perhaps this too is the result of the experience of the age.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

“We often dazzle ourselves by adopting as our own many an idea andobservation which either leaps vividly to mind from a time when we have read it, or else is present in the total consciousness of the age – yes, even as I write this observation now – perhaps this too is the result of the experience of the age.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection