Concluding Unscientific Postscript Quotes

“...The discrepancy is that the ethical self should be found immanently in the despair, that the individual won himself by persisting in the despair. True, he has used something within the category of freedom, choosing himself, which seem to remove the difficulty, one that presumably has not struck many, since philosophically doubting everything and then finding the true beginning goes one, two, three. But that does not help. In despairing, I use myself to despair, and therefore I can indeed despair of everything by myself. But if I do this, I cannot come back by myself. It is in this moment of decision that the individual needs divine assistance, whereas it is quite correct that in order to be at this point one must first have understood the existence-relation between the aesthetic and the ethical; that is to say, by being there in passion and inwardness, one surely becomes aware of the religious - and of the leap.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript

“Christianity will not be content to be an evolution within the total category of human nature; an engagement such as that is too little to offer to a god. Neither does it even want to be the paradox for the believer, and then surreptitiously, little by little, provide him with understanding, because the martyrdom of faith (to crucify one's understanding) is not a martyrdom of the moment, but the martyrdom of continuance.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript

“As he is walking along and pondering this, he sees a skittle ball lying on the ground. He picks it up and puts it in the tail of his coat. At every step he takes, this ball bumps him, if you please, on his rear, and every time it bumps him he says, “Boom! The earth is round.” He arrives in the capital city and immediately visits one of his friends. He wants to convince him that he is not lunatic and therefore paces up and down the floor and continually says, “Boom! The earth is round!” But is the earth not round? Does the madhouse demand yet another sacrifice on account of this assumption, as in those days when everyone assumed it to be as flat as a pancake? Or is he lunatic, the man who hopes to prove that he is not lunatic by stating a truth universally accepted and universally regarded as objective? And yet, precisely by this it became clear to the physician that the patient was not yet cured, although the cure certainly could not revolve around getting him to assume that the earth is flat.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript

“Only in the ethical is there immortality and an eternal life; otherwise understood, the world-historical is perhaps a spectacle, a spectacle which perhaps endures—but the spectator dies, and his contemplation of the spectacle was perhaps a highly significant way of killing time.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript: to Philosophical Fragments

“Suppose a man wished to communicate the conviction that the God-relationship of the individual is a secret. Suppose he were what we are accustomed to call a kindly soul, who loved others so much that he simply could not keep this to himself; suppose he nevertheless had sense enough to feel a little of the contradiction involved in communicating it directly, and hence told it to others only under a pledge of secrecy: what then? Then he must either have assumed that the disciple was wiser than his teacher, so that he could really keep the secret while the teacher could not (beautiful satire upon being a teacher!); or he must have become so overwhelmed with the bliss of galimatias that he did not notice the contradiction.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript: to Philosophical Fragments

“Aber Existieren ist etwas ganz anderes als Wissen.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript

“Here is the crux of the matter, and I come back to the case of the learned theology. For whose sake is it that the proof is sought? Faith does not need it; aye, it must even regard the proof as its enemy, But when faith begins to feel embarrassed and ashamed, like a young woman for whom her love is no longer sufficient, but who secretly feels ashamed of her lover and must therefore have it established that there is something remarkable about him—when faith thus begins to lose its passion, when faith begins to cease to be faith, then a proof becomes necessary so as to command respect from the side of unbelief.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript