Works of Love Quotes

“When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world — no matter how imperfect — becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for love.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“With respect to love we speak continually about perfection and the perfect person. With respect to love Christianity also speaks continually about perfection and the perfect person. Alas, but we men talk about finding the perfect person in order to love him. Christianity speaks about being the perfect person who limitlessly loves the person he sees.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“Men think that it is impossible for a human being to love his enemies, for enemies are hardly able to endure the sight of one another. Well, then, shut your eyes--and your enemy looks just like your neighbor.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“To grumble about the world and its unhappiness is always easier than to beat one's breast and groan over oneself.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“To have distinctiveness is to believe in the distinctiveness of everyone else, because distinctiveness is not mine but is God’s gift by which he gives being to me, and he indeed gives to all, gives being to all. (p. 271)”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“the measure of a person’s disposition is this: how far is he from what he understands to what he does, how great is the distance between his understanding and his actions.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“Spontaneous love makes a person free and at the next moment dependent. It is just as with a person’s coming into existence; by coming into existence, by becoming a self, he becomes free, but at the next moment he is dependent on this self.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“As the calm lake stems from the deep spring that no eye saw, so too a person's love has a still deeper ground, in God's love. If there were no gushing spring at the bottom, if Hod were not love, then neither would there be the little lake nor either a person's love. As the calm lake stems darkly from the deep spring, so a person's love originate mysteriously in God's. As the calm lake indeed invites you to contemplate it, yet with the darkness of the reflection prevents you from seeing through it, so does love's mysterious origin in God's love prevent you from seeing its ground. When you think you see it, it is a reflection that deceives you, as if what only hides the deeper ground were itself the ground.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“salvation consists primarily in his beginning to sorrow earnestly over himself!”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“When the depressed person desires to be rid of life, indeed, of himself, is this not because he is unwilling to learn earnestly and rigorously to love himself?”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“All distinctions between the many different kinds of love are essentially abolished by Christianity.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“Love believes all things," for to believe all things means
precisely, even though love is not apparent, even though the opposite is seen, to presuppose that love is nevertheless present fundamentally, even in the misguided, even in the corrupt, even in the hateful.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“However ridiculous, however backward, however inexpedient loving one's neighbour may seem in he world, it is still the highest a man is capable of doing.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“The actor’s art is the art of deceiving; the art is the deception. To be able to deceive is the great thing, and to allow oneself to be deceived is just as great. Therefore one must not be able and must not want to see the actor through the costume; therefore it is the pinnacle of art when the actor becomes one with what he represents, because this is the pinnacle of deception.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“The best defense against hypocrisy is love; indeed, it is not only a defense but a chasmic abyss; in all eternity it has nothing to do with hypocrisy. This also is a fruit by which love is known—it secures the loving one against falling into the snare of the hypocrite.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“The poet can understand everything, in riddles, and wonderfully explain everything, in riddles, but he cannot understand himself or understand that he himself is a riddle”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally and happily secured against despair”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“Forsake the dissimilarities so that you can love the neighbor. Alas, perhaps it is not even necessary to say this to you; perhaps you found no beloved in this world, no friend along the way, so that you are walking alone.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“Solo hay un camino para asegurarse nunca ser engañado, y ese es el de creerlo todo amorosamente.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“Pero entonces, ¿qué es amor? Amor es presuponer amor; tener amor significa presuponer amor en los demás, ser amoroso significa presuponer que los demás son amorosos.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“Hablando en términos humanos, amar es seguir la representación que el amado se haya formado acerca de lo que es el amor, y haciéndolo uno será amado.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“Pues amar a Dios significa amarse de verdad a uno mismo; ayudar a otro ser humano a que ame a Dios es amar a otro ser humano; ser ayudado por otro ser humano para amar a Dios significa ser amado.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“Knowledge is like the sheerest transparency, precisely the most perfect and purest, like the purest water, which has no taste at all. The magistrate is not defiled because he knows more about the plots than the criminal. No, knowledge does not defile a man; it is mistrust which defiles a man's knowledge just as love purifies it.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“No poet, if he understands himself, would think of singing its praises. What the poet sings about must have the sadness, which is the riddle of his own life, that it must blossom—and, alas, must perish.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“perhaps most individuals live in a diluted social morality and need the rigorous ethical imperative of vision and requirement”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“O you quiet martyrs of an unhappy erotic love, what you suffered by having, out of love, to hide your love certainly remained a secret; it never became known, so great was your love that involved this sacrifice—yet your love became known by its fruits! And perhaps these very fruits, the ones matured by the quiet fire of a hidden pain, became the most precious.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“what paganism called love, as distinguished from self-love, was preference. But if passionate preference is essentially another form of self-love, then one sees here again the truth in the saying of the venerable fathers: “that the virtues of paganism are glittering vices”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“In erotic love and friendship, the two love each other by virtue of the dissimilarity or by virtue of the similarity that is based on dissimilarity (as when two friends love each other by virtue of similar customs, characters, occupations, education, etc., that is, on the basis of the similarity by which they are different from other people, or in which they are like each other as different from other people). Therefore the two can become one self in a selfish sense.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love.

“The poet does indeed love solitude, loves it—in order to discover in solitude the missing happiness of erotic love and friendship, just as one who in wonder wants to observe the stars seeks a dark place.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love.

“(…) hay posibilidad del bien incluso en el último instante, y que hay por tanto esperanza todavía incluso para el más perdido.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love