The Concept of Irony Quotes

“It requires courage not to surrender oneself to the ingenious or compassionate counsels of despair that would induce a man to eliminate himself from the ranks of the living; but it does not follow from this that every huckster who is fattened and nourished in self-confidence has more courage than the man who yielded to despair.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony: With Continual Reference to Socrates/Notes of Schelling's Berlin Lectures

“If we ask what poetry is
we may say in general that it is
a victory over the world;
it is through a negation of the
imperfect actuality
that poetry opens up
a higher actuality”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates

“In our age there has been much talk about the importance of doubt for science and scholarship, but what doubt is to science, irony is to personal life. Just as scientists maintain that there is not true science without doubt, so it may be maintained with the same right that no genuinely human life is possible without irony.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony: With Continual Reference to Socrates/Notes of Schelling's Berlin Lectures

“This Socratic possibility of beginning wherever he might find himself — although when actualized in life it would as often as not go unnoticed by the multitude, for whom it always remained a mystery how they had come to discuss this or that subject, since their investigations more often began and ended at a stagnated horse pond; this steady Socratic perspective for which no subject was so compact that he could not instantly see the Idea in it — and this not hesitatingly but with immediate certainty, yet also having a practised eye for the apparent abbreviations of perspective and so did not draw the object to him surreptitiously, but simply retained the same ultimate prospect while it emerged step by step for the listener and onlooker; this Socratic parsimony which formed such a biting opposition to the empty noise and undigested fodder of the Sophists — all this is what one must wish that Xenophon had let us feel in Socrates. And what a life would thereby have been depicted when in the midst of the busy labour of the artisans, the braying of the pack animals, one had seen the divine web which Socrates worked into the very fibre of existence.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony: With Continual Reference to Socrates/Notes of Schelling's Berlin Lectures

“This emphasis on the situation was particularly important in order to show that what was central for Socrates was not a fixed point but an ubique et nusquam. It was needed in order to point up the Socratic sensibility which under the subtlest and weakest contact immediately discerned the presence of the Idea, immediately felt the electricity pervading the whole existence.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony: With Continual Reference to Socrates/Notes of Schelling's Berlin Lectures