Christianity
All communication of truth has become abstract: the public has become the authority, the newspapers call themselves the editorial board, the professor calls himself speculation, the priest is meditation: not one of them, not one, dares say “I.”
JN, vol. 6, Journal NB11: 223, p. 133
A philosopher with authority is nonsense. For a philosopher extends no farther than his teachings extend; if I can prove that his teachings are self-contradictory, erroneous, etc., then he has nothing to say to us.
JN, vol. 6, Journal NB14: 134, p. 427
That is why people prefer being involved with ingenuity and profundity, because they can play blindman’s bluff with them, but they are afraid of authority.
WL, p. 97
A king exists physically in such a way that one can physically assure oneself of it, and if it is necessary perhaps the king can very physically assure one that he exists. But God does not exist in that way. Doubt has made use of this to place God on the same level with all those who have no authority, on the same level with geniuses, poets, and thinkers …
WA, p. 97
Doubt and disbelief, which make faith worthless, have, among other things, also made people ashamed of obeying, of submitting to authority.
WA, p. 104
If a son were to say, “I obey my father not because he is my father but because he is a genius, or because his commands are always profound and brilliant,” this filial obedience is affected. The son emphasizes something altogether wrong, emphasizes the brilliance, the profundity in a command, whereas a command is simply indifferent to this qualification. The son is willing to obey on the basis of the father’s profundity and brilliance, and on that basis he simply cannot obey him, because his critical attitude with regard to whether the command is profound and brilliant undermines the obedience.
WA, p. 104
Thus all modern speculative thought is affected by having abolished obedience on the one hand and authority on the other.
WA, p. 104
Therefore a genius-existence is always like a fairy tale if in the deepest sense the genius does not turn inward into himself. The genius is able to do all things, and yet he is dependent upon an insignificance that no one comprehends, an insignificance upon which the genius himself by his omnipotence bestows omnipotent significance.
CA, p. 99
The genius is not like most people and would not be satisfied to be so. This is not because he disdains men, but because he is primitively concerned with himself, whereas other men and their explanations are of no help to him.
CA, p. 107
A thesis: great geniuses couldn’t really read a book. While they are reading, they will always develop themselves more than understand the author.
JN, vol. 1, Journal BB: 46, p. 131
The authentic genius’s appropriation of the impression of actuality is often like someone sleeping who hears the fire alarm and conveys everything into his dreaming world while the factual as such does not appear to him at all.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 145, p. 253
Like a thunderstorm, genius flies against the wind.
JN, vol. 2, Journal EE: 158, p. 50
When a boatman sails out with his skiff he usually knows the whole journey ahead of time; but when a man-of-war puts out to sea it is only after it is out on the deep that it receives its orders: thus it is with the genius; he is out on the deep and receives his orders; the rest of us know various bits and pieces about the various things we undertake.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 369, pp. 241–42
What an age needs is not a genius—it surely has had geniuses enough—but a martyr, one who in order to teach people to obey would himself become obedient to the point of death, one whom men put to death; but, see, just because of that they would lose, for simply by killing him, by being victorious in this way, they would become afraid of themselves. This is the awakening that our age needs.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB3: 19, pp. 253, 255
There are two types of geniuses. Thunder is characteristic of the first type; lightning, on the other hand, is rare and seldom strikes. The second type contains within itself a category of reflection with which it disciplines itself or restrains the thunder. But then the lightning is all the more intense; it strikes the chosen points with lightning’s swiftness and certainty—and deadliness.
JN, vol. 6, Journal NB12: 49, p. 166
Writing is not speaking; sitting at a desk and copying what is said is only baneful toil in comparison with stepping forth in an assembly, looking at a great throng who all are inspired by the same thing and for the same thing, having the stillness enter in like the prayer before battle, having the word break forth like the thunder of combat, being oneself transported by the silence that is the silence of attention, hearing the whisper that is the whisper of approval, sensing the stentoriousness of the Amen of conviction.
P, p. 27
To write a book is the easiest of all things in our time, if, as is customary, one takes ten older works on the same subject and out of them puts together an eleventh on the same subject.
P, p. 35
An expert judge in this matter has said that one rarely sees anyone who writes humbly about humility, doubtingly about doubt, etc. In other words, one rarely finds an exposition of which it holds true that the exposition is that which is expounded …
FSE, p. 119
I do not know to whom I am speaking about this, whether anyone is concerned about such things; but this I know, that such people have lived, and this I know, that the very people who have praised love effectually have been experienced sailors and able seamen in these waters that nowadays are in part almost unknown. And for them I can write, comforting myself with the beautiful words: “Write!” “For whom?” “For the dead, for those whom you have loved in some past.”
WL, p. 362
But all true helping begins with a humbling. The helper must first humble himself under the person he wants to help and thereby understand that to help is not to dominate but to serve …
PV, p. 45
To be a teacher is not to say: This is the way it is, nor is it to assign lessons and the like. No, to be a teacher is truly to be the learner. Instruction begins with this, that you, the teacher, learn from the learner, place yourself in what he has understood and how he has understood it …
PV, p. 46
An author’s work should bear the imprint of his likeness, his individuality, in the same way as the portrait that Christ is said to have sent to King Abgarus of Edessa; it was not a minutely detailed reproduction but, in some inexplicably miraculous way, a sort of emanation onto the canvas.
JN, vol. 1, Journals DD: 151, p. 255
But there must be something that is so blessed that it cannot be expressed in words. Otherwise, why were the men to whom something truly great was revealed struck dumb?—
JN, vol. 1, Journal FF: 33, p. 75
There are remarks and feelings that are expressed in the sort of medium in which they only become visible when they are fired by the warmth of sympathy and the flames of enthusiasm—as with the sort of paper on which writing only becomes visible when it is held up to the light.—
JN, vol. 2, Journal FF: 57, p. 80
This is indeed the profound untruth about all modern lectures: there is absolutely no notion of how the idea is affected when the person who presents it doesn’t dare express it in actions; precisely for this reason the heart and soul of the idea disappear; the power of the idea is eliminated.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB4: 72, p. 322
Following the path of the commentators is often like traveling to London; true, the road leads to London, but if one wants to get there, he has to turn around.
JP, vol. 1, no. 203, p. 83
All human speech, even divine speech of Holy Scripture, about the spiritual is essentially metaphorical speech.
WL, p. 209
The press is really that which annihilates all personality; that a cowardly wretch can sit in concealment and write and publish for thousands. All personal conduct and all personal power must come to naught on this.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 20, p. 28
FIGURE 7. The Corsair.
From The Corsair, Issue 285, March 6, 1846.
With the help of the degeneracy of the press, human beings will at last be made into complete idiots. A journal’s first concern has to be circulation; from then on, the rule for what it publishes can be this: the cleverness and hilarity of printing something that has nothing to do with communicating in print.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 25, p. 148
The daily press is and will remain the evil principle in the modern world. There is no limit to its sophistry, because it can sink ever lower in its choice of readers. In consequence, it dredges up so much muck that no state is capable, any longer, of restraining it.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 29, p. 150
In the most ancient of times, judges and prophets watched over a country’s ethos. Later it was traditional for the clergy to do it.
Then, because of worldliness, the church doubted—and the “newspapers”—and the public became ethical authorities! Finally, the most degraded part of the daily press, under the name of satire, kept a watch over ethics! [T]his is something like sending a young girl to a brothel—to safeguard her innocence.
JN, vol. 6, Journal NB11: 44, pp. 27–28
In fact, if the daily press, like some other occupational groups, had a coat-of-arms, the inscription ought to be: Here men are demoralized in the shortest possible time, on the largest possible scale, at the cheapest possible price.
JP, vol. 2, no. 2171, p. 489
In contrast to the age of revolution, which took action, the present age is an age of publicity, the age of miscellaneous announcements: nothing happens but still there is instant publicity.
TA, p. 70
In a certain sense there is something horrible about contemplating the whole mob of publishers, booksellers, journalists, authors—all of them working day and night in the service of confusion, because men will not become sober and understand that relatively little knowledge is needed to be truly human—but all the more self-knowledge.
JP, vol. 1, no. 649, p. 269
Evaluation by newspapers will gradually be extended to cover subjects never dreamed of.
JP, vol. 2, no. 2145, p. 478
SCIENCE
Here it might well seem that there is a difficulty, inasmuch as natural science, the eagerness to understand, has made its votaries and adherents enthusiastic, and thus to this extent understanding and enthusiasm do not appear to conflict with one another. It must, however, be noted that a speculative thinker, e.g., a natural scientist, etc., who is really and truly enthusiastic in grasping and understanding things, does not notice that he himself is continually positing that which he wants to abrogate. He is enthusiastic about understanding everything else, but he does not come to understand that he himself is enthusiastic—that is, he does not come to conceptualize his own enthusiasm even though, in this enthusiasm, he is enthusiastic about conceptualizing everything else.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 70, p. 58, lines 26–37
In our times, it is especially the natural sciences that are dangerous. Physiology will ultimately expand so much that it will annex ethics. Indeed, there are already signs of a new attempt to treat ethics as physics, whereby the whole of ethics becomes an illusion, and the ethical aspect of the human race will be treated statistically …
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 70, p. 59, lines 3–9
When a man makes the statement, both simple and profound, that “I cannot see with my naked eye how consciousness comes into being,” this is perfectly proper. But when a man has a microscope in front of his eye and looks and looks and looks—and yet cannot see it, this is comical.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 73, p. 62, lines 27–31
Then we are informed by sophistical physiology that “the key to the knowledge of the conscious mental life lies in the unconscious” (Carus). But if one cannot explain the transition from unconsciousness to consciousness, what does this say about the key[?]
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 73, p. 64, lines 38–41
Absolutely no benefit can be derived from involving oneself with the natural sciences. One stands there defenseless, with no control over anything. The researcher immediately begins to distract one with his details: Now one is to go to Australia; now to the moon; now into an underground cave; now, by Satan, up the ass—to look for an intestinal worm; now the telescope must be used; now the microscope: Who the Devil can endure it!
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 87, pp. 71–72
PHILOSOPHY
Philosophy is life’s dry nurse, it can look after us but not give suck.
JN, vol. 1, Journal AA: 47, p. 45
With every step it takes, philosophy sheds a skin and into it creep the more foolish adherents.
JN, vol. 1, Journal BB: 36, p. 116
In the realm of thought there is a haggling, an up-to-a-certain-point understanding, which leads to nonsense just as surely as good intentions lead to hell.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 204, p. 189
That God could create beings who are free in relation to himself is the cross that philosophy could not bear but upon which it has remained hanging.
JN, vol. 2, Journal FF: 149, p. 95
It is quite true what philosophy says, that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other principle, that it must be lived forward. Which principle, the more one thinks it through, ends exactly with temporal life never being able to be properly understood …
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 167, p. 179
Philosophy’s idea is mediation—Christianity’s is the paradox.
JN, vol. 3, Notebook 7: 22, p. 207
Kant’s theory of radical evil has only one flaw, that he does not firmly determine that the inexplicable is a category, that the paradox is a category. Everything turns on this. For people have continually said this sort of thing: that to say that one cannot understand something or other does not satisfy scholarly science, which wishes to grasp things conceptually. This is the seat of the error; one must say precisely the opposite: that if human scholarly science will not acknowledge that there is something it cannot understand—or, to be even more exact, something concerning which it clearly understands that it cannot understand—then everything is confused.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 125, p. 88
In the old days they loved wisdom … nowadays they love the title of philosopher.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB5: 144, p. 428
The stone which was laid before Christ’s grave could well be called the philosophers’ stone, it seems to me, inasmuch as its removal has given not only the Pharisees but now for 1,800 years the philosophers a good deal to do.
JP, vol. 3, no. 3243, p. 496
In the earlier ancient period the philosopher was a power, an ethical power, a [person of] character—then the empire protected itself by putting them on salary, by making them “professors.”
JP, vol. 3, no. 3316, p. 521
Philosophy cannot and must not give faith, but it must understand itself and know what it offers and take nothing away, least of all trick men out of something by pretending that it is nothing.
FT, p. 33
What philosophers say about actuality [Virkelighed] is often just as disappointing as it is when one reads on a sign in a secondhand shop: Pressing Done Here. If a person were to bring his clothes to be pressed, he would be duped, for the sign is merely for sale.
EO,1, p. 32
Of what use was it to find out that there is an eternal philosophy that everyone should embrace if everyone did not learn how to go about doing it or if no one at all learned it, if at least none of the listeners had learned more than he? And yet it pained him; he thought the words to be so beautiful that he could not stop listening to them, just as one sadly gazes after the wild geese flying in the sky. Anyone who wants to belong to that world must join them, and yet no one has ever been seen flying with them.
JC, p.148
FIGURE 8. Grib Forest.
Print by S. H. Petersen, 1820. From the original in the Museum of Coppenhagen. Reproduced by permission of the Museum of Copenhagen.
[W]hat is existence? It is that child who is begotten by the infinite and the finite, the eternal and the temporal, and is therefore continually striving,
CUP, p. 92
Existence itself, existing, is a striving and is just as pathos-filled as it is comic: pathos-filled because the striving is infinite, that is, directed toward the infinite, is a process of infinitizing, which is the highest pathos; comic because the striving is a self-contradiction.
CUP, p. 92
A system of existence [Tilværelsens System] cannot be given.
CUP, p. 118
Abstractly viewed, system and existence cannot be thought conjointly, because in order to think existence, systematic thought must think it as annulled and consequently not as existing. Existence is the spacing that holds apart; the systematic is the conclusiveness that combines.
CUP, p. 118
[I]t is the misfortune of our age that it has come to know too much, has forgotten what it means to exist …
CUP, p. 269
Just as existence has joined thinking and existing, inasmuch as an existing person is a thinking person, so are there two media: the medium of abstraction and the medium of actuality.
CUP, p. 314
For the existing person, existing is for him his highest interest, and his interestedness in existing is his actuality. What actuality is cannot be rendered in the language of abstraction.
CUP, p. 314
All knowledge about actuality is possibility. The only actuality concerning which an existing person has more than knowledge about is his own actuality, that he exists, and this actuality is his absolute interest.
CUP, p. 316
Existence is always the particular; the abstract does not exist.
CUP, p. 330
The subjective thinker is not a scientist-scholar; he is an artist. To exist is an art.
CUP, p. 351
The spheres are related as follows: immediacy, finite common sense; irony, ethics with irony as its incognito; humor; religiousness with humor as its incognito—and then, finally, the essentially Christian, distinguished by the paradoxical accentuation of existence, by the paradox, by the break with immanence, and by the absurd.
CUP, pp. 531–32n
Precisely by coming into existence, everything that comes into existence demonstrates that it is not necessary, for the only thing that cannot come into existence is the necessary, because the necessary is.
PF, p. 74
THE ABSURD
What, then, is the absurd? The absurd is that the eternal truth has come into existence in time, that God has come into existence, has been born, has grown up, etc., has come into existence exactly as an individual human being, indistinguishable from any other human being …
CUP, p. 210
This concept of improbability, the absurd, ought then to be developed, for it is nothing but superficiality to think that the absurd is not a concept, that all sorts of absurdities belong equally under the absurd. No, the concept of the absurd is precisely to grasp the fact that it cannot and must not be grasped.
CUP (Vol. 2, Supplement), pp. 98–99
The absurd, the paradox, is composed in such a way that reason has no power at all to dissolve it in nonsense and prove that it is nonsense; no, it is a symbol, a riddle, a compounded riddle about which reason must say: I cannot solve it, it cannot be understood, but it does not follow thereby that it is nonsense.
CUP (Vol. 2, Supplement), p. 99
It is evident that sorrow can make a man mentally ill, and that is hard enough; it is also evident that there is a willpower that can haul to the wind so drastically that it rescues the understanding, even though a person becomes a little odd (and I do not intend to disparage this). But to be able to lose one’s understanding and along with it everything finite, for which it is the stock-broker, and then to win the very same finitude again by virtue of the absurd—this appalls me, but that does not make me say it is something inferior, since, on the contrary, it is the one and only marvel.
FT, p. 36
The absurd does not belong to the differences that lie within the proper domain of the understanding. It is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen.
FT, p. 46
And what higher movement has the age discovered, now that entering the monastery has been abandoned? Is it not a wretched worldly wisdom, sagacity, pusillanimity, that sits in the place of honor, that cravenly deludes men into thinking that they have performed the highest and slyly keeps them from even attempting the lesser? The person who has made the monastic movement has only one movement left, the movement of the absurd. How many in our day understand what the absurd is?
FT, p. 101
PARADOX
The paradox is the authentic pathos of the intellectual life, and just as only great souls are susceptible to passions, so are only great thinkers susceptible to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing other than grandiose thoughts, not yet fully developed.
JN, vol. 2, Journal FF: 152, p. 95
But one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow.
PF, p. 37
But the ultimate potentiation of every passion is always to will its own downfall, and so it is also the ultimate passion of the understanding [Forstand] to will the collision, although in one way or another the collision must become its downfall. This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.
PF, p. 37
If the paradox and the understanding meet in the mutual understanding of their difference, then the encounter is a happy one, like erotic love’s understanding—happy in the passion to which we as yet have given no name and which we shall not name until later. If the encounter is not in mutual understanding, then the relation is unhappy, and the understanding’s unhappy love, if I dare call it that (which, please note, resembles only the unhappy love rooted in misunderstood self-love; since the power of chance is capable of nothing here, the analogy stretches no further), we could more specifically term offense.
PF, p. 49
But then is faith just as paradoxical as the paradox? Quite so. How else could it have its object in the paradox and be happy in its relation to it? Faith itself is a wonder, and everything that is true of the paradox is also true of faith.
PF, p. 65
The eternal truth has come into existence in time. That is the paradox.
CUP, p. 209
The paradox of faith, then, is this: that the single individual is higher than the universal, that the single individual … determines his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute, not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the universal.
FT, p. 70
THE UNDERSTANDING/REASON/KNOWLEDGE
There is an old saying that to understand and to understand are two things, and so they are…. To understand a speech is one thing, and to understand what it refers to, namely, the personal, is something else; …
CA, p. 142
In every generation, most people … live and die in the delusion that things keep on going, and that if it were granted them to live longer, things would keep going onward in a continuing, straightforward ascent with more and more comprehension. How many experience at all the maturity of discovering that there comes a critical point where things turn around, when what matters from then on is an increasing comprehension that more and more comprehends that there is something that cannot be comprehended[?]
JN, vol. 6, Journal NB12: 134, p. 225
FIGURE 9. Kierkegaard as student.
Portrait by David Jacob Jacobsen, 1840. The Museum of National History, Frederiksborg.
To sit in a room where everything is so quiet that one can hear a grain of sand fall and can understand the highest—that every person can do. But, to speak figuratively, to sit in the kettle the coppersmith is hammering on and then to understand the same thing—well, then one must have the understanding close at hand …
WL, pp. 78–79
The understanding counts and counts, calculates and calculates, but it never arrives at the certainty that faith possesses …
WL, p. 105
So also with knowing when it becomes fantastic. The law for the development of the self with respect to knowing, insofar as it is the case that the self becomes itself, is that the increase of knowledge corresponds to the increase of self-knowledge, that the more the self knows, the more it knows itself.
SUD, p. 31
Does this mean, then, that to understand and to understand are two different things? They certainly are, and the person who has understood this—but, please note, not in the sense of the first kind of understanding—is eo ipso initiated into all the secrets of irony.
SUD, p. 90
What, then, is the unknown? It is the frontier that is continually arrived at, and therefore when the category of motion is replaced by the category of rest it is the different, the absolutely different. But it is the absolutely different in which there is no distinguishing mark.
PF, pp. 44–45
Honor be to learning and knowledge; praised be the one who masters the material with the certainty of knowledge, with the reliability of autopsy.
CUP, p. 11
All my work oriented to knowing does not touch my life at all, its desires, its passions, its selfishness, and leaves me completely unchanged—my action changes my life.
FSE, p. 116
This is the truth of the matter. In every human being there is a capacity, the capacity for knowledge. And every person—the most knowing and the most limited—is in his knowing far beyond what he is in his life or what his life expresses.
FSE, p. 118
But one thing is sure, reflection, like knowledge, increases sorrow, and beyond a doubt there is no task and effort more difficult for the individual as well as for the whole generation than to extricate oneself from the temptations of reflection …
TA, p. 77
[W]hen the understanding stands still, it behooves one to have the courage and the heart to believe the wondrous and, continually strengthened by this vision, to return to actuality and not just sit still and want to fathom it.
SLW, p. 122
Truth has always had many loud proclaimers, but the question is whether a person will in the deepest sense acknowledge the truth, will allow it to permeate his whole being, will accept all its consequences, and not have an emergency hiding place for himself and a Judas kiss for the consequence.
CA, p. 138
There is one view of life that holds that wherever the multitude is, there, too, is the truth—that truth itself needs to have the multitude on its side. There is another view of life that holds that wherever the multitude is, there is untruth, so that even if every individual, silently and separately, possessed the truth, nonetheless if they assembled in a multitude (in such a way that the multitude had any sort of decisive, electoral, noisy, audible significance), then untruth would immediately be present.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 56, p. 54
How many an individual has not asked, “What is truth?” and at bottom hoped that it would be a long time before the truth would come so close to him that in the same instant it would determine what it was his duty to do at that moment.
WL, p. 96
FIGURE 10. Kierkegaard grave.
Photograph by Wayne Wakeman, 2002.
Let us take the knowledge of God as an example. Objectively, what is reflected upon is that this is the true God; subjectively, that the individual relates himself to a something in such a way that his relation is in truth a God-relation. Now, on which side is the truth?
CUP, p. 199
The how of the truth is precisely the truth.
CUP, p. 323
[F]or only the truth that builds up is truth for you.
Thus understood, the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity. It is the first reflection of eternity in time, its first attempt, as it were, at stopping time.
CA, p. 88
Nature’s security has its source in the fact that time has no significance at all for nature. Only with the moment does history begin.
CA, p. 89
If there is no next day for you, then either you are dying or you are one who by dying to temporality grasped the eternal, either one who is actually dying or one who is really living.
CD, p. 72
If it is true that time changes everything, the changeable, then it is also true that time reveals who it was who did not change.
TA, p. 7
All the forces of life are incapable of resisting time; it sweeps them along with itself—even recollection is in the present.
TDIO, p. 78
Indeed, time [Tid] also is a good. If a person were able to produce a scarcity [Dyrtid] in the external world, yes, then he would be busy.
TDIO, p. 83
Who has not heard how one day, sometimes one hour, gained infinite worth because death made time dear! Death is able to do this, but with the thought of death the earnest person is able to create a scarcity so that the year and the day receive infinite worth …
TDIO, p. 84
What is joy, or what is it to be joyful? It is truly to be present to oneself; but truly to be present to oneself is this today, this to be today, truly to be today. The more true it is that you are today, the more completely present you are to yourself today, the less the day of trouble, tomorrow, exists for you. Joy is the present time with the whole emphasis on: the present time.
WA, p. 39
Time, or the fact that suffering drags on in time, is always the most oppressive suffering. Daily worries, daily derision year in and year out, are far worse than any catastrophe, because, among other things, this always looks like nothing to an outside observer.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 80, p. 172
In relation to the absolute, there is only one time, the present; for the person who is not contemporary with the absolute, it does not exist at all.
PC, p. 63
Alas, why did time come into existence! If the good has always been victorious eternally, why must it drag itself slowly forward through the duration of time or almost perish in the slowness of time, why must it struggle laboriously through what makes time so long, through uncertainty!
UDVS, p. 61
Alas, time comes and time goes, it subtracts little by little; then it deprives a person of a good, the loss of which he indeed feels, and his pain is great. Alas, and he does not discover that long ago it has already taken away from him the most important thing of all—the capacity to make a resolution …
TDIO, p. 48
ETERNAL
Many people are afraid of eternity—if only we can endure time, we can surely deal with eternity. Thus when one hears lovers vow to love one another for eternity, it does not mean nearly as much as when they promise to do so in time, because the person who makes such a promise for eternity can always answer that for the time being you’ll have to excuse me.
JN, vol. 3, Notebook 7: 38, pp. 210–11
[D]enial of the eternal may express itself directly or indirectly in many various ways, as mockery, as prosaic intoxication with common sense, as busyness, as enthusiasm for the temporal, etc.
CA, p. 152
Some bend eternity into time for the imagination. Conceived in this way, eternity produces an enchanting effect. One does not know whether it is dream or actuality. As the beams of the moon glimmer in an illuminated forest or a hall, so the eternal peeps wistfully, dreamily, and roguishly into the moment. Thought of the eternal becomes a fanciful pottering around, and the mood is always the same: Am I dreaming, or is it eternity that is dreaming of me?
CA, p. 152
Resolution is a waking up to the eternal …
EUD, p. 347
Alas, time and busyness think that eternity is very far away …
UDVS, p. 66
Wherever the eternal is, there is rest; but there is unrest where the eternal is not present.
UDVS, p. 258
For an existing person, the goal of motion is decision and repetition. The eternal is the continuity of motion, but an abstract eternity is outside motion, and a concrete eternity in the existing person is the maximum of passion.
CUP, p. 312
Only the eternal can be and become and remain contemporary with every age …
WL, p. 31
Thus the one who actually occupies himself with the eternal is never busy.
WL, p. 98
DEATH
But even if it is very pleasant for flesh and blood to avoid opposition, I wonder if it is a comfort also in the hour of death. In the hour of death, surely the only comfort is that one has not avoided opposition but has suffered it.
WL, p. 84
It is a task, and one need not have seen much in life to have seen enough to be assured that it may very well be necessary to emphasize that it is a task, a duty, to recollect the dead. The untrustworthiness of human feelings left to their own devices perhaps never manifests itself more than in this very relationship.
WL, p. 348
Parents love the children almost before they come into existence and long before they become conscious beings, therefore as nonbeings. But a dead person is also a nonbeing, and the two greatest good works are these: to give a human being life and to recollect one who is dead; yet the first work of love has a repayment.
WL, p. 349
There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life’s highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.
EO,1, p. 20
In the grave there is no recollection, not even of God. See, the man did know this, the one of whom it must now be said that he no longer recollects anything, to whom it would now be too late to say this.
TDIO, p. 71
Death can expressly teach that earnestness lies in the inner being, in thought, can teach that it is only an illusion when the external is regarded light-mindedly or heavy-mindedly or when the observer, profoundly considering the thought of death, forgets to think about and take into account his own death.
TDIO, p. 73
To think of oneself as dead is earnestness; to be a witness to the death of another is mood.
TDIO, p. 75
When death comes, the word is: Up to here, not one step further, then it is concluded, not a letter is added; the meaning is at an end and not one more sound is to be heard—all is over.
TDIO, pp. 78–79
Death in earnest gives life force as nothing else does; it makes one alert as nothing else does.
TDIO, p. 83
When sickness becomes a daily visitor and time passes, the time of joy, and even those closest become weary of the suffering one and many an impatient word wounds, when the sufferer himself feels that his mere presence is disturbing to the joyful, and so you must sit far away from the dance—then it is supposed to be a relief to reflect that death invites him also to the dance, and in that dance all become equal.
TDIO, p. 87
So death is indefinable—the only certainty, and the only thing about which nothing is certain.
TDIO, p. 91
What is decisive about the explanation, what prevents the nothingness of death from annihilating the explanation, is that it acquires retroactive power and actuality in the life of the living person; then death becomes a teacher to him and does not traitorously assist him to a confession that denounces the explainer as a fool.
TDIO, p. 97
And this testing by death—or with a more commonly used foreign word to designate the same thing—this final examination [Examen] of life, is equally difficult for all. It is not as it usually is—namely, that the fortunately gifted person passes easily and the poorly gifted person has a hard time—no, death adapts the test to the ability—oh, so very accurately, and the test becomes equally difficult because it is the test of earnestness.
TDIO, p. 102
[J]ust as nature declares God, so every grave preaches.
TDIO, p. 109
Move on, you drama of life—let no one call it a comedy, no one a tragedy, for no one saw the end! Move on, you drama of existence, where life is not given again any more than money is! Why has no one returned from the dead? Because life does not know how to captivate as death does, because life does not have the persuasiveness that death has.
R, p. 176
“Just as the captive beast walks round in the cage every day for the sake of exercise, or measures the length of the chain, so I too measure the length of the chain every day by walking to the thought of death—for the sake of exercise and to put up with living.”
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB3: 7, p. 248
IMMORTALITY
A book propounds the question of the immortality of the soul; the contents of the book are, of course, the answer. But the contents of the book, as the reader convinces himself by reading it through, consist of all the wisest and best men’s opinions, strung on a thread, concerning immortality…. But essentially the question of immortality is not a learned question; it is a question belonging to inwardness, which the subject by becoming subjective must ask himself.
CUP, p. 173
It [demonstrating immortality] is like wanting to paint Mars in the armor that makes him invisible.
CUP, p. 174
Immortality is judgment. There is not one more word to say about immortality; the one who says one more word or a word in another direction had better beware of judgment.
CD, p. 206
Immortality could not be a final change that intervened … it is a changelessness that is not changed with the change of the years.
UDVS, pp. 10–11
The distant baying of a dog, calling one to far-off, friendly, familiar places—constitutes the most beautiful proof of the immortality of the soul.
JN, vol. 2, Journal FF: 71, p. 83
REPETITION
Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward.
R, p. 131
He alone is truly happy who is not deluded into thinking that the repetition should be something new, for then one grows weary of it.
R, p. 132
Repetition is the new category that will be discovered…. The dialectic of repetition is easy, for that which is repeated has been—otherwise it could not be repeated—but the very fact that it has been makes repetition into something new.
R, pp. 148–49
If one does not have the category of recollection or repetition, all life dissolves into an empty, meaningless noise. Recollection is the ethnical [ethniske] view of life, repetition the modern; repetition is the interest [Interesse] of metaphysics, and also the interest upon which metaphysics comes to grief; repetition is the watchword [Løsnet] in every ethical view; repetition is conditio sine qua non [the indispensable condition] for every issue of dogmatics.
R, p. 149
When ideality and reality touch each other, then repetition occurs.
JC, p. 171
BUSYNESS
There [is] no one I would rather have fall down, or have Knippelbro raised in front of, etc. than these hard pressed businessmen who have so infinitely much to get done in the world, while the rest of us, when Knippelbro is raised, find it a good opportunity to fall into a reverie—
JN, vol. 3, Notebook 5: 6, p. 172
FIGURE 11. Kierkegaard in the street.
By Luplau Janssen, 1902. Photo by Lennart Larsen. The National Museum of History, Frederiksborg.
The result of busyness is that an individual is very seldom permitted to form a heart.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 92, p. 74
This is the situation: in the eternal sense there is absolutely nothing to hurry after, and nonetheless … I must be as diligent as the most diligent, as frugal with time as a beggar is with a shilling, and I must occupy myself most carefully and calmly with every little detail.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 214, p. 124
To be busy is to occupy oneself, divided and scattered (which follows from the object that occupies one), with all the multiplicity in which it is simply impossible for a person to be whole, whole in all of it or whole in any particular part of it, something only the insane can succeed in doing.
WL, p. 98
A mirror, it is true, has the feature that a person can see his image in it, but then one must stand still. If one hastily hurries by, one gets to see nothing.
UDVS, p. 67
THE INDIVIDUAL
There is at once something very humbling and yet infinitely elevating for the individual in the fact that God concerns himself just as much, absolutely just as much, with the least [human being] as with the greatest.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 68, p. 56
To will to be an individual human being (which one unquestionably is) with the help of and by virtue of one’s difference is flabbiness; but to will to be an individual existing human being (which one unquestionably is) in the same sense as everyone else is capable of being—that is the ethical victory over life and over every mirage …
CUP, p. 356
Everyone must make an accounting to God as an individual; the king must make an accounting to God as an individual, and the most wretched beggar must make an accounting to God as an individual—lest anyone be arrogant by being more than an individual, lest anyone despondently think that he is not an individual …
UDVS, p. 128
Eternity does not ask whether you brought up your children the way you saw others doing it but asks you as an individual how you brought up your children.
UDVS, pp. 130–31
[I]f I have spoken erroneously, and insofar as I have spoken erroneously, I will be asked about it as a single individual and without any excuses. In eternity there is not the remotest thought of any collective failure. In eternity the single individual, you, my listener, and I, will be questioned as the single individual, alone by himself as an individual …
UDVS, p. 149
LAUGHTER/HUMOR/THE COMIC
[T]he comical always consists in contradiction. If a man seeks permission to establish himself as a proprietor of an alehouse and is refused, it is not comical. On the other hand, if a girl seeks permission to establish herself as a prostitute and is refused, which sometimes happens, then it is comical …
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 276, pp. 208–9
Humor can be either religious or demonic (in relation to the two mysteries)[.]
JN, vol. 3, Notebook 5: 30, p. 183
One must see how no attack is so feared as that of laughter, how even the person who courageously risked his life for a stranger would not be far from betraying his father and mother if the danger was laughter, because more than any other this attack isolates the one attacked …
PV, p. 65
Something marvelous has happened to me. I was transported to the seventh heaven. There sat all the gods assembled. As a special dispensation, I was granted the favor of making a wish. “What do you want,” asked Mercury. “Do you want youth, or beauty, or power, or a long life, or the most beautiful girl, or anyone of the other glorious things we have in the treasure chest? Choose—but only one thing.” For a moment I was bewildered; then I addressed the gods, saying: My esteemed contemporaries, I choose one thing—that I may always have the laughter on my side. Not one of the gods said a word; instead, all of them began to laugh. From that I concluded that my wish was granted and decided that the gods knew how to express themselves with good taste, for it would indeed have been inappropriate to reply solemnly: It is granted to you.
EO,1, pp. 42–43
The comic is always a sign of maturity … I consider the power in the comic a vitally necessary legitimation for anyone who is to be regarded as authorized in the world of spirit in our day…. But assistant professors are so devoid of comic power that it is shocking …
CUP, p. 281
To aspire to wittiness without possessing the wealth of inwardness is like wanting to be prodigal on luxuries and to dispense with the necessities of life …
TA, p. 74
The more one suffers, the more sense, I believe, one gains for the comic. Only by the most profound suffering does one gain real competence in the comic, which with a word magically transforms the rational creature called man into a Fratze [caricature].
SLW, p. 245
THE TRAGIC
[N]o matter how much the world has changed, the idea of the tragic is still essentially unchanged, just as weeping still continues to be equally natural to humankind.
EO,1, p. 139
The tragic and the comic are the same inasmuch as both are contradiction, but the tragic is suffering contradiction, and the comic is painless contradiction.
CUP, p. 514
I too have combined the tragic with the comic: I make witticisms, people laugh—I cry.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 33, p. 225
Doubtless the most sublime tragedy consists in being misunderstood. For this reason the life of Christ is supreme tragedy.
JP, vol. 1, no. 118, p. 50
Irony is an abnormal development which, like the abnormality in the livers of Strasbourg geese, ends by killing the individual.
JN, vol. 2, Journal FF: 159, p. 97
Irony is the unity of ethical passion, which in inwardness ethically accentuates one’s own I, and cultivation, which in outwardness (in associating with human beings) infinitely abstracts from one’s own I.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 323, p. 223
But just as there is something deterring about irony, it likewise has something extraordinarily seductive and fascinating. Its masquerading and mysteriousness, the telegraphic communication it prompts because an ironist always has to be understood at a distance …
CI, p. 48
The ironist is the vampire who has sucked the blood of the lover and while doing so has fanned him cool, lulled him to sleep, and tormented him with troubled dreams.
CI, p. 49
The ironic figure of speech has still another property that characterizes all irony, a certain superiority deriving from its not wanting to be understood immediately, even though it wants to be understood, with the result that this figure looks down, as it were, on plain and simple talk that everyone can promptly understand …
FIGURE 12. Hansen drawing of Kierkegaard.
Drawing by H. P. Hansen, 1854. Royal Library, Copenhagen.
CI, p. 248
[W]e have irony as the infinite absolute negativity. It is negativity, because it only negates; it is infinite, because it does not negate this or that phenomenon; it is absolute, because that by virtue of which it negates is a higher something that still is not.
CI, p. 261
In irony, the subject is negatively free, since the actuality that is supposed to give the subject content is not there…. But this very freedom, this suspension, gives the ironist a certain enthusiasm, because he becomes intoxicated, so to speak, in the infinity of possibilities …
CI, p. 262
Irony is indeed free, free from the sorrows of actuality, but also free from its joys, free from its blessing, for inasmuch as it has nothing higher than itself, it can receive no blessing …
CI, p. 279
As the ironist poetically composes himself and his environment with the greatest possible poetic license, as he lives in this totally hypothetical and subjunctive way, his life loses all continuity. He succumbs completely to mood. His life is nothing but moods.
CI, p. 284
There is a lot of talk these days about irony and humor, especially by people who have never been able to practice them but nevertheless know how to explain everything.
FT, p. 51
[W]hat doubt is to science, irony is to personal life.
CI, p. 326
Father in Heaven! When the thought of you awakens in our soul, let it not awaken like a startled bird which then flutters about in confusion, but like the child from sleep with its heavenly smile.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 189, p. 265
God can just as little prove his existence in any other sense than that in which he is able to swear: he has nothing higher to swear by than himself.
JN, vol. 2, Journal EE: 45, p. 18
It is really remarkable that while all the other attributes ascribed to God are adjectives, “Love” alone is a substantive, and it would scarcely occur to one to make the mistake of saying: [“]God is lovely.” Thus language itself has given expression to the substantial element that is found in this attribute.—
JN, vol. 2, Journal EE: 62, p. 22
It is so impossible for the world to exist without God that if God could forget it, it would instantly cease to exist.
JN, vol. 2, Journal FF: 54, p. 80
FIGURE 13. Fear and Trembling title page.
If the subjects in a country in which there was a king enthroned were to sit down to investigate whether it was indeed the best thing to have a king, he would surely be furious. And this is how people behave with respect to God—people forget that God exists and they consider whether it is the best thing, the most satisfactory thing, to have a God.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 393, p. 251
There are people who say with a certain pride: I owe nothing to any person, I have educated myself. There are others who say: This great thinker was my teacher, this excellent general, and I account it an honor to have been his disciple, to have fought under him—but what would you think if a person were to say: God in heaven was my teacher, and I account it an honor to be his disciple, he brought me up.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 509, p. 285
There is at once something very humbling and yet infinitely elevating for the individual in the fact that God concerns himself just as much, absolutely just as much, with the least [human being] as with the greatest.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 68, p. 56
Precisely because God cannot be an object for human beings, because God is subject, precisely for this reason the reversal shows itself absolutely: when one denies God—then he does no injury to God but annihilates himself; when one mocks God—then he mocks himself.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 88, p. 73
Imagine a girl who is unhappily in love speaking to a rock about her pain: God listens to your complaint just as impassively, if you imagine that you are the object of his preferential love.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 168, p. 107
I read, somewhere, a very penetrating distinction drawn by Abraham a St. Clara: When a person has withdrawn from the world (in an external sense) but does not live in communion with God—that is, he has the world with him in his thoughts—this person is not solitary; he lives alone but is not solitary.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 97, p. 178
If the birds do not need to be reminded to praise God, then should not men be moved to prayer without church, in the true house of God, where heaven’s arch forms the church ceiling, where the roar of the storm and the gentle zephyr take the place of the organ’s bass and treble …
JN, vol. 1, Journal AA: 7, p. 12
The divine may well be stirring within earthly relationships and it does not require these to be annihilated as the condition of its appearing, just as God’s Spirit revealed itself to Moses in the thornbush, which burned without being consumed.
JN, vol. 2, Journal EE: 10, p. 6
All people wish either to be or to become contemporary with great men, great events, etc. God knows how many people actually live contemporaneously with themselves. To be contemporary with oneself (thus, not in the feared or expected future or in the past) is transparency in repose, and this is possible only through the relation to God, or it is the relation to God.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 199, p. 218
The demonstration of the existence of God is something with which one learnedly and metaphysically occupies oneself only on occasion, but the thought of God forces itself upon a man on every occasion.
CA, p. 140
It is an extraordinary benefaction that you came into existence, it is a nice world you came into, and God is a nice fellow; just stay with him, he very likely will not fulfill all your wishes, but he certainly does help. A downright falsehood.
TM, p. 252
It seems as if all this research and pondering and scrutinizing would draw God’s Word very close to me; the truth is that this is the very way, this is the most cunning way, to remove God’s Word as far as possible from me …
FSE, p. 35
When an oak nut is planted in a clay pot, the pot breaks; when new wine is poured into old leather bottles, they burst. What happens, then, when the god plants himself in the frailty of a human being if he does not become a new person and a new vessel!
PF, p. 34
For the fool says in his heart that there is no God, but he who says in his heart or to others: Just wait a little and I shall demonstrate it—ah, what a rare wise man he is!
PF, p. 43
Oh, the true devotion, however, is to give up all claims on life, all claims on power and honor and advantage, all claims—but the happiness of erotic love and friendship is among the very greatest claims—that is, to give up all claims in order to understand what an enormous claim God and eternity have upon the individual himself.
WL, p. 90
Our earthly life, which is frail and infirm, must separate explaining and being, and this weakness of ours is an essential expression of how we relate to God.
WL, p. 101
God is not something external, as is a wife, whom I can ask whether she is now satisfied with me.
CUP, p. 162
Nature, the totality of creation, is God’s work, and yet God is not there, but within the individual human being there is a possibility (he is spirit according to his possibility) that in inwardness is awakened to a God-relationship, and then it is possible to see God everywhere.
CUP, pp. 246–47
It by no means follows, however, that a person’s life becomes easy because he learns to know God …
EUD, p. 324
Only when he himself becomes nothing, only then can God illuminate him so that he resembles God. However great he is, he cannot manifest God’s likeness; God can imprint himself in him only when he himself has become nothing. When the ocean is exerting all its power, that is precisely the time when it cannot reflect the image of heaven, and even the slightest motion blurs the image; but when it becomes still and deep, then the image of heaven sinks into its nothingness.
EUD, p. 399
[T]he voice of God is always a whisper …
TA, p. 10
In the theater the performance is played before persons present who are called spectators, but at the religious address God himself is present; in the most earnest sense he is the critical spectator who is checking on how it is being spoken and on how it is being heard, and for that very reason there are no spectators. Thus the one speaking is the prompter, and the listener is present and open before God; he is, if I may put it this way, the actor, who in the true sense is acting before God.
UDVS, pp. 124–25
Dependence on God is the only independence …
UDVS, p. 182
Among the many goods there is one that is the highest, that is not defined by its relation to the other goods, because it is the highest, and yet the person wishing does not have a definite idea of it, because it is the highest as the unknown—and this good is God.
TDIO, p. 18
Can the Omnipresent One actually have become like a rare natural phenomenon whose existence the scientist demonstrates, or like a variable star observed at century-long intervals and whose existence therefore requires demonstration, especially during the intervening centuries when it is not seen!
TDIO, p. 25
People see God in great things, in the raging of the elements and in the course of world history; they entirely forget what the child understood, that when it shuts its eyes it sees God.
TDIO, p. 31
The person who is without God in the world soon becomes bored with himself—and expresses this haughtily by being bored with all life, but the person who is in fellowship with God indeed lives with the one whose presence gives infinite significance to even the most insignificant.
TDIO, p. 78
The uncharitableness of the natural man cannot allow him the extraordinary that God has intended for him; so he is offended.
SUD, p. 86
God does not avail himself of an abridgment; he comprehends … actuality itself, all its particulars; for him the single individual does not lie beneath the concept.
SUD, p. 121
The sighing of the wind, the echoing of the forest, the murmuring of the brook, the humming of the summer, the whispering of the leaves, the rustling of the grass, every sound [Lyd], every sound you hear is all compliance [Adlyd], unconditional obedience [Lydighed]. Thus you can hear God in it …
WA, p. 25
Strangely enough, this deification of the established order is the perpetual revolt, the continual mutiny against God.
PC, p. 88
[T]o God, world history is the royal stage where he, not accidentally but essentially, is the only spectator, because he is the only one who can be that. Admission to this theater is not open to any existing spirit. If he fancies himself a spectator there, he is simply forgetting that he himself is supposed to be the actor in that little theater and is to leave it to that royal spectator and poet how he wants to use him in that royal drama, Drama Dramatum [The Drama of Dramas].
CUP, p. 158
But you shall love God in unconditional obedience, even if what he requires of you might seem to you to be to your own harm, indeed, harmful to his cause; for God’s wisdom is beyond all comparison with yours, and God’s governance has no obligation of responsibility in relation to your own sagacity. All you have to do is obey in love.
WL, p. 20
FAITH
It would surely not be unthinkable that a human being could live his entire life constantly worried that he did not have faith, and of whom it might be said—and to whom it would be said: Dear Friend, you had faith, and your worries were only the pains of inwardness.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 379, p. 246
To have faith is exactly to make oneself light with the aid of considerable gravity to which one subjects oneself; to become objective is to make oneself light by throwing off the burdens. Having faith is just like flying, but one flies precisely with the assistance of a countervailing gravity; it takes considerable gravity to become light enough to fly.
FIGURE 14. Fear and Trembling.
From the Royal Library, Copenhagen, B pk. 10 læg 1.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 65, p. 55
Faith is always related to what is not seen; in the setting of nature (in opposition to the senses) to what is invisible; in the setting of spirit (spiritually) to what is improbable.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 90, p. 74
When one must have a real relation to God, that is, concern oneself with him every day … then one quickly learns that one must make sure to understand that everything God does is good, or learn always to be thankful. Otherwise all that childish nonsense appears: at one moment one is to be thankful, because everything is good or because such and such was so nice; at the next moment one must sigh and beg for patience, because now such and such was so bad. It is impossible to have a real relation to God and at the same time remain in one’s merely human and earthly notion of what is of good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 139, p. 196
Let us rather say it openly, along with honest Kant, who declared the relation to God to be a sort of madness, a hallucination. Being involved with something invisible is of course also like this.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 235, p. 229
But the Christian knows that to need God is a human being’s perfection.
CD, p. 64
An earnest Christian, for example, is well aware that there are moments when he is more profoundly and vitally gripped by the Christian life than he usually is, but he does not therefore become a pagan when the mood passes.
CI, p. 284
[I]f he believes his eyes, he is in fact deceived, for the god cannot be known directly.
PF, p. 63
[A]wareness is by no means partial to faith, as if faith proceeded as a simple consequence of awareness. The advantage is that one enters into a state in which the decision manifests itself ever more clearly.
PF, p. 93
[I]f someone wanted to test whether he has faith, or try to attain faith, this really means he will prevent himself from attaining faith; he will bring himself into the restlessness of craving where faith is never won …
WL, p. 33
Without risk, no faith. Faith is the contradiction between the infinite passion of inwardness and the objective uncertainty.
CUP, p. 204
The believer cares so little for probability that he fears it most of all, since he knows very well that with it he is beginning to lose his faith.
CUP, p. 233
Even if someone were able to transpose the whole content of faith into conceptual form, it does not follow that he has comprehended faith, comprehended how he entered into it or how it entered into him.
FT, p. 7
But Abraham had faith, and therefore he was young, for he who always hopes for the best grows old and is deceived by life, and he who is always prepared for the worst grows old prematurely, but he who has faith—he preserves an eternal youth.
FT, p. 18
Love indeed has its priests in the poets, and occasionally we hear a voice that knows how to honor it, but not a word is heard about faith. Who speaks to the honor of this passion?
FT, p. 32
I wonder if anyone in my generation is able to make the movements of faith?
FT, p. 34
[O]ur generation does not stop with faith, does not stop with the miracle of faith, turning water into wine—it goes further and turns wine into water.
FT, p. 37
The knights of the infinite resignation are easily recognizable—their walk is light and bold. But they who carry the treasure of faith are likely to disappoint, for externally they have a striking resemblance to bourgeois philistinism, which infinite resignation, like faith, deeply disdains.
FT, p. 38
I can still save my soul as long as my concern that my love of God conquer within me is greater than my concern that I achieve earthly happiness.
FT, p. 49
[A]lthough Abraham arouses my admiration, he also appalls me.
FT, p. 60
But faith is the paradox that interiority is higher than exteriority …
FT, p. 69
Faith is the highest passion in a person.
FT, p. 122
And this is one of the most decisive definitions for all Christianity—that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.
SUD, p. 82
[F]aith conquers the world by conquering at every moment the enemy within one’s own inner being, the possibility of offense.
PC, p. 76
Just as the concept “faith” is an altogether distinctively Christian term, so in turn is “offense” an altogether distinctively Christian term relating to faith. The possibility of offense is the crossroad, or it is like standing at the crossroad. From the possibility of offense, one turns either to offense or to faith, but one never comes to faith except from the possibility of offense.
PC, p. 81
If the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, then learning obedience is the consummation of wisdom …
UDVS, p. 258
[T]he believer continually lies out on the deep, has 70,000 fathoms of water beneath him. However long he lies out there, this still does not mean that he will gradually end up lying and relaxing onshore. He can become more calm, more experienced, find a confidence that loves jest and a cheerful temperament—but until the very last he lies out on 70,000 fathoms of water.
SLW, p. 444
It is only all too easy to understand the requirement contained in God’s Word (“Give all your goods to the poor.” “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the left.” “If anyone takes your coat, let him have your cloak also.” “Rejoice always.” “Count it sheer joy when you meet various temptations” etc.). It is just as easy to understand as the remark “The weather is fine today,” … The most limited poor creature cannot truthfully deny being able to understand the requirement …
FSE, pp. 34–35
When the world commences its drastic ordeal, when the storms of life crush youth’s exuberant expectancy, when existence, which seemed so affectionate and gentle, changes into a pitiless proprietor who demands everything back, everything that it gave in such a way that it can take it back—then the believer most likely looks at himself and his life with sadness and pain, but he still says, “There is an expectancy that the whole world cannot take from me; it is the expectancy of faith, and this is victory.”
EUD, pp. 23–24
[P]encil-pushing modern speculative thought takes a dim view of passion, and yet, for the existing person, passion is existence at its very highest—and we are, after all, existing persons.
CUP, p. 197
The passion of the infinite, not its content, is the deciding factor, for its content is precisely itself. In this way the subjective “how” and subjectivity are the truth.
CUP, p. 203
All passion is like sailing: the wind must be sufficiently forceful to stretch the sail with one uno tenore [continuous] gust, there must not be too much flapping of the sails and tacking before reaching deep water, there must not be too many preliminaries and prior consultations.
TA, p. 43
Faith is a marvel, and yet no human being is excluded from it; for that which unites all human life is passion, and faith is a passion.
FT, p. 67
[I]t is very easy to leave something behind as a matter of course over the years. And over the years, an individual may abandon the little bit of passion, feeling, imagination, the little bit of inwardness he had and embrace as a matter of course an understanding of life in terms of trivialities …
SUD, p. 59
Belief and doubt are not two kinds of knowledge that can be defined in continuity with each other, for neither of them is a cognitive act, and they are opposite passions.
PF, p. 84
Let others complain that the times are evil. I complain that they are wretched, for they are without passion.
EO,1, p. 27
Let no one misunderstand all my talk of pathos and passion as if I intended to acknowledge every uncircumcised immediacy, every unshaven passion.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 237, p. 199
With respect to what is accidentally unpopular (based on the differences between one human being and another) one has to say that the others don’t understand it and that’s that. With respect to what is essentially unpopular (to live passionately, absolutely passionately, in something in and for itself) one has to say that the others regard it as lunacy.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB5: 142, p. 428
PRAYER
The immediate person believes and fancies that the main thing when he prays, what he is particularly occupied with, is that God hears what it is he is praying for. And yet in the truly eternal sense it is just the opposite: it is not when God hears what is being prayed for that the true prayer relationship occurs but when it is the one who prays who continues to pray until it is he who is the one hearing, who hears what God wills.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 464, p. 272
Lord, our God, you know our cares better than we ourselves know them, you know how easily the anxious mind entangles itself in unseasonable and self-made worries, we would pray that you will give us insight to see through their unseasonableness and pride, to scorn them, these busy self-made cares; but the cares you place upon us, we pray that we may humbly accept them from your hand, and that you will give us strength to bear them—
JN, vol. 3, Notebook 5: 16, p. 179
Imagine a girl who is in love—which do you think she loves more: that the beloved, loafing around on a Sunday with nothing to do, happens to remember her and thus to think of her, or that he finds time to think of her even in his busiest moments, albeit without neglecting anything[?] So too, is praying to God in the day of need what he loves best and what is most pleasing to him.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB5: 13, p. 376
Praying is thus the highest pathos of the infinite, and yet it is comic, precisely because in its inwardness praying is incommensurate with every external expression …
CUP, p. 90
[T]he prayer does not change God, but it changes the one who prays.
UDVS, p. 22
To pray is also to breathe, and possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing.
SUD, p. 40
EARNESTNESS/SERIOUSNESS*
What is really viewed as seriousness is a certain training, the trained skill in being a husband, a civil servant, etc. If someone spent his time serving the highest idea with enormous diligence, making every sacrifice, or spent his days in dance halls and bars, wasting his fortune: both of these are viewed as equal by these petrified civil servants.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 53, pp. 48–49
Most people think it is seriousness to get an official position, to be attentive to the fact that a higher position, which one can seek, will soon be vacant, and how they will make the move, and what they will then do in order to arrange things. They think it is seriousness to attend distinguished social gatherings; they prepare themselves for a dinner party with His Excellency more than for Holy Communion, and when you see them on the way there, they look so serious that it is quite awful. Look, I can understand all this very well. The only thing I cannot understand is that if this is truly seriousness, then eternity must be sheer fun and games. For in eternity there is neither preferment nor promotion, nor is there a moving day or dinner parties at the homes of Excellencies.
FIGURE 15. Kierkegaard as a young man.
By Carl Aarsleff. Photograph by Walter Lowrie.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 66, p. 55
Whoever loves can hardly find joy and satisfaction, not to mention growth, in preoccupation with a definition of what love properly is. Whoever lives in daily and festive communion with the thought that there is a God could hardly wish to spoil this for himself, or see it spoiled, by piecing together a definition of what God is. So also with earnestness, which is so earnest a matter that even a definition of it becomes a frivolity.
CA, p. 147
Above all, be an earnest person by having forgotten the one and only earnestness, to relate yourself to God, to become nothing.
WL, p. 103
When someone goes his way bowed low in adversity, sufferings, sickness, lack of appreciation, hardship, and wretched prospects, he draws the wrong conclusion if on the basis of that he directly concludes that he is earnest, because earnestness is not the direct version but the ennobled one …
TDIO, p. 74
Earnestness is that you think death, and that you are thinking it is your lot, and that you are then doing what death is indeed unable to do—namely, that you are and death also is.
TDIO, p. 75
No bowstring can be tightened in such a way and is able to give the arrow such momentum the way the thought of death is able to accelerate the living when earnestness stretches the thought.
TDIO, p. 83
Earnestness does not scowl but is reconciled with life and knows how to fear death.
TDIO, p. 88
Ah, my friend, it is far better that you never forget to remember promptly than that you promptly say: I will never forget it. Earnestness is precisely this kind of honest distrust of oneself, to treat oneself as a suspicious character, as a financier treats an unreliable client, saying, “Well, these big promises are not much help; I would rather have a small part of the total right away.”
FSE, p. 44
How consistent life is! There is not anything that is true in one sphere that is not true in another. What profound earnestness that the laws of life are such that everyone must serve them whether he wants to or not.
SLW, p. 384
On the whole ethics has come to be neglected in modern science and scholarship…. And that is why ultimately men have forgotten completely what earnestness is and in all earnestness regard as nonsense that which leads to self-knowledge, turns a person out of his delusions, etc.; whereas every communication of knowledge is regarded as earnestness—and yet every communication of knowledge only nourishes the sickness.
JP, vol. 1, no. 649, p. 269
SIN
In the struggle to actualize the task of ethics, sin shows itself not as something that belongs only accidentally to the accidental individual, but as something that withdraws deeper and deeper as a deeper and deeper presupposition, as a presupposition that goes beyond the individual. Then all is lost for ethics …
CA, p. 19
Sin is for the ethical consciousness what error is for the knowledge of it—the particular exception that proves nothing.
CA, p. 19
The concept of sin does not properly belong in any science …
CA, p. 21
[S]in comes into the world as the sudden, i.e., by a leap …
CA, p. 32
So sinfulness is by no means sensuousness, but without sin there is no sexuality, and without sexuality, no history.
CA, p. 49
The only thing that is truly able to disarm the sophistry of sin is faith, courage to believe that the state itself is a new sin, courage to renounce anxiety without anxiety, which only faith can do …
CA, p. 117
Let us imagine the greatest criminal who has ever lived and also imagine that by that time physiology will have upon its nose an even more splendid pair of spectacles than ever before, so that it could explain the criminal, explain that the whole thing was a matter of natural necessity, that his brain had been too small, etc. How dreadful is that immunity from all further prosecution in comparison to the judgment Christianity passes on him: that he will go to hell if he does not repent.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 70, p. 61
Sin is sin; sin is no greater because it is against God or before God. Strange! Even lawyers speak of aggravated crimes; even lawyers make a distinction between a crime committed against a public official, for example, or against a private citizen …
SUD, p. 80
[M]an has to learn what sin is by a revelation from God; sin is not a matter of a person’s not having understood what is right but of his being unwilling to understand it …
SUD, p. 95
[S]in grows every moment that one does not take leave of it.
SUD, p. 106
The cursory observation that merely looks at the new sin and skips what lies between … is just as superficial as supposing that a train moves only when the locomotive puffs.
SUD, p. 106
But the person seeking to understand himself in the consciousness of sin before God does not understand it as a general statement that all people are sinners …
TDIO, p. 29
DEMONIC
When one becomes aware of the breadth of the field of the demonic, then perhaps it will also be clear that many of those who want to deal with the phenomenon of the demonic come under the category of the demonic themselves, and that there are traces of it in every man, as surely as every man is a sinner.
CA, p. 122
The demonic is anxiety about the good.
CA, p. 123
An adherent of the most rigid orthodoxy may be demonic. He knows it all. He genuflects before the holy. Truth is for him the aggregate of ceremonies. He talks of meeting before the throne of God and knows how many times one should bow. He knows everything, like the man who can prove a mathematical proposition when the letters are ABC, but not when the letters are DEF.
CA, pp. 139–40
Sin itself is a struggle of despair; but then, when all the powers are depleted, there may be a new intensification, a new demonic closing up within himself: this is despair over sin.
SUD, p. 110
[T]his is the deep contradiction in the demonic, and in a certain sense there is ever so much more good in a demoniac than in superficial people.
FT, p. 96
The demonic has the same quality as the divine, namely, that the single individual is able to enter into an absolute relation to it.
FT, p. 97
A person reposes in the forgiveness of sins when the thought of God no longer reminds him of the sin, but of the fact that it is forgiven, so that what is past is not a recollection of how much he offended, but of how much he has been forgiven.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 116, p. 185
It was a miracle when Christ said to the paralyzed man: Your sins are forgiven, stand up and walk. Though this miracle has not happened to me—what miraculous confidence and openness in faith to believe that sin is completely forgotten so that no anxiety accompanies one’s memory of it; truly to believe that one has become a new person so that one scarcely recognizes oneself.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB4: 156, p. 360
But there is also a love with which I love God, and this love has only one expression in language—it is “repentance.” If I do not love him in this way, then I do not love him absolutely, out of my innermost being.
EO,2, p. 216
Repentance specifically expresses that evil essentially belongs to me and at the same time expresses that it does not essentially belong to me.
EO,2, p. 224
FIGURE 16. Gammeltorv.
Lithograph by Em. Baerentzen. From a photograph in the Picture Collection of the Royal Library. Reproduced courtesy of the Royal Library.
Sin advances in its consequence; repentance follows it step by step, but always a moment too late.
CA, p. 115
But without honesty there is no repentance…. To repent of a generality without substance is a contradiction …
TDIO, pp. 34–35
One can indeed forget in many ways. One can forget because one gets something else to think about; one can forget thoughtlessly and light-mindedly; one can think that everything is forgotten because one has oneself forgotten. But eternal justice can and will forget in only one way, through forgiveness—but then, of course, the believer must not forget either, but he must steadfastly recollect that it is forgiven him.
UDVS, p. 247
Just as one by faith believes the unseen into what is seen, so the one who loves by forgiveness believes away what is seen. Both are faith. Blessed is the believer, he believers what he cannot see; blessed is the one who loves, he believes away that which he indeed can see!
WL, p. 295
One rants so much against anthropomorphisms and fails to remember that the birth of Christ is the greatest and most meaningful.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 34, p. 225
What precisely is profound in Christianity is that Christ is both our atoner and our judge, not that one is our atoner and another our judge, for then we would nevertheless come to be judged, but that the atoner and the judge are the same.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 142, p. 253
Christ did not concern himself with writing—he wrote only in sand.
JN, vol. 2, Journal FF: 105, p. 88
Present-day Christendom really lives as if the situation were as follows: Christ is the great hero and benefactor who has once and for all secured salvation for us; now we must merely be happy and delighted with the innocent goods of earthly life and leave the rest to him. But Christ is essentially the exemplar, that is, we are to resemble him, not merely profit from him.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 182, p. 212
But didn’t Christ come into the world to take suffering away, so that we should be happy—not to bring new sufferings[?] Doesn’t taking it this way make his whole coming into the world futile? On the contrary. He came into the world to transform humanity in such a way that all these human sufferings (poverty, penury, sickness, loss of honor, etc.) become as something childish, something to be reckoned as nothing.
JN, vol. 4, NB5: 143, p. 428
With Christ as the Exemplar, what we human beings might call intellectuality is not at all prominent. That is why we would find it offensive to think of Christ laughing, something that is expressed in the hymn: Why does he cry, who never laughed[?]
JN, vol. 6, Journal NB12: 128, p. 221
Christ was the fulfilling of the Law. How this thought is to be understood we are to learn from him, because he was the explanation, and only when the explanation is what it explains, when the explainer is what is explained, when the explanation [Forklaring] is the transfiguration [Forklarelse], only then is the relation the right one.
WL, p. 101
In Christ everything is revealed—and everything is hidden.
EUD, p. 433
If Christ is proclaimed to you, then it is offense to say: I do not want to have any opinion about it.
SUD, p. 129
What ungodly thoughtlessness that makes sacred history into profane history, Christ into a human being! Can one, then, come to know something about Jesus Christ from history? By no means. Jesus Christ is the object of faith; one must either believe in him or be offended; for to “know” simply means that it is not about him.
PC, p. 33
If one has only a fantastic picture of Christ, if he is not the individual human being who stands face to face with one, and his father, the carpenter, is not an actual individual human being with whom one is well acquainted, and likewise the rest of his relatives—then it is quite possible not to be offended. But if one is not contemporary with Christ in this way, then it is also impossible to become Christian.
PC, p. 103
LOVE
They say love makes one blind; it does more than that, it makes one deaf, it paralyses one; the person suffering from it is like the mimosa that closes so no picklock can open it; the more force one uses, the more tightly is it shut.
JN, vol. 3, Notebook 8: 11, p. 223
Does not even an otherwise humble gift, an insignificant little something, have infinite worth for the lover when it is from the beloved!
CD, p. 15
Being in love is the culmination of a person’s purely human existence, which is a double existence, and for that very reason being in love is simultaneously just as much inwardness as it is a relation directed outwardly to actuality.
TA, p. 49
There has been much talk in the world about unhappy love, and everyone knows what the term means: that the lovers are unable to have each other. And the reasons—well, there can be a host of them. There is another kind of unhappy love: the love of which we speak, to which there is no perfect earthly analogy but which we nevertheless, by speaking loosely for a while, can imagine in an earthly setting. The unhappiness is the result not of the lovers’ being unable to have each other but of their being unable to understand each other. And this sorrow is indeed infinitely deeper than the sorrow of which people speak, for this unhappiness aims at the heart of love and wounds for eternity …
PF, pp. 25–26
What is it, namely, that connects the temporal and eternity, what else but love, which for that very reason is before everything and remains after everything is gone.
WL, p. 6
Love’s hidden life is in the innermost being, unfathomable, and then in turn is in an unfathomable connectedness with all existence.
WL, p. 9
In other words, just as love itself is invisible and therefore we have to believe in it, so also is it not unconditionally and directly to be known by any particular expression of it.
WL, p. 13
There is no word in human language, not one single one, not the most sacred one, about which we are able to say: If a person uses this word, it is unconditionally demonstrated that there is love in that person. On the contrary, it is even true that a word from one person can convince us that there is love in him, and the opposite word from another can convince us that there is love in him also. It is true that one and the same word can convince us that love abides in the one who said it and does not in the other, who nevertheless said the same word.
WL, p. 13
But the one who is busily occupied tracking down hypocrites, whether he succeeds or not, had better see to it that this is not also a hypocrisy, inasmuch as such discoveries are hardly the fruits of love.
WL, p. 15
The best defense against hypocrisy is love …
WL, p. 15
If mistrust can actually see something as less than it is, then love also can see something as greater than it is.
WL, p. 16
Christianity certainly knows far better than any poet what love is and what it means to love. For this very reason it also knows what perhaps escapes the poets, that the love they celebrate is secretly self-love, and that precisely by this its intoxicated expression—to love another person more than oneself—can be explained.
WL, p. 19
The commandment said, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” but if the commandment is properly understood it also says the opposite: You shall love yourself in the right way.
WL, p. 22
Whoever has any knowledge of people will certainly admit that just as he has often wished to be able to move them to relinquish self-love, he has also had to wish that it were possible to teach them to love themselves.
WL, p. 23
Consequently, only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured. The security of eternity casts out all anxiety and makes love perfect, perfectly secured.
WL, p. 32
Is changingness indeed a stronger power than changelessness, and who is the stronger, the one who says, “If you will not love me, then I will hate you,” or the one who says, “If you hate me, I will still continue to love you”?
WL, p. 34
The jealous person catches, almost imploringly, every beam from the love in the beloved, but through the burning glass of jealousy he focuses all these beams on his own love, and he slowly burns up.
WL, p. 35
If, however, love has undergone eternity’s change by becoming duty, it does not know habit and habit can never gain power over it. Just as eternal life is said to have no sighing and no tears, so one could add: and no habit either, and truly by this we do not say anything less glorious.
WL, p. 37
People think that it is impossible for a human being to love his enemy, because, alas, enemies are hardly able to endure the sight of one another. Well, then, shut your eyes—then the enemy looks just like the neighbor. Shut your eyes and remember the commandment that you shall love; then you love—your enemy—no, then you love the neighbor, because you do not see that he is your enemy.
WL, p. 68
Moreover, learn and never forget the lesson, this sadness that is the truth of earthly life, that all love between human beings neither can be nor will be perfectly happy, never dares to be perfectly secure! In the divine sense, even the happiest love between two people still has one danger that the merely human view of love does not think of, the danger that the earthly love could become too intense, so that the God–relationship is disturbed …
WL, p. 129
But to love oneself in the divine sense is to love God, and truly to love another person is to help that person to love God or in loving God.
WL, p. 130
When it is a duty to love the people we see, one must first and foremost give up all imaginary and exaggerated ideas about a dreamworld where the object of love should be sought and found—that is, one must become sober, gain actuality and truth by finding and remaining in the world of actuality as the task assigned to one.
WL, p. 161
Therefore if you want to be perfect in love, strive to fulfill this duty, in loving to love the person one sees, to love him just as you see him, with all his imperfections and weaknesses, to love him as you see him when he has changed completely, when he no longer loves you but perhaps turns away indifferent or turns away to love another, to love him as you see him when he betrays and denies you.
WL, p. 174
Love, on the other hand—oh, it is not like an art, jealous of itself and therefore bestowed on only a few. Everyone who wants to have love is given it, and if he wants to undertake the task of praising it, he will succeed in that also.
WL, p. 360
Much that is said praising a mother’s love for her child is, of course, rooted in a misunderstanding, since maternal love as such is simply self-love raised to a higher power, and thus the animals also have it. That this kind of love in its initial state is self-love is apparent …
WL, p. 483
Love for God and love for neighbor are like two doors that open simultaneously, so that it is impossible to open one without also opening the other, and impossible to shut one without also shutting the other.
WL, p. 487
But the person who can scarcely open himself cannot love, and the person who cannot love is the unhappiest of all.
EO,2, p. 160
Alas, how utterly different married life and marriage conditions are in this world, and yet there is one resolution common to each and every one or can be so: that love [Kjerlighed] conquers everything.
TDIO, p. 67
But the true expression of loving much is just to forget oneself completely. If one remembers oneself, one can, to be sure, love but not love much; and the more one remembers oneself, to the same degree one loves less.
WA, p. 140
No one who was great in the world will be forgotten, but everyone was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion to the greatness of that which he loved. He who loved himself became great by virtue of himself, and he who loved other men became great by his devotedness, but he who loved God became the greatest of all.
FT, p. 16
The person who truly loves does not love once for all; neither does he use a portion of his love now and then in turn another portion … No, he loves with all his love; it is totally present in every expression; he continually spends all of it, and yet he continually keeps it all in his heart. What marvelous wealth!
UDVS, p. 30
I do not have the right to become insensitive to life’s pain, because I shall sorrow; but neither do I have the right to despair, because I shall sorrow; and neither do I have the right to stop sorrowing, because I shall sorrow. So it is with love. You do not have the right to become insensitive to this feeling, because you shall love; but neither do you have the right to love despairingly, because you shall love; and just as little do you have the right to warp this feeling in you, because you shall love.
WL, p. 43
Worldly wisdom is of the opinion that love is a relationship between persons; Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between: a person—God—a person, that is, that God is the middle term.
WL, pp. 106–7
SUFFERING
It is and remains the most difficult spiritual trial when a person doesn’t know whether insanity or sin is the reason for his suffering. Here freedom, otherwise used as the means with which to fight, has become dialectical with its dreadful contrasts.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 242, p. 200
Suffering patiently is not at all specifically Christian—but freely choosing suffering from which one could escape, freely choosing it for the sake of a good cause: that is Christian.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 145, p. 199
At its deepest level, all offense is a suffering.
PF, p. 49
There is so much talk about human distress and wretchedness—I try to understand it and have also had some intimate acquaintance with it—there is so much talk about wasting a life, but only that person’s life was wasted who went on living so deceived by life’s joys or its sorrows that he never became decisively and eternally conscious as spirit, as self …
SUD, p. 26
NEIGHBOR
Think of the most cultured person, one of whom we all admiringly say, “He is so cultured!” Then think of Christianity, which says to him, “You shall love the neighbor!” Of course, a certain social courtesy, a politeness toward all people, a friendly condescension toward inferiors, a boldly confident attitude before the mighty, a beautifully controlled freedom of spirit, yes, this is culture—do you believe that it is also loving the neighbor?
WL, p. 60
The neighbor is one who is equal. The neighbor is neither the beloved, for whom you have passion’s preference, nor your friend, for whom you have passion’s preference.
WL, p. 60
The neighbor is every person, since on the basis of dissimilarity he is not your neighbor, nor on the basis of similarity to you in your dissimilarity from other people.
WL, p. 60
At a distance the neighbor is a shadow that walks past everyone’s thoughts on the road of imagination, but that the person who actually walked by at the same moment was the neighbor—this he perhaps does not discover.
WL, p. 79
Take many sheets of paper, write something different on each one; then no one will be like another. But then again take each single sheet; do not let yourself be confused by the diverse inscriptions, hold it up to the light, and you will see a common watermark on all of them. In the same way the neighbor is the common watermark, but you see it only by means of eternity’s light when it shines through the dissimilarity.
WL, p. 89
If everyone in truth loved the neighbor as himself, then perfect human equality would be achieved unconditionally.
PV, p. 111
One has no neighbor; for the “I” is at once itself and its neighbor, as also it is expressed: One is closest to oneself (i.e., one’s own neighbor).
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 32a, p. 225
What Socrates says about loving the ugly is really the Christian teaching concerning love of neighbor.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 77, p. 171
One must really have suffered very much in the world, have become very unhappy, before there can be any talk whatsoever of beginning to love one’s neighbor. Only in self-denial’s dying-away from earthly delight and happiness and happy days, only then does “the neighbor” come into existence…. Everyone who clings to earthly life does not love his neighbor, that is, his neighbor does not exist for him.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 155, p. 201
Deep down, many people think that the Christian commandments (e.g., loving your neighbor as yourself), are deliberately made a little bit too rigorous—rather as when the clock that serves to wake the household is 1/2 an hour too fast in order that one doesn’t get up too late in the morning.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB5: 26, p. 381
CHRISTIANITY
There is so much talk about how Christianity presupposes nothing at all on the part of the human being, [but] it obviously presupposes one thing: that is, selflove, for Christ obviously presupposes it when he says that love of the neighbor is to be as great as love toward ourselves.
FIGURE 17. Journal entry.
Source: JN, vol. 5, Journal NB10: 57, p. 297.
JN, vol. 2, Journal EE: 98, p. 32
The consciousness of sin is and remains conditio sine qua non for all Christianity …
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 205, p. 189
As long as a person has many wells from which to draw water, he is not aware of having any anxious concerns about the possible unavailability of water. But when a person has only one single well! And thus it is only when Christianity becomes the sole well for a person that spiritual trials begin.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 159, p. 104
Oh, but how shamefully people have even made use of Christianity in order to refine what is worldly. Someone desires worldly things more than does any pagan—but in addition cloaks it with Christian disdain for everything worldly. Thank you, this is harvesting twice.
JN, vol. 6, Journal NB12: 59, p. 174
Ah, there is indeed something sadly true in the circumstance that it would be better that Christianity not be preached at all than that it be preached as it is nowadays. To be elated for an hour in this way once a week just as one is in the theater, and then the problem is exactly that one gets accustomed to hearing everything without it in any way occurring to a person that he do something.
JN, vol. 6, Journal NB12: 151, p. 239
In the magnificent palace church, a handsome court preacher, the cultivated public’s chosen one, steps before a select circle of the distinguished and cultured, and preaches movingly on the words of the apostle, [“]God chose the lowly and the despised[”]—and no one laughs.
JN, vol. 6, Journal NB14: 53, p. 380
And the day when Christianity and the world become friends—yes, then Christianity is abolished.
PC, p. 224
The Christian truth has, if I may say so, its own eyes with which to see; indeed, it seems to be all eyes. But it would be very disturbing, indeed, it would be impossible, for me to look at a painting or a piece of cloth if I discovered while looking at it that it was the painting or the cloth that was looking at me. And this is the case with the Christian truth …
PC, p. 234
There is something that God cannot take away from a human being, namely, the voluntary, and it is precisely this that Christianity requires.
CD, p. 179
Truly, there is something that is more against Christianity and the essence of Christianity than any heresy, any schism, more against it than all heresies and schisms together, and it is this: to play at Christianity.
TM, p. 6
“Grace” cannot possibly stretch so far; one thing it must never be used for—it must never be used to suppress or to diminish the requirement. In that case “grace” turns all Christianity upside down.
TM, p. 47
Christianity did not enter into the world in order to reassure you in your natural condition (thus assuring the pastor a thriving and pleasant livelihood), but that it, renouncing all things, entered into the world in order, with the terrors of eternity, to wrest you out of the peace in which you naturally are.
TM, p. 312
A Christian is a person who has caught on fire.
TM, p. 465
Christianity is the only historical phenomenon that despite the historical—indeed, precisely by means of the historical—has wanted to be the single individual’s point of departure for his eternal consciousness, has wanted to interest him otherwise than merely historically, has wanted to base his happiness on his relation to something historical.
PF, p. 109
Although an outsider, I have at least understood this much, that the only unforgivable high treason against Christianity is the single individual’s taking his relation to it for granted.
CUP, p. 16
In those early days, a Christian was a fool in the eyes of the world. To the pagans and Jews it was foolishness for him to want to become one. Now one is a Christian as a matter of course. If someone wants to be a Christian with infinite passion, he is a fool …
CUP, p. 216
What I recoil from, then, even more than from dying or from losing my dearest treasure, is to say of Christianity that is true to a certain degree.
CUP, p. 234
[I]f Christianity were a doctrine, then the relation to it would not be one of faith, since there is only an intellectual relation to a doctrine. Christianity, therefore, is not a doctrine but the fact that the god has existed.
CUP, p. 326
That one can know what Christianity is without being a Christian must, then, be answered in the affirmative. Whether one can know what it is to be a Christian without being one is something else, and it must be answered in the negative.
CUP, p. 372
If one were to state and describe in a single sentence the victory Christianity has won over the world or, even more correctly, the victory by which it has more than overcome the world … then I know of nothing shorter but also nothing more decisive than this: it has made every human relationship between person and person a relationship of conscience.
WL, p. 135
Christianity does not want to make changes in externals; neither does it want to abolish drives or inclination—it wants only to make infinity’s change in the inner being.
WL, p. 139
Humanly speaking, death is the last of all, and, humanly speaking, there is hope only as long as there is life. Christianly understood, however, death is by no means the last of all; in fact, it is only a minor event within that which is all, an eternal life …
SUD, p. 7
Christianity thinks that it is the unconditioned, and that alone, or the impression, the impact of the unconditioned, that is able to make a person completely sober when he unconditionally surrenders to its power, and otherwise he has not felt the impact of the unconditioned; that on the other hand it is precisely this “to a certain degree” that is intoxicating and stupefying, makes one heavy, drowsy, sluggish, and apathetic, somewhat like an alcoholic, who is said to walk around in a continual stupor.
FSE, pp. 106–7
[O]h, that I had a voice that could be heard, and would that I could give it significance like that of a dying person’s voice, and that what I said could continue to sound, because it is so crucial!—in possibility Christianity is easy; and merely expounded, that is, kept in possibility, it pleases people. In actuality it is so difficult, and expressed in actuality, that is, as action, it incites people against you.
FSE, pp. 116–17
FIGURE 18. Map of Copenhagen.
Source: Kirmmse, Encounters with Kierkegaard, p. xv.
Soon it will have gone so far that an admirer of Christianity is a rarity; the average person is lukewarm, neither cold nor hot, and many are atheists, mockers, nonreligious persons, deniers. But in the strictest sense “the admirer” is still not a true Christian; if it cannot be said that he is lukewarm because there is heat in him, neither can it be said that he is hot. Only the imitator is the true Christian.
PC, p. 256
The established order continues to stand, but since it is equivocal and ambiguous, passionless reflection is reassured. We do not want to abolish the monarchy, by no means, but if little by little we could get it transformed into make-believe, we would gladly shout “Hurrah for the King!” We do not want to topple eminence, by no means, but if simultaneously we could spread the notion that it is all make-believe, we would approve and admire…. [W]e are willing to keep Christian terminology but privately know that nothing decisive is supposed to be meant by it.
TA, pp. 80–81
* The Danish term alvor can be translated either as “earnestness” or “seriousness.”