“The most fatal thing of all is to satisfy a want which is not yet felt, so that without waiting till the want is present, one anticipates it, likely also uses stimulants to bring about something which is supposed to be a want, and then satisfies it. And this is shocking! And yet this is what they do in the religious sphere, whereby they really are cheating men out of what constitutes the significance of life, and helping people to waste life.” ————————————————————————- ~Source: The Attack Upon “Christendom” (1854 – 1855) Author: Soren Kierkegaard
December 14
December 14, 2009 at 9:05 am (1)
Tags: The Journals
“Most of all I like to talk with old women who retail family gossip, after them lunatics — least of all with very sensible people.”
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~Source: The Journals (1836)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard
December 13
December 13, 2009 at 9:07 am (Blooms)
Tags: Either/Or
“So far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good. Boredom is the root of all evil, and it is this which must be kept at a distance. Idleness is not an evil, indeed one may say that every human being who lacks a sense for idleness proves that his consciousness has not yet been elevated to the level of the humane. There is a restless activity which excludes a man from the world of the spirit, setting in a class with the brutes, whose instincts impel them always to be on the move.”
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~Source: Either/Or (1843)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard
December 12
December 12, 2009 at 8:41 am (Blooms)
Tags: The Changelessness of God (1855)
“Imagine a solitary wayfarer, a desert wanderer. Almost burned by the heat of the sun, languishing with thirst, he finds a spring. O refreshing coolness! Now God be praised, he says — and yet it was merely a spring he found; what then must not he say who found God!”
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~Source: The Changelessness of God (1855)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard
December 11
December 11, 2009 at 8:48 am (Blooms)
Tags: Anti-Climacus, Practice in Christianity: "The Exposition - B" (1850)
“A theological professor who, with the help of everything that has been written earlier about it, has written a new book on the demonstrations of the truth of Christianity, would feel insulted if someone would not admit that it was now demonstrated; Christ himself, however, says no more than that the demonstrations are able to lead someone — not to faith, far from it, but to the point where faith can come into existence, are able to help someone to become aware and to that extent help him to come into the dialectical tension from which faith breaks forth: will you believe or will you be offended.”
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~Source: Practice in Christianity: “The Exposition – B” (1850)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus
December 10
December 10, 2009 at 7:30 am (Blooms)
Tags: Concluding Unscientific Postscript To The "Philosophica, Johannes Climacus
“Even though it be true that the conception of God is the absolute help, it is also the only help which is absolutely capable of revealing to man his own helplessness. The religious man lies in the finite like a helpless child; he desires absolutely to hold fast to the conception, and precisely this annihilates him; he desires to do all and, while he summons his will to the task, his impotence begins, since for a finite being there is always a meanwhile; he desires to do all, to express this religious absoluteness, but he cannot make this finite commensurable for that purpose.”
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~Source: Concluding Unscientific Postscript To the “Philosophical Fragments” (1846)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Johannes Climacus
December 09
December 9, 2009 at 8:36 am (Blooms)
Tags: The Present Age: A Literary Review
“In order that everything should be reduced to the same level it is first of all necessary to procure a phantom, a spirit, a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage — and that phantom is the public. It is only in an age which is without passion, yet reflective, that such a phantom can develop itself with the help of the Press which itself becomes an abstraction.” ————————- ~Source: The Present Age: A Literary Review (1846) Author: Soren Kierkegaard
December 08
December 8, 2009 at 7:14 am (Blooms)
Tags: Christian Discourses, Resurrection of the Dead
“Save me, O God, from ever being completely sure; keep me unsure until the end so that then, if I receive eternal blessedness, I might be completely sure that I have it by grace! It is empty shadowboxing to give assurances that one believes it is by grace — and then to be completely sure. The true, the essential expression of its being by grace is the very fear and trembling of unsureness. There lies faith.”
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~Source: Christian Discourses: “Resurrection of the Dead” (1848)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard
December 07
December 7, 2009 at 7:58 am (Blooms)
Tags: Anti-Climacus, The Sickness Unto Death
“Nevertheless there is and remains a distinction, and a qualitative one, between paganism in the narrowest sense, and paganism within Christendom. The distinction (as Vigilius Haufniensis has pointed out in relation to dread) is this, that paganism, though to be sure it lacks spirit, is definitely oriented in the direction of spirit, whereas paganism within Christendom lacks spirit with a direction away from it, or by apostacy, and hence in the strictest sense is spiritlessness.” —————————————- ~Source: The Sickness Unto Death (1849) Author: Soren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus
December 06
December 6, 2009 at 9:42 am (Blooms)
Tags: Either/Or: A Fragment Of Life (1843), Victor Eremita
“One must guard against friendship. How is a friend defined? He is not what philosophy calls the necessary other, but the superfluous third. What are friendship’s ceremonies? You drink each other’s health, you open an artery and mingle your blood with that of the friend. It is difficult to say when the proper moment for this arrives, but it announces itself mysteriously; you feel some way that you can no longer address one another formally. When once you have had this feeling, then it can never appear that you have made a mistake, like Geert Westphaler, who discovered that he had been drinking to friendship with the public hangman.” ————————- ~Source: Either/Or: A Fragment Of Life (1843) Author: Soren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Victor Eremita
