The Kierkegaarden

“In resignation I make renunciation of everything; this movement I make by myself, and if I do not make it, it is because I am cowardly and effeminate and without enthusiasm and do not feel the significance of the lofty dignity which is assigned to every man, that of being his own censor, which is a far prouder title than that of Censor General to the whole Roman Republic. This movement I make by myself, and what I gain is myself in my eternal consciousness, in blissful agreement with my love for the Eternal Being.” ——————————————————– ~Source: Fear And Trembling (1843) Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Johannes De Silentio

“So for the first thing, the knight will have power to concentrate the whole content of life and the whole significance of reality into a single wish. If a man lacks this concentration, this intensity, if his soul from the beginning is dispersed in the multifarious, he never comes to the point of making the movement; he will deal shrewdly in life like the capitalists who invest their money in all sorts of securities, so as to gain on the one what they lose on the other — in short, he is not a knight at all.”
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~Source: Fear And Trembling (1843)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Johannes De Silentio

“The ethical expression for [Abraham's] relation to Isaac is that the father must love the son. The ethical relation is reduced to the relative in contradistinction to the absolute relation to God. To the question ‘Why?’ Abraham has no other answer than that it is an ordeal, a temptation that, as noted above, is a synthesis of its being for the sake of God and for his own sake… For instance, if we see someone doing something that does not conform to the universal, we say that he is hardly doing it for God’s sake, meaning thereby that he is doing it for his own sake. The paradox of faith has lost the intermediary, that is, the universal. On the one side, it has the expression of the highest egotism, on the other side, the expression for the most absolute devotion, to do it for God’s sake. Faith itself cannot be mediated into the universal, for thereby it is canceled. Faith is this paradox, and the single individual cannot make himself understandable to anyone.”
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~Source: Fear and Trembling (1843)
Author: Sren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio