The Kierkegaarden

“Oh, the sins of passion and of the heart — how much nearer to salvation than the sins of reason!”
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~Source: The Journals (18??)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“It is so impossible for the world to exist without God that if God could forget it it would instantly cease to be.”
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~Source: The Journals (1837)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“Adversity doesn’t just knit people together but elicits also that beautiful inner community, as the frost forms patterns on the windowpane which the warmth of the sun then erases.” ——————————————————– ~Source: The Journals (1835) Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“Finally, there is one thing to remember — that my original thought must still be subject to a certain control. How many times have I said this, that a warship does not get its orders until it is at sea,…” ——————————————————– ~Source: The Journals (1849) Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“It seems to me that Christian dogmatics must be an explication of Christ’s activity, the more so since Christ established no teaching but was active. He didn’t teach that there was redemption for man, he redeemed men….Christ’s nature was imparted through that activity, Christ’s relation to God, human nature, man’s situation conditioned by Christ’s activity (which was really the main thing). All the rest would then be regarded as mere introduction.”
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~Source: The Journals, I (1834)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“What an individual is capable of may be measured by how far his understanding is from his willing. What a person can understand he must also be able to make himself will. Between understanding and willing lie the excuses and evasions.”
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~Source: The Journals (1846)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“Not only does society not embrace (as I gather the Chinese do) five cardinal virtues (civility is the fifth)–no, society embraces, establishes, just one: civility.”
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~Source: The Journals (1854)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“It is a special kind of retrial we must make. Back to the monastery from which Luther (this will surely be the truth) broke out, that’s where the cause is to be restored to. Which is not to say that the Pope is to win, nor that putting it back there is a job for the papal police. The monastery’s mistake was not asceticism, celibacy, etc.; no, the mistake was to have reduced the price of Christianity by letting these be regaded as exceptional Christians–and the purely secular nonsense as normal Christianity… In other words, Luther turned in the wrong direction: the price has to be raised, not reduced. This is why there has always struck me as something odd about the idea that God went along with Lutheranism; for wherever God comes along, what makes progress recognizable is a heightening of the demands, the whole thing becoming more difficult. The mark of the human, on the other hand, is always to have things become easier and for that to be the progress.”
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~Source: The Journals (1854)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

“The subjectivity which I myself think must first be born with regard to the Church — in that every new norm one wants to impose on the Church faces the same objection rightly raised against the Bible — is already prototypically there in the most objective thing of all; the confession begins: I believe.” ——————————————————– ~Source: The Journals (1835) Author: Søren Kierkegaard