“Lord, give us weak eyes for things of little worth, and eyes clear-sighted in all of your truth.”
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~Source: The Sickness Unto Death (1849)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus

“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

“So to despair over something is not yet properly despair. It is the beginning, or it is as when the physician says of a sickness that it has not yet declared itself. The next step is the declared despair, despair over oneself.” ——— ~Source: The Sickness Unto Death (1849) Author: Soren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus

“If one would have a common name for this *despair, one might call it Stoicism — yet without thinking only of this philosophic sect. And to illuminate this sort of despair more sharply one would do well to distinguish between the active and the passive self, showing how the self is related to itself in suffering when it is passive, and showing that the formula constantly is: in despair to will to be oneself.”
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~Source: The Sickness Unto Death (1849)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus

“Yet in another and still more definite sense despair is the sickness unto death. It is indeed very far from being true that, literally understood, one dies of this sickness, or that this sickness ends with bodily death. On the contrary, the torment of despair is precisely this: not to be able to die. So it has much in common with the situation of the moribund when he lies and struggles with death, and cannot die.”
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~Source: The Sickness Unto Death (1849)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus

“The despairing man who is unconscious of being in despair is, in comparison with him who is conscious of it, merely a negative step further from the truth and from salvation. Despair itself is a negativity, unconsciousness of it is a new negativity. But to reach truth one must pierce through every negativity. For here applies what the fairy tale recounts about a certain enchantment: the piece of music must be played through backward; otherwise the enchantment is not broken.” ——————————- ~Source: The Sickness Unto Death (1849) Author: Soren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus
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“The despairing man who is unconscious of being in despair is, in comparison with him who is conscious of it, merely a negative step further from the truth and from salvation. Despair itself is a negativity, unconsciousness of it is a new negativity. But to reach truth one must pierce through every negativity. For here applies what the fairy tale recounts about a certain enchantment: the piece of music must be played through backward; otherwise the enchantment is not broken.” ——————————- ~Source: The Sickness Unto Death (1849) Author: Soren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus

“If one would have a common name for this *despair, one might call it Stoicism — yet without thinking only of this philosophic sect. And to illuminate this sort of despair more sharply one would do well to distinguish between the active and the passive self, showing how the self is related to itself in suffering when it is passive, and showing that the formula constantly is: in despair to will to be oneself.”
——————————————————–

~Source: The Sickness Unto Death (1849)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus

“The despairing man who is unconscious of being in despair is, in comparison with him who is conscious of it, merely a negative step further from the truth and from salvation. Despair itself is a negativity, unconsciousness of it is a new negativity. But to reach truth one must pierce through every negativity. For here applies what the fairy tale recounts about a certain enchantment: the piece of music must be played through backward; otherwise the enchantment is not broken.” ——————————- ~Source: The Sickness Unto Death (1849) Author: Soren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus

“Socrates proved the immortality of the soul from the fact that the sickness of the soul (sin) does not consume it as sickness of the body consumes the body. So also we can demonstrate the eternal in man from the fact that despair cannot consume his self, that this precisely is the torment of contradiction in despair. If there were nothing eternal in a man, he could not despair; but if despair could consume his self, there would still be no despair.”
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~Source: The Sickness Unto Death (1849)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus