One thought succeeds another. No sooner is it thought and I want to write it down, than there is a new one: hold onto it, seize it, madness, insanity!
JN, vol. 1, Journal CC: 21, p. 198
I really hate these half-learned robbers. When I am at a social gathering, how often I have taken pains to sit down to talk with some old spinster who lives to tell family stories, listening with the greatest seriousness to everything she can prattle about.
JN, vol. 1, Journal CC: 23, p. 199
I prefer to talk with old ladies who retail family nonsense; next with the insane—and last of all with very reasonable people.
JN, vol. 1, Journal CC: 24, p. 199
[W]hy I so much prefer autumn to spring is that in the autumn one looks at heaven—in the spring at the earth.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 74, p. 236
FIGURE 2. Kierkegaard family home.
Photograph, undated, Museum of Copenhagen.
I think that if ever I do become an earnest Christian, my deepest shame will be that I did not become one before, that I first wanted to try everything else.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 89, p. 240
What does the soul find so invigorating about reading folk tales? When I am tired of everything and “full of days,” fairy-tales are for me always the revitalizing bath that proves so refreshing.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 94, p. 241
Again such a long time has passed in which I have been unable to collect myself for the least thing—I must now make another little shot at it.
Poul Møller is dead.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 96, p. 243
There is an indescribable joy that glows through us just as inexplicably as the apostle’s unmotivated exclamation: “Rejoice, and again I say, Rejoice.”—Not a joy over this or that, but a full-bodied shout of the soul “with mouth and lip and heart so deep”: “I rejoice at my joy, of, in, with, at, upon, by, and with my joy”—a heavenly refrain which as though suddenly interrupts our other songs, a joy which like a breath of air cools and refreshes, a puff from the trade winds that blow across the plains of Mamre to the eternal mansions.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 113, pp. 245–46
How I thank you, Father in heaven, for having kept here on earth for a time like the present when my need for it can be so great, an earthly father who, as I so very much hope, will with your help have greater joy in being my father the second time than he had the first.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 116, p. 246
Grasping childhood is like grasping a beautiful region as one rides in a carriage looking backward; one only becomes properly aware of the beauty at that moment, at that very instant when it begins to disappear, and all I have left of that happy time is crying like a child.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 122[a], p. 248
My father died on Wednesday, the 8th, at 2:00 a.m. I did so earnestly desire that he should live a few years more, and I regard his death as the last sacrifice his love made for me, because he has not died from me but died for me, so that something might still come of me.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 126, p. 249
The pity about me is that my life, my states of mind, always follow two declensions, in which not only the suffixes become different but the whole word is changed.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 197, p. 267
I am so unhappy right now that I am indescribably happy in my dreams.
JN, vol. 2, Journal EE: 59[a], p. 22
All of existence makes me anxious, from the smallest fly to the mysteries of the Incarnation; I find everything inexplicable, myself most of all; everything is infected, myself most of all.
JN, vol. 2, Journal EE: 64, p. 23
I say of my grief what the Englishman says of his house: my grief is my castle.
JN, vol. 2, Journal EE: 65, p. 23
God in Heaven, let me really feel my nothingness, not so as to despair over it, but so as to feel the greatness of your goodness all the more strongly.
JN, vol. 2, Journal EE: 67, p. 24
These days my life feels rather like that of a chess piece, when the opponent says: that piece cannot be moved—like a useless bystander, since my time has not yet come.
JN, vol. 2, Journal EE: 76, p. 26
Strangely enough, there is something that has often made me anxious: that the life I was living wasn’t my own but quite identical with that of another definite person, without my being able to prevent it, and I only discovered it whenever it had been lived through up to a certain point.
JN, vol. 2, Journal EE: 84, p. 28
I shall now, for a season, for some miles in time, plunge underground like the Guadalquivir; to be sure, I shall come up again!
JN, vol. 2, Journal EE: 128, p. 42
The reason why my progress through life is so uncertain is that my front legs (hopes, etc.) were weakened in my early youth by being overexercised.
JN, vol. 2, Journal EE: 141, p. 44
I stand like a solitary spruce, egoistically self-enclosed and pointing toward what is higher, casting no shadow, and only the wood dove builds its nest in my branches.
JN, vol. 2, Journal FF: 54, p. 79
Every flower of my heart turns into a frost flower.
JN, vol. 2, Journal FF: 73, p. 83
My ideas suffer the same fate as do parents who, though they bear healthy children, forget to have them christened in time; then subterranean beings come and put a changeling in place of the child (what is lacking is not the natural element, but solicitous care and development).
JN, vol. 2, Journal FF: 74, p. 84
It seems to me as if I were a galley slave chained to death; every time life stirs, the chain rattles and death makes everything wither away—and it happens every moment.
JN, vol. 2, Journal FF: 79, p. 84
My ideas and their elaboration are like the biting of fish during certain months of the year—they nibble. There are plenty of bites, but no fish.
JN, vol. 2, Journal FF: 84, p. 85
I am a Janus bifrons: with one face I laugh, with the other I weep.
JN, vol. 2, Journal FF: 93, p. 86
When at times there is such a racket in my head that it seems as if my cranium has been lifted up, as when gnomes lift a mountain up a bit, celebrating and making merry inside.
JN, vol. 2, Journal FF: 181, p. 101
After my death no one will find in my papers (this is my consolation) the least information about what has really filled my life, find that script in my innermost being that explains everything, and which often, for me, makes what the world would call trifles into events of immense importance, and which I too consider of no significance once I take away the secret note that explains it.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 95, p. 157
Had I faith I would have stayed with Regine. Praise and thanks be to God, I have now understood it. I have been on the point of losing my mind these days.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 115, p. 164
I was born in 1813, the wrong fiscal year, in which so many other bad banknotes were put into circulation, and my life seems best compared to one of them. There is something of greatness about me, but because of the poor state of the market I am not worth much. And at times a banknote like that became a family’s misfortune.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 198, p. 188
The way it is with my feelings is like an Englishman who got into financial difficulty; even though he had a hundred-pound note, there was no one there who could change it.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 245, p. 200
There is a bird called the rainseer and that is what I am like; in our times when a storm starts brewing, individuals of my sort turn up.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 391, p. 250
My idea is now to qualify myself for the priesthood[.] For several months I have prayed to God to help me along, for it has long been clear to me that I ought not to continue as an author, which is something I want to be entirely or not at all. That’s also why I haven’t begun anything new while doing the proof-reading, except for the little review of Two Ages, which is, once more, concluding.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 415, p. 257
How dreadful the thought of that man who once, as a small boy tending sheep on the Jutland heath, in much suffering, starving and exhausted, stood up on a hill and cursed God—and that man was unable to forget it when he was 82 years old.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 416, p. 257
I am always accused of using long parentheses. Reading for my examination is the longest parenthesis I have experienced.
JN, vol. 3, Notebook 5: 19, p. 181
Next to taking off every stitch of clothing, owning nothing in the world, not the least little thing, and then hurling myself into the water, nothing pleases me more than speaking a foreign language, preferably a living one, in order to become quite foreign to myself.
JN, vol. 3, Notebook 7: 11, p. 205
My doubt is frightful.—Nothing can stop me—it is a hunger of damnation, I can consume every sort of reasoning, every consolation, every comfort—I overrun all resistance at a speed of 10,000 miles a second.
JN, vol. 3, Notebook 7: 17, p. 206
In addition to the rest of my numerous circle of acquaintances—with whom I generally have a rather superficial relationship—I have one more intimate confidante: my melancholia; and in the midst of my joy, in the midst of my work, she beckons to me, calling me away, even though I remain present in body; she is the most faithful lover whom I have known, and what wonder, then, that I must be instant[ly] ready to follow.
JN, vol. 3, Notebook 7: 28, p. 209
How great is a woman’s devotion.—But the curse hanging over me is that I never dare let any one become deeply and intimately attached to me.
JN, vol. 3, Notebook 8: 15, p. 224
I cannot be quit of this relationship, for I cannot poetize it; the moment I want to poetize it, I am immediately possessed by an anxiety, an impatience which wants to resort to action.
JN, vol. 3, Notebook 8: 18, p. 225
But it is undeniably an education to be situated as I am in a small city like Copenhagen. To work to the utmost of my abilities, almost to the point of despair, with profound agony in my soul and much inner suffering, to pay out money in order to publish books—and then to have literally fewer than 10 people who read them through properly, while university students and other writers find it convenient to depict the writing of a large book as something close to ridiculous.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 18, p. 15
If only I could make myself become a priest. After all, however much my present life has gratified me, out there, in quiet activity, granting myself a bit of literary productivity in my free moments, I would breathe more easily.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 19, pp. 16–17
To be the greatest philosopher in Denmark borders on satire—something like being the greatest—let’s think—the greatest of all the traveling theater troupes one has seen—in Odense. Or, as when P.L. Møller praised my polemic against Heiberg—“that it was the wittiest of all the things that had been written against Heiberg.”
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 32, p. 32
I am in the deepest sense an unhappy individual who, from my earliest days, has been nailed fast to one or another suffering that verged on madness and that must have its deeper origin in a misrelation between my mind and my body—because (and this is both remarkable and an infinite encouragement to me) it has no relation to my spirit, which on the contrary, perhaps because of the tension between my mind and my body, has been granted an unusual resilience.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 34, pp. 33–34
I seem to be fated never to be capable of being understood by others with respect to the decisive elements of my life. What would never occur to anyone is precisely what is decisive for me. When one lives as strenuous a life as I do, the total misunderstanding is in a certain sense an agony.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 35, p. 36
I really did imagine that I understood a little something about human beings; but the longer I live, the more I realize that we absolutely do not understand one another.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 71, p. 61
With respect to spelling, I submit unconditionally to authority (Molbech); it never occurs to me to want to correct him, because I know that I lack expertise in this area, which is why I willingly admit that in this respect every reasonably decent Danish author is perhaps more careful about this than I am.
With punctuation matters are different. Here I submit unconditionally to no one, and I doubt very much that there is any Danish author who could compete with me in this respect.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 146, p. 98
Now, Andersen can tell the fairy tale about the “Galoshes of Good Fortune,” but I can tell the fairy tale about the shoe that pinches. Or rather, I could tell it, though precisely because I will not tell it but conceal it in profound silence, I am able to tell quite a few other things.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 156, p. 103
My work is of such a nature that it can only be understood after my death, but this coincides with my idea of penance.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 9, p. 139
I suffered indescribable and unrelenting injustice at the hands of those who continually construed as pride what was intended only to keep the secret of my melancholia. But, to be sure, I have achieved what I wished, for scarcely a soul has ever felt sympathy for me.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 71, p. 169
What I lack is the bodily energy—to loaf; what I have is intellectual energy, and the only thing one can do with that is work.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 87, p. 175
From earliest childhood, an arrow of grief has been embedded in my heart. As long as it remains there, I am ironic—if it is drawn out, I will die.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 92, p. 177
When one is immersed in one’s own thoughts and thus on the way to forgetting actuality, it is remarkable how one is called back, as happened to me today, by a peddler woman’s cry: Cherries here, 6 shillings, cherries here for 6 shillings. What really brought me back was not just that cry—but that familiar voice! The memory comes from my earliest childhood; only in more recent years she has changed a bit, her mouth has become a bit crooked, which somewhat affects her pronunciation of the word “shilling.”
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 112, p. 183
Until now I have protected myself against my melancholia with intellectual labor that keeps it at bay. Now—in the faith that God in forgiveness has forgotten the portion of guilt there is within it—I must myself try to forget it, though not through distraction, not by distancing myself from it, but in God, so that when I think of God, I must think that he has forgotten it, and thus myself learn to dare to forget it in forgiveness.
JN vol. 4, Journal NB2: 136, p. 194
And this is why not only my writings but indeed my life, the intriguing secret of the whole machinery, will one day be studied and studied. I dare go so far as to guarantee that there is hardly a diplomat with as good an overview of an age, even though he stands on the street and perceives every detail.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB3: 22, p. 256
Had I not been of independent means, I would have gotten along well with my contemporaries. First of all, I wouldn’t have had the time for large and thematically unified works; my achievements would have been like those of other men. That’s how to be loved. They would have been trivialities—then they’d be read.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB4: 14, p. 294
What my father said about me is true: “nothing will come of you as long as you have money.” He spoke prophetically; he thought I would drink it and dream it away. But it didn’t go quite that far. No, but with my sharp mind, and my melancholia, and then with money, oh, what favorable conditions for developing all the torments of self-torture in my heart.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB4: 152, p. 357
I owe everything to my father from the very beginning. When, melancholic as he was, he saw melancholia in me, his plea to me was: See to it that you truly love Jesus Christ.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB5: 65, p. 400
How true, then, are those words that I have so often said of myself, that as Scheherazade saved her life by telling tales, I save my life or keep myself alive by producing.
JN, vol. 5, NB8: 36, p. 167
Therefore my life is indeed also a bit of an offense: what is offensive is that it does at least approximate expressing that an idea does in fact exist. The lives of others express that there exist well-paid, excellent livings, titles, and ranks: what could be offensive about this?—no, that is truth and wisdom.
JN, vol. 6, Journal NB12: 55, p. 169
Sometimes I find it edifying to consider that the thorn or barb I have in the flesh, the suffering of which I patiently strive to bear—that this is exactly what will become, or what will help me to become a thorn in the eye of the world.
JN, vol. 6, Journal NB12: 152, p. 239
In referring to my activity as an author … I am like a voice, but I always have one more listener than speakers generally have: myself.
JN, vol. 6, Journal NB14: 103, p. 411
The category of my work is to make people aware of Christianity, but that is why it is always said: I’m not Christian—for otherwise there is confusion. My task is in the true sense of the term to deceive people into the religious obligation that they have cast off. But I have no authority. Instead of authority, I employ precisely the opposite: I say, The whole affair is my upbringing.
JN, vol. 6, Journal NB14: 31, p. 366
I have just now come from a gathering where I was the life of the party; witticisms flowed out of my mouth; everybody laughed, admired me—but I left, yes, the dash ought to be as long as the radii of the earth’s orbit _________________________ _______________________________________________________ and I wanted to shoot myself.
JP, vol. 5, no. 5141, p. 69
Then it was that the great earthquake occurred, the frightful upheaval which suddenly drove me to a new infallible principle for interpreting all the phenomena.
Then I surmised that my father’s old-age was not a divine blessing, but rather a curse, that our family’s exceptional intellectual capacities were only for mutually harrowing one another; then I felt the stillness of death deepen around me, when I saw in my father an unhappy man who would survive us all, a memorial cross on the grave of all his personal hopes.
JP, vol. 5, no. 5430, pp. 140–41
All I have is my life, which I promptly stake every time a difficulty appears. Then it is easy to dance, for the thought of death is a good dancing partner, my dancing partner.
PF, p. 8
By no means do I have faith. By nature I am a shrewd fellow, and shrewd people always have great difficulty in making the movement of faith, but I do not attribute per se any worth to the difficulty that brought the shrewd person further in the overcoming of it than to the point at which the simplest and most unsophisticated person arrives more easily.
FT, p. 32
I am no fool who believes that the world becomes better because it praises me or, worse, because it censures me….
COR, p. 202
[W]hat I in truth am as an author, that I am and was a religious author, that my whole authorship pertains to Christianity, to the issue: becoming a Christian, with direct and indirect polemical aim at that enormous illusion, Christendom, or the illusion that in such a country all are Christians of sorts.
PV, p. 23
And here I sit. Outside, everything is in commotion, nationalism sweeps everyone away; everyone talks of sacrificing life and limb, and is perhaps willing to do so, but supported by the omnipotence of opinion. And I sit in a tranquil room (—I will clearly soon be of no importance in the national cause—). I know only one danger—the danger of religiosity. But no one worries about that.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB4: 118, p. 346
If my melancholia has misled me in any way, it must be by having led me to want to view as guilt and sin what perhaps was only unhappy suffering, spiritual trial. In one sense, this is the most frightful misunderstanding, that is, it was the signal for almost insane anguish; but even if I have gone too far in this direction, it has nonetheless served me well.
JN, vol. 5, Journal NB8: 113, p. 201
OBSERVATIONS
Childhood is life’s paradigmatic part; manhood its syntax.
JN, vol. 1, Journal AA: 30, p. 40
This is the road we all must travel—over the Bridge of Sighs into eternity.
JN, vol. 1, Journal CC: 19, p. 198
Sometimes something happens that in every way corresponds on the spiritual level with that vegetative, digestive dropping-off into a feeling of pleasant recuperation.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 30, p. 222
Beware false prophets who come to you in wolves’ clothing but inwardly are sheep—i.e., the phrasemongers.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 66, p. 234
There is nothing more dangerous for someone, nothing more paralyzing, than a kind of isolating fixation on oneself, in which world history, human life, society—in short everything—disappears and, in an egoistic circle … one constantly sees only one’s own navel.
FIGURE 3. An aphorism on an undated strip of paper, presumably from May 1835.
From the Royal Library, Copenhagen, A pk. 1.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 76, p. 237
Presentiment is the earthly life’s nostalgia for something higher, for the lucidity which man must have had in his paradisial life.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 80, p. 238
Fixed ideas are like cramps e.g. in the foot—the best remedy for them is to trample on them.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 115, p. 246
May our talk not be like the flower which today stands in the meadow and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace …
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 182, p. 263
The life of every individual also has its Genesis and then its Exodus (its exit into the world), its Leviticus, when the mind turns toward heaven, its Numbers, when one begins to count the years, its Deuteronomy.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 190, p. 265
Woodland looks best from a distance, it is then an interesting mystery; seen from close up it is a riddle that has been solved; water, on the other hand, is a deep truth that becomes more interesting the further into it one peers, and the least drop of water has the same influence on the observant spirit, so that, unlike trees, one doesn’t need great quantities.
JN, vol. 2, Journal EE: 109, p. 37
Abstract concepts are as invisible as a straight line, they are only visible when they are made concrete.
JN, vol. 2, Journal EE: 127, p. 42
The most agreeable, the most refreshing conversation is still that which is carried on by the trees …
JN, vol. 2, Journal EE: 136, p. 43
[N]ot the laughter which is the playmate of pain, that’s not what I want; still less the wohlfeile syrupy smile, I don’t want that at all—but the smile that is the first fruits of blessedness.
JN, vol. 2, Journal EE: 137, p. 42
There are many people who arrive at answers in life just like schoolboys; they cheat their teacher by copying the answer out of the arithmetic book without having worked the problem out themselves.
JN, vol. 2, Journal FF: 31, p. 75
“Everything that is human lies, hope as well as despair,” a quotation I read in an old devotional work.
JN, vol. 2, Journal FF: 80, p. 84
Life can only be interpreted after it has been lived, just as it was only after he was resurrected that Christ began to interpret the Scriptures, showing how they taught about him.
JN, vol. 2, Journal FF: 122, p. 91
It takes moral courage to grieve; it takes religious courage to be joyful.
JN, vol. 2, Journal HH: 4, p. 120
Consciousness presupposes itself, and to ask about its origin is an idle question that is just as captious as that ancestor: What came first, the tree or the seed?
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 60, p. 147
The more a person is able to forget, the more metamorphoses his life can have; the more he is able to remember, the more divine his life becomes.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 92, p. 157
The most dreadful that can happen to someone is that he becomes comical to himself in what is essential, e.g., that he discovers that the content of his feelings is nonsense.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 169, p. 180
Indeed, it can also be healthy to keep a wound open: a healthy and open wound; sometimes it is worst when it heals over.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 304, p. 217
[O]bjective thinking is not the least bit concerned about the thinker, and it finally becomes so objective that it thinks like the customs officer who was only concerned with writing—the others were concerned with reading.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 344, p. 233
The cowardly dogs, which do not bite, bark right away when they see a stranger; when he has gone past they fall silent. The dangerous dogs keep quite still when one walks past them; they follow a couple of steps behind, bark once or twice, then they bite. This is how it is with human beings and the impression made upon them by life’s events: The lower sorts bark right away—the more serious ones follow behind slowly and store everything away.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 351, pp. 235–36
It is quite curious: naturally the life of a little insignificant thing is viewed with contempt, and is overlooked by all intelligent people; in return, the little insignificant thing sometimes takes revenge, for when a man goes mad it is almost always over some little insignificant thing.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 388, p. 249
As there are plants which do not merely bear their beneficial fruit but also purify and enrich the soil in which they grow, so that far from exhausting its fertility, they enrich it—so it is with every good effort; it not only bears its fruit but also purifies the soil of the mind.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 394, p. 251
And when you had become truly weary of the world, when you wanted to give vent to your passion in a single proverb, then perhaps you said: The world passeth away, and the lust thereof. But at the same instant your soul was reminded that there was an old proverb, and you involuntarily came to repeat what you next remembered from childhood: the word of the Lord endureth forever. At first you said it perfunctorily, but in the end it came to be everything to you.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 517, p. 288
When a person, gone astray to the point of perdition, is at the point of downfall, then these are the last words and the sign: Something better in me is, after all, being destroyed. As bubbles rise from a drowning man, this is the sign—then he sinks. Just as reserve can become a person’s downfall, because he will not articulate what is hidden, so too the uttering of those words: the downfall, because simply saying them expresses that he has become so objective to himself that he dares to speak of his own ruin as of something decided …
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 432, p. 262
Somewhere in Engeland [sic] there is a gravestone with only these words on it: The Unhappiest Man. I could imagine someone reading it and thinking there was no one buried there but that it was intended for him.
JN, vol. 3, Notebook 5: 24, p. 182
On the road to Aarhus I saw a most amusing sight: two cows roped together came cantering past us, the one frisking about with a jovial swing to its tail, the other, as it appeared, more prosaic and quite in despair at having to take part in the same movements.—Aren’t most marriages so arranged?
JN, vol. 3, Notebook 6: 33, p. 197
There is indeed an equilibrium in the world. To one God gave the joys, to the other the tears and permission every once in a while to rest in his embrace;—and yet the divine reflects itself far more beautifully in the tear-dimmed eye, just as the rainbow is more beautiful than the clear blue sky.
JN, vol. 3, Notebook 6: 34, p. 198
[I]t takes more courage to suffer than to act, more courage to forget than to remember, and perhaps the most wonderful thing about God is that he can forget the sins of human beings.
JN, vol. 3, Notebook 7: 15, p. 205
It is after all salutary once in a while to feel that one is in God’s hand and not forever sneaking around in the nooks and crannies of a familiar city where one always knows a way out.
JN, Vol. 3, Notebook 8: 8, p. 222
And when God wants to bind a person to him properly, he summons his most faithful servant, his trustiest messenger, and that is Grief, and he tells him, [“]Hurry after him, catch up with him, don’t leave his side.[”] … and no woman can cling more tenderly to what she loves than Grief [does].
JN, vol. 3, Notebook 8: 43, p. 232
Furthermore, my observations more than confirm my sense that this is how it is: If a person consistently expresses an idea, every objection raised against him will contain a self-revelation of the one who raises it.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 7, p. 14
The secret of life, if one wants to get on well, is: good twaddle about what one wants to do and how one is prevented from doing it—and then, no action.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 18, p. 27
Fundamentally, the world always remains just as clever—that is, just as stupid. Thus when a man—who has been misunderstood, mocked, persecuted, ridiculed, despised by his times—has fought for a truth, the next generation discovers that he was great—and admires him.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 37, p. 39
Genuine magnanimity can never be rewarded in the world, quite simply because if this so-called magnanimous action is such that the times are immediately able to understand that it is magnanimous, then it is not true magnanimity in the highest sense, for of course it has its reward.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 38, p. 40
Pascal says that this is why it is so difficult to believe, because it is so difficult to obey.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 40, p. 41
Human envy will finally come to abolish every essential distinction, replacing it with tyrannical arbitrariness.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 43, p. 43
Every person would in fact be infinitely strong if he did not need to use 2/3 of his energy in discovering his task. This is why the child has so much energy, because the father poses the task and the child must merely obey.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 60, p. 51
All knowledge has something captivating about it, but on the other hand it also transforms the entire state of the knower’s mind.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 70, p. 60
If a maidservant asked an astronomer what time it was, he would answer, for example, It is 12 o’clock. If a businessman asked him this, he would say, Just yesterday, when I raised the flag, I set my own watch, so I know it is exactly 12 o’clock. But if an astronomer who wanted to make an observation asked him this, he would say, It is 12 o’clock, 1 minute, 37 seconds, and several decimals. He would have told the truth in all 3 cases. What he said to the maidservant was by no means untrue. That is the way simplicity and scholarship relate to one another.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 72, p. 62
Even the art of printing books is an almost satirical invention, for good Lord, it has certainly become clear that there are only so many who actually have anything to communicate. Thus this great discovery has helped broadcast all the nonsense that would otherwise have been stillborn.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 73, pp. 62–63
Just as one can determine the time of day by determining an object’s relation to its shadow, so can one determine a person’s maturity by this ratio: how close does he think he is to what is highest.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 167, p. 106
“The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” This seems so peaceful, as everything does from a distance. One imagines the sheep gathered round the shepherd, and then the wolf comes. Alas, but suppose it was the sheep themselves who were so foolish as to side with the wolf about killing the shepherd.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 183, pp. 111–12
Children play soldier, in times of peace people play war, and most people play at religion.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 36, p. 153
Most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, sometimes horribly objective—ah, the task is precisely to be objective in relation to oneself and subjective in relation to all others.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 57, p. 162
When a child in a dark room waits for the door to be opened and for the whole anticipated glory to appear, the room remains as dark, even to the last second before the door is opened, as it was to begin with. Insofar as the parents have no agreement with the child as to how long he must wait, neither does he know whether a long stretch of time remains. But one thing is sure—the second the door is opened, the glory will be revealed.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 79, p. 172
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
Money is the numerator, mercy the denominator. But, when all is said and done, the denominator is surely the more important.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 96, p. 178
It can be readily conceded that everyone who can beget children can also bring up their young (just like animals), but bringing up human beings is a very rare gift…. There is perhaps no situation and no tendency in which the confusion of the times will become so laughable as in the business of bringing up children. In the next generation the parents themselves will probably be so mediocre that they themselves will very much need upbringing—and it is they who are supposed to assist the schoolmaster in bringing up the children.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 144, p. 198
When a ship is to sail out of the harbor, they first cast out an end [of rope] that is rowed out by a couple of sailors in a boat, made fast to a piling, and the ship is pulled from that point. And when a human life is to begin properly, an end must also be cast out—that is, there must be a dead person who assists in getting life going. Every existence that does not have the assistance of a beloved dead person remains an insignificant existence or one that is great in a merely worldly sense.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 185, p. 213
Most people prefer to have two advisers, one for the hour of danger, when they are afraid—and then, when things go well again, then they would prefer not to have anything to do with him, because the sight of him reminds them of how weak they were, and now they prefer to imagine that they have triumphed by dint of their own strength—not by God’s.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 251, p. 234
There’s something far more compassionate in gray weather than in sunshine, it is like the development of the theme that something can be made even of insignificant things, yes, of things that have been thrown away. And gray weather puts on a more beautiful appearance the more one looks at it.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB3: 25, p. 257
Augustine has said it so well: Certainly God has promised you forgiveness—but he has not promised you the next day.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB3: 56, p. 273
Imagine a young person and how he might wish to live—but let us then give a test. Imagine someone dying, how he might wish to have lived: You will find that you come to the opposite result. Who is right, then? Really it is the one who is dying. For the youth wishes for life (for these 70 years); the one dying wishes for eternity or wishes that he had lived for the sake of eternity.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB4: 61, p. 316
What is dangerous about the creeping villainy is that it takes considerable imagination and considerable dialectical abilities to be able to detect it at the moment and see what it is. Well, neither of these features [imagination or dialectical ability] are prominent in most people—and so the villainy creeps forward just a little bit each day, unnoticed.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB5: 58, p. 397
The best proof for the immortality of the soul, for the existence of God, etc. is really the impression one gets of this in one’s childhood and is thus the proof that, unlike those many learned and high-falutin’ proofs, could be put like this: It is certainly true, because my father told it to me.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB5: 114, p. 418
Oh, when they preach on Job, they are always in a hurry to get to the end, to the fact that he gets everything back again, double. To me it seems strange to preach about this. For isn’t it true that as soon as this happens, you can certainly get yourself back on your feet and accept it—see, that’s why I prefer to preach about the time preceding it.
JN, vol. 5, Journal NB6: 40, p. 30
To reduplicate is to be what one says. Human beings are therefore infinitely better served by someone who does not speak in all-too-lofty tones but who is what he says.
JN, vol. 5, Journal NB6: 57, p. 39
The person who is unable to seduce people, is not able to save them, either.
JN, vol. 5, Journal NB8: 8, p. 154
One solitary person cannot help or save an age; he can only make it clear that it is on its way to a downfall.
JN, vol. 5, Journal NB10: 93, p. 314
The essential thinker always states an issue in its most extreme form; this is precisely what is brilliant—and only a few can follow him. Then the professor comes; he takes away the “paradox”—a great many people, almost the entire multitude, can understand him, and then people think that now the truth has become truer! … Every essential thinker can only view the professor comically.
JN, vol. 6, Journal NB12: 32, p. 161
And therefore—oh, wonderful love of Providence, which has provided every animal with one or another means of defense—thus, too, does Providence make every more profound nature silent. Through silence he saves his life, in silence; saved, he possesses his blessedness.
JN, vol. 6, Journal NB12: 135, p. 226
Weeping for oneself: this is the only right place for tears. Praised be the person who can say, I myself am the only object I find worthy enough—or wretched enough—to weep for.
JN, vol. 6, Journal NB13: 19, p. 286
Just tell me how you judge your childhood and youth, and I will tell you who you are.
JN, vo. 6, Journal NB13: 28, p. 292
The dreadful thing is not that I am to suffer punishment when I have done something wrong; the dreadful thing is that I could do something wrong—and there would be no punishment.
JN, vol. 6, Journal NB13: 46, p. 305
Priests no longer concern themselves with the cure of souls; physicians now take care of that. Instead of becoming another person through conversion, one now does so through baths, spas, and the like …
JN, vol. 6, Journal NB14: 64, p. 386
People must indeed have lived in a far simpler fashion when they believed that God revealed his will in dreams…. [T]he poor opinion of dreams typical of our times is … connected to the spiritualism that constantly presses upon consciousness, whereas those simpler times piously believed that the unconscious life in a person was both the dominant and the most profound aspect.
JN, vol. 6, Journal NB14: 83, p. 398
And even if “the professor” happened to read this, it would not stop him, it would not prick his conscience—no, he would lecture on this, too. And even if the professor happened to read this remark, it would not stop him either—no, he would lecture on this, too. For the professor is even longer than the tapeworm which a woman was delivered of recently (200 feet according to her husband …
JP, vol. 6, no. 6818, p. 454
The age of making distinctions is passed. It has been vanquished by the system. In our day, whoever loves to make distinctions is regarded as an eccentric whose soul clings to something that has long since vanished.
CA, opening page
Not everyone who is stooped-shouldered is an Atlas, nor did he become such by supporting a world.
CA, p. 7
Appropriation is precisely the secret of conversation.
CA, p. 16
The subject of which psychology treats must be something in repose that remains in a restless repose, not something restless that always either produces itself or is repressed.
CA, p. 21
[T]he older and the more spiritually developed the individuality is, the less beautiful it is in sleep, whereas the child is more beautiful in sleep.
CA, p. 65
To offer witticisms about the sexual is a paltry art, to admonish is not difficult, to preach about it in such a way that the difficulty is omitted is not hard, but to speak humanly about it is an art.
CA, p. 67
Many a marriage has been profaned, and not by a stranger.
CA, p. 71
However, life is rich enough, if only one understands how to see. One need not travel to Paris and London; besides, this would be of no help if one is unable to see.
CA, p. 74
If I am anxious about a past misfortune, then this is not because it is in the past but because it may be repeated, i.e., become future.
CA, p. 91
Yet instead of learning from this how to lay hold of the eternal, we only learn how to drive ourselves, our neighbors, and the moment to death—in the pursuit of the moment. If a person could have a part just once, could lead the waltz of the moment just once—then he has lived, then he becomes the envy of the less fortunate, those who are not born but rush headlong into life, and headlong continue to rush forward, never reaching it.
CA, p. 105
Whoever has some understanding of men knows very well that sophistry always fixes upon one particular point and continually skirts the point.
CA, p. 114
In our courageous age, we dare not tell a patient that he is about to die, we dare not call the pastor lest he die from shock, and we dare not tell the patient that a few days ago a man died from the same disease.
CA, p. 121
But why do people rush around in such a terrible haste? If there is no eternity, the moment is just as long as if there were.
CA, p. 152
[I]t is often distressing to be an observer—it has the same melancholy effect as being a police officer.
R, p. 135
I went out to the café where I had gone every day the previous time to enjoy the beverage that, according to the poet’s precept, when it is “pure and hot and strong and not misused,” can always stand alongside that to which the poet compares it, namely, friendship. At any rate, I prize coffee.
R, pp. 169–70
I stick my finger into the world—it has no smell. Where am I? What does it mean to say: the world? What is the meaning of that word? Who tricked me into this whole thing and leaves me standing here? Who am I? How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it, why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought from a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn’t it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager—I have something to say about this.
R, p. 200
But the crowd can rarely account for its judgment, has one opinion today, another tomorrow.
PC, p. 42
But it must be remembered that with regard to differences in life everyone wants to cling to his own; it is because of this fixed point, this consideration, that human compassion is always merely to a certain degree.
PC, p. 59
To make oneself quite literally one with the most wretched (and this, and this alone is divine compassion), this is “too much” for people, something they can shed a few emotional tears over during a quiet Sunday hour and involuntarily burst out laughing over when they see it in actuality.
PC, p. 59
For people are willing enough to practice compassion and self-denial, willing enough to seek after wisdom, etc., but they want to determine the criterion themselves, that it shall be to a certain degree.
PC, p. 60
In order truly to will the good, one must avoid even the appearance of doing it.
PC, p. 129
[I]f there is something you want to forget, then try to find something else to remember …
PC, p. 152
[T]he admirer … keeps himself personally detached; he forgets himself, forgets that what he admires in the other person is denied to him, and precisely this is what is beautiful, that he forgets himself in this way in order to admire.
PC, p. 242
And yet there is an infinite difference between an admirer and an imitator, because an imitator is, or at least strives to be, what he admires.
PC, p. 249
Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.
LD, p. 214
Take the riches away, then I can no longer be called rich; but take tomorrow away—alas, then I can no longer be called rich either.
CD, p. 27
The rich pagan, however, also has only one thought: riches…. Not only is he without God in the world, but wealth is his god, which attracts to itself his every thought.
CD, p. 33
Trouble and today correspond to each other; self-torment and the next day also go together.
CD, p. 71
Oh, in the customary pursuits of daily life, how easy it is, in the spiritual sense, to doze off….
CD, p. 254
The present age is essentially a sensible, reflecting age, devoid of passion, flaring up in superficial, short-lived enthusiasm and prudentially relaxing in indolence.
TA, p. 68
Not even a suicide these days does away with himself in desperation but deliberates on this step so long and so sensibly that he is strangled by calculation, making it a moot point whether or not he can really be called a suicide, inasmuch as it was in fact the deliberating that took his life.
TA, p. 68
So ultimately the object of desire is money, but it is in fact token money, an abstraction. A young man today would scarcely envy another his capacities or his skill or the love of a beautiful girl or his fame, no, but he would envy him his money. Give me money, the young man will say, and I will be all right.
TA, p. 75
Entrapped air always becomes noxious, and the entrapment of reflection with no ventilating action or event develops censorious envy.
TA, p. 82
If an insurrection at its peak is so like a volcanic explosion that a person cannot hear himself speak, leveling at its peak is like a deathly stillness in which a person can hear himself breathe, a deathly stillness in which nothing can rise up but everything sinks down into it, impotent.
TA, p. 84
Nowadays it is possible actually to speak with people, and what they say is admittedly very sensible, and yet the conversation leaves the impression that one has been speaking with an anonymity.
TA, p. 103
[I]f one is reminded every day to forget, one never does really forget.
FSE, p. 37
[I]t takes a personality, an I, to look at oneself in a mirror; a wall can be seen in a mirror, but a wall cannot see itself or look at itself in a mirror. No, while reading God’s Word you must incessantly say to yourself: It is I to whom it is speaking; it is I about whom it is speaking.
FSE, p. 44
It is so easy to trip the light fantastic of desire, but when, after a while, it is desire that dances with a person against his will—that is a ponderous dance.
FSE, p. 66
[W]hat one’s life proclaims is a hundred thousand times more powerfully effective than what one’s mouth proclaims …
FSE, pp. 131–32
Concepts, just like individuals, have their history and are no more able than they to resist the dominion of time, but in and through it all they nevertheless harbor a kind of homesickness for the place of their birth.
CI, p. 9
[T]he endless calculating of the circumstances of pleasure impedes and stifles pleasure itself.
CI, p. 61
Presumably it could occur to a human being to poetize himself in the likeness of the god or the god in the likeness of himself, but not to poetize that the god poetized himself in the likeness of a human being.
PF, p. 36
A person lives undisturbed in himself, and then awakens the paradox of self-love as love for another, for one missing.
PF, p. 39
[T]rying to get rid of something by sleeping is just as useless as trying to obtain something by sleeping.
PF, p. 43
Thus, belief believes what it does not see; it does not believe that the star exists, for that it sees, but it believes that the star has come into existence.
PF, p. 81
In one person’s mouth the same words can be so full of substance, so trustworthy, and in another person’s mouth they can be like the vague whispering of leaves.
WL, pp. 11–12
There is only one whom a person should fear, and that is God; and there is only one of whom a person should be afraid, and that is oneself.
WL, p. 15
Unchangingness is the true independence.
WL, p. 39
Even if passionate preference had no other selfishness in it, it would still have this, that consciously or unconsciously there is self-willfulness in it—unconsciously insofar as it is in the power of natural predispositions, consciously insofar as it utterly gives itself to this power and assents to it.
WL, p. 55
Whether someone savoring his arrogance and his pride openly gives other people to understand that they do not exist for him and, for the nourishment of his arrogance, wants them to feel it as he demands expressions of slavish submission from them, or whether he slyly and secretly expresses that they do not exist for him simply by avoiding any contact with them … —these are basically one and the same.
WL, p. 74
The yes of the promise is sleep-inducing, but the no, spoken and therefore audible to oneself, is awakening, and repentance is usually not far away.
WL, p. 93
When a man turns his back on someone and walks away, it is easy to see that he is walking away; but when a person hits upon the idea of facing one from whom he is walking away, hits upon the idea of walking backward while with appearance and glance and salutations he greets someone, giving assurances again and again that he is coming immediately or even incessantly saying, “Here I am!”—although he is moving further and further, note well, backward: then it is not very easy to become aware. And so it is also with the one who, rich in good intentions and quick to promise, moves backward further and further away from the good.
WL, p. 94
What the world actually admires as sagacity is knowledge of evil—whereas wisdom is knowledge of the good.
WL, p. 285
It is only too certain that every human being, unfortunately, has a great inclination to see his neighbor’s faults and perhaps an even greater one to want to tell them. If there is nothing else, there is, alas, to use the mildest term, a kind of nervous debility that makes people very weak in this temptation …
WL, p. 290
That the existing subjective thinker is continually striving does not mean, however, that in a finite sense he has a goal toward which he is striving, where he would be finished when he reached it.
CUP, p. 91
Suppose a person is given the task of entertaining himself for one day and by noon is already finished with the entertainment—then his speed would indeed be of no merit. So it is also when life is the task. To be finished with life before life is finished with one is not to finish the task at all.
CUP, p. 164
Don Quixote is the prototype of the subjective lunacy in which the passion of inwardness grasps a particular fixed finite idea. But when inwardness is absent, parroting lunacy sets in, which is just as comic …
CUP, p. 195
Mood is like the Niger River in Africa; no one knows its source, no one knows its outlet—only its reach is known!
CUP, p. 237
I know very well that people usually admire the artist-life of a person who follows his talent without accounting to himself for what it means to be human, so that the admirer forgets him in admiration over his work of art. But I also know that the tragedy of an existing person of that sort is that he is a variant [Differents] and the differential is not personally reflected in the ethical.
CUP, p. 303
Every individuality of distinction always has some one-sidedness, and the one-sidedness itself can be an indirect declaration of his actual greatness, but it is not the greatness itself.
CUP, p. 349
I am well aware that if anyone nowadays were to live as a Greek philosopher, that is, would existentially express what he would have to call his life-view, be existentially absorbed in it, he would be regarded as lunatic.
CUP, p. 352
That one person can swim the channel and a second person knows twenty-four languages and a third person walks on his hands etc.—one can admire that si placet [if you please]. But if the person presented is supposed to be great with regard to the universal because of his virtue, his faith, his nobility, his faithfulness, his perseverance, etc., then admiration is a deceptive relation or can easily become that. What is great with regard to the universal must therefore not be presented as an object for admiration, but as a requirement.
CUP, p. 358
I prefer to talk with children, for one may still dare to hope that they may become rational beings; but those who have become that—good Lord!
EO,1, p. 19
I don’t feel like doing anything. I don’t feel like riding—the motion is too powerful; I don’t feel like walking—it is too tiring; I don’t feel like lying down, for either I would have to stay down, and I don’t feel like doing that, or I would have to get up again, and I don’t feel like doing that, either. Summa Summarum: I don’t feel like doing anything.
EO,1, p. 20
Old age fulfills the dreams of youth. One sees this in Swift: in his youth he built an insane asylum; in his old age he himself entered it.
EO,1, p. 21
What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding; what if laughter really were weeping!
EO,1, p. 21
Alas, fortune’s door does not open inward so that one can push it open by rushing at it; but it opens outward, and therefore one can do nothing about it.
EO,1, p. 23
I complain that in life it is not as in the novel, where one has hardhearted fathers and nisses and trolls to battle, and enchanted princesses to free. What are all such adversaries together compared with the pale, bloodless, tenacious-of-life nocturnal forms with which I battle and to which I myself give life and existence.
EO,1, p. 23
On the whole, I lack the patience to live. I cannot see the grass grow, and if I cannot do that, I do not care to look at it at all. My views are the superficial observations of a “fahrender Scholastiker [traveling scholastic]” who dashes through life in the greatest haste. It is said that our Lord satisfies the stomach before the eyes. That is not what I find: my eyes are surfeited and bored with everything, and yet I hunger.
EO,1, p. 25
People’s thoughts are as thin and fragile as lace, and they themselves as pitiable as lace-making girls. The thoughts of their hearts are too wretched to be sinful. It is perhaps possible to regard it as sin for a worm to nourish such thoughts, but not for a human being, who is created in the image of God.
EO,1, p. 27
Human dignity is still acknowledged even in nature, for when we want to keep birds away from the trees we set up something that is supposed to resemble a human being, and even the remote resemblance a scarecrow has to a human being is sufficient to inspire respect.
EO,1, p. 28
The best demonstration of the wretchedness of life [Tilværelse] is that which is obtained through a consideration of its glory.
EO,1, p. 28
Most people rush after pleasure so fast that they rush right past it.
EO,1, p. 29
How empty and meaningless life is.—We bury a man; we accompany him to the grave, throw three spadefuls of earth on him; we ride out in a carriage, ride home in a carriage; we find consolation in the thought that we have a long life ahead of us. But how long is seven times ten years?
EO,1, p. 29
In a theater, it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed—amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.
EO,1, p. 30
Real enjoyment consists not in what one enjoys but in the idea.
EO,1, p. 31
If I had in my service a submissive jinni who, when I asked for a glass of water, would bring me the world’s most expensive wines, deliciously blended, in a goblet, I would dismiss him until he learned that the enjoyment consists not in what I enjoy but in getting my own way.
EO,1, p. 31
For me nothing is more dangerous than to recollect [erindre]. As soon as I have recollected a life relationship, that relationship has ceased to exist. It is said that absence makes the heart grow fonder. That is very true, but it becomes fonder in a purely poetic way.
EO,1, p. 32
To live in recollection is the most perfect life imaginable; recollection is more richly satisfying than all actuality, and it has a security that no actuality possesses. A recollected life relationship has already passed into eternity and has no temporal interest anymore.
EO,1, p. 32
My life is utterly meaningless. When I consider its various epochs, my life is like the word Schnur in the dictionary, which first of all means a string, and second a daughter-in-law. All that is lacking is that in the third place the world Schnur means a camel, in the fourth a whisk broom.
EO,1, p. 36
[M]y soul’s poisonous doubt consumes everything. My soul is like the Dead Sea, over which no bird is able to fly; when it has come midway, it sinks down, exhausted, to death and destruction.
EO,1, p. 37
How dreadful boredom is—how dreadfully boring; I know no stronger expression, no truer one, for like is recognized only by like.
EO,1, p. 37
Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it. Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way. Whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the stupidities of the world, and you will regret it; weep over them, and you will also regret it.
EO,1, p. 38
Wine no longer cheers my heart; a little of it makes me sad—much, depressed. My soul is dull and slack; in vain do I jab the spur of desire into its side; it is exhausted, it can no longer raise itself up in its royal jump.
EO,1, p. 41
Perhaps nothing ennobles a person so much as keeping a secret. It gives a person’s whole life significance, which it has, of course, only for himself: it saves a person from all futile consideration of the surrounding world.
EO,1, p. 157
Boredom is the root of all evil.
EO,1, p. 285
On a secretly blushing cheek shines the glow of the heart.
EO,1, p. 378
Are you not aware that there comes a midnight hour when everyone must unmask; do you believe that life will always allow itself to be trifled with; do you believe that one can sneak away just before midnight in order to avoid it?
EO,2, p. 160
Frequently I have noticed in life that the costlier the liquid on which a person becomes intoxicated, the more difficult the cure becomes; the intoxication is more beautiful and the consequences apparently not as pernicious.
EO,2, p. 194
[T]he person who lives esthetically sees only possibilities everywhere; for him these make up the content of future time, whereas the person who lives ethically sees tasks everywhere.
EO,2, p. 251
As soon as the talent is not regarded as a calling—and if it is regarded as calling every human being has a calling—the talent is absolutely egotistic. Therefore, everyone who bases his life on a talent establishes to the best of his ability a robber-existence.
EO,2, p. 292
The phrase “to accomplish” signifies a relation between my action and something else that lies outside me. Now, it is easy to see that this relation does not lie in my power, and to that extent it is just as appropriate to say of the most talented person as of the humblest of men—that he accomplishes nothing.
EO,2, p. 295
The absolute condition for friendship is unity in a life-view. If a person has that, he will not be tempted to base his friendship on obscure feelings or on indefinable sympathies.
EO,2, p. 319
No matter how strong a person is, no person is stronger than himself.
EUD, p. 18
Without understanding how, they are in the midst of the movement of life, a link in the chain that binds a past to a later time; unconcerned about how it happens, they are carried along on the wave of the present. Reposing in the law of nature that lets a human life grow up in the world as it spreads a carpet of flowers over the earth, they go on living happy and contented amid the changes of life, and no moment desire to tear themselves free from them …
EUD, p. 33
[W]hat one sees depends on how one sees.
EUD, p. 59
Tell someone who your friends are, and he will know you; confide your wishes to him, and he will understand you; not only is your soul manifest in the wish, but inasmuch as the wish craftily betrays to him your inner state he sees through you in another way also.
EUD, p. 253
Who has forgotten the priceless enjoyment of childhood—wishing, which is the same for the poor child and for the rich child! Who has forgotten those beautiful stories from a vanished period in which, just as in childhood, wishing is the meaning of life …
EUD, p. 253
[I]f he nevertheless is unwilling to be an instrument of war in the service of inexplicable drives, indeed, in the service of the world, because the world itself, the object of his craving, stimulates the drives … a stringed instrument in the hands of inexplicable moods or, rather, in the hands of the world, because the movement of his soul is in accord with the way the world plucks its strings … a mirror in which he intercepts the world or, rather, the world reflects itself …
EUD, p. 308
From the external and visible world there comes an old adage: “Only one who works gets bread.” Oddly enough, the adage does not fit the world in which it is most at home, for imperfection is the fundamental law of the external world, and here it happens again and again that he who does not work does get bread, and he who sleeps gets it even more abundantly than he who works.
FT, p. 27
What, then, is education? I believed it is the course the individual goes through in order to catch up with himself, and the person who will not go through this course is not much helped by being born in the most enlightened age.
FT, p. 46
I require every person not to think so inhumanly of himself that he does not dare to enter those palaces where the memory of the chosen ones lives or even those where they themselves live. He is not to enter rudely and foist his affinity upon them. He is to be happy for every time he bows before them, but he is to be confident, free of spirit, and always more than a charwoman, for if he wants to be no more than that, he will never get in.
FT, p. 64
But although “impractical,” yet the religious is eternity’s transfigured rendition of the most beautiful dream of politics.
PV, p. 103
And the ocean, like the wise man, is self-sufficient, whether it lies just like a child and amuses itself by itself with gentle ripples, like a child playing on its lips, or at midday lies, like a half-sleeping indulgent thinker, surveying everything around it, or at night it deeply ponders its own nature; whether with profound subtlety it makes itself into nothing in order to observe or it rages in its own passion. The ocean runs deep, it indeed knows what it knows; the one who runs deep always knows that …
UDVS, pp. 20–21
Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing
UDVS, p. 24
[I]nspired words are quickly forgotten in the trivialities of life.
UDVS, p. 31
[T]here is a hope that should be killed, just as there is a lust, a craving, and a longing that should be killed—the earthly hope should be killed …
UDVS, p. 116
Purity of heart—this is a metaphorical expression that compares the heart to the ocean, and why specifically to that? Because the ocean’s depth is its purity, and its purity is its transparency, because the ocean is deep only when it is pure, and pure only when it is transparent.
UDVS, p. 121
Worldly worry always seeks to lead a human being into the small-minded unrest of comparisons …
UDVS, p. 188
[S]ome wear the medal to their honor and others honor the medal by wearing it.
UDVS, p. 199
If it is possible, if I have wasted my best time without experiencing anything, at least teach me in so doing not to become indifferent, teach me not to seek the consolation of others in a common loss; then surely the terror of the loss may be a beginning of my healing.
TDIO, p. 22
Wonder, however, which is the beginning of all deeper understanding, is an ambivalent passion that in itself contains fear and blessedness.
TDIO, p. 24
In relation to every human being, the lowliest and the greatest, it holds true that not an angel and not legions of angels and not the horrors of the whole world can impart true wonder and true fear, but they certainly can make him superstitious.
TDIO, p. 25
Ah, it is much easier to look to the right and to the left than to look into oneself, much easier to haggle and bargain just as it is also much easier to underbid than to be silent—but the more difficult is still the one thing needful.
TDIO, p. 31
[T]he weed of corruption has the characteristic that all weeds have: it sows itself.
TDIO, p. 55
Now, just as it is true that in everyone’s soul there is a longing like that erotic love the poets celebrate, so there is also in everyone the longing, a wish, that craves what might be called the guide and teacher in life, the tested person whom one can trust, the wise person who knows how to counsel, the noble person who encourages by his own example, the gifted person who has the power of eloquence and the substance of conviction, the earnest person who safeguards the appropriation.
TDIO, p. 58
There is a consolation in life, a false flatterer; there is a safeguard in life, a hypocritical deceiver—it is called postponement.
TDIO, p. 79
It is the fraudulence of sadness to be unwilling to understand that there is something else to fear than life, and therefore a consoling wisdom other than the sleep of death must be found.
TDIO, p. 81
This is the way a person always gains courage; when he fears a greater danger, he always has the courage to face a lesser one; when he is exceedingly afraid of one danger, it is as if the others did not exist at all.
SUD, pp. 8–9
As a matter of fact, in the world there is interest only in intellectual or esthetic limitation or in the indifferent (in which there is the greatest interest in the world), for the secular mentality is nothing more or less than the attribution of infinite worth to the indifferent.
SUD, p. 33
If I have ventured wrongly, well, then life helps me by punishing me. But if I have not ventured at all, who helps me then?
SUD, p. 34
There is a story about a peasant who went barefooted to town with enough money to buy himself a pair of stockings and shoes and to get drunk, and in trying to find his way home in his drunken state, he fell asleep in the middle of the road. A carriage came along, and the driver shouted to him to move or he would drive over his legs. The drunken peasant woke up, looked at his legs and, not recognizing them because of the shoes and stockings, said: “Go ahead, they are not my legs.”
SUD, p. 53
No, whatever a man may arrive at as a matter of course, whatever things may come as a matter of course—faith and wisdom are definitely not among them.
SUD, p. 58
In antiquity as well as in the Middle Ages there was an awareness of this longing for solitude and the respect for what it means; whereas in the constant sociality of our day we shrink from solitude to the point (what a capital epigram!) that no use for it is known other than as punishment for criminals.
SUD, p. 64
To defend something is always to disparage it.
SUD, p. 87
The beginning is not that with which one begins but that to which one comes, and one comes to it backward.
WA, p. 11
[N]o one teaches joy better than one who is joyful oneself.
WA, p. 36
[S]implicity is that the teacher himself is what he is teaching.
WA, p. 38
As a subject I am to honor and obey the king with undivided soul, but I am permitted to be built up religiously by the thought that essentially I am a citizen of heaven and that if I ever meet his departed majesty there I shall not be bound in subservient obedience to him.
WA, p. 100
To honor one’s father because he is exceptionally intelligent is impiety.
WA, p. 101
[P]erhaps the most dangerous temptations are those that come under the modest label of “nothing at all.”
COR, p. 180
To believe the ideality on the word of another is like laughing at a joke not because one has understood it but because someone else said that it was funny.
SLW, p. 438
The most glorious powers are set in motion in order to get a committee set up; as soon as it is done, no one cares about the matter anymore.
TM, p. 389 (note)
Indeterminableness is the basis of dizziness … Therefore the remedy for dizziness is limitation; and in the spiritual sense all discipline is limitation.
BA, p. 288
Now it is certainly true that to have mood can be something very genuine and that no mortal life is so absolute that it does not know the contrasts involved therein. In a sound and healthy life, however, the mood is just an intensification of the life that ordinarily stirs and moves within a person.
CI, p. 284
In life it is very important to be on the watch for one’s cue.
JN, vol. 2, Journal FF: 11, p. 70
Someone who has one thought, but an infinite one, can be borne along by it through his entire life, lightly and on wings …
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 32, p. 141
It is said that experience makes a person wise. That is a very unreasonable thing to say. If there were nothing greater still than experience, experience would make him mad.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 57, p. 146
Do not promise never to forget … —no, rather turn the situation around and say, “This certainly is nothing to remember for my whole life, but I promise that I will remember it promptly this very hour, and I will keep that promise.”
FSE, pp. 45–46
One of the ostensibly most respectable answers given to this “why” of marriage is: Marriage is a school for character …
EO,2, p. 64
What is joy, or what is it to be joyful? It is truly to be present to oneself …
WA, p. 39
Whatever one generation learns from another, no generation learns the essentially human from a previous one. In this respect, each generation begins primitively … For example, no generation has learned to love from another, no generation is able to begin at any other point than at the beginning, no later generation has a more abridged task than the previous one …
FT, p. 121
The art of recollecting is not easy, because in the moment of preparation it can become something different, whereas memory merely fluctuates between remembering correctly and remembering incorrectly. For example, what is homesickness? It is something remembered that is recollected. Homesickness is prompted simply by one’s being absent. The art would be to be able to feel homesickness even though one is at home. This takes proficiency in illusion.
SLW, p. 13
Indeed, did Adam dare to recollect Eden; did he dare, when he saw thistles and thorns at his feet, did he dare to say to Eve: No! It was not like this in Eden. In Eden, oh, do you recollect? Did Adam dare to do this? Even less do I.
SLW, p. 350
Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read—ultimately you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself …
SLW, p. 364
Not until the moment when there awakens in his soul a concern about what meaning the world has for him and he for the world, about what meaning everything within him by which he himself belongs to the world has for him and he therein for the world—only then does the inner being announce its presence in this concern.
EUD, p. 86
What is more difficult—to awaken someone who is sleeping or to awaken someone who, awake, is dreaming that he is awake?
WL, p. 5
FIGURE 4. Kierkegaard statue in front of Royal Library. Photograph of the plaster model for the large bronze statue in front of the Royal Library in Copenhagen.
Anxiety is a qualification of dreaming spirit, as such it has its place in psychology. Awake, the difference between myself and my other is posited; sleeping, it is suspended; dreaming, it is an intimated nothing.
CA, pp. 41–42
Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself.
CA, p. 61
As anxiety is posited in modesty, so it is present in all erotic enjoyment, and by no means because it is sinful.
CA, p. 71
Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.
CA, p. 97
To the extent that in every state possibility is present, anxiety is also present. Such is the case after sin is posited, for only in the good is there a unity of state and transition.
CA, p. 113
Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.
CA, p. 155
Anxiety is freedom’s possibility, and only such anxiety is through faith absolutely educative, because it consumes all finite ends and discovers all their deceptiveness.
CA, p. 155
If, on the other hand, the speaker maintains that the great thing about him is that he has never been in anxiety, I will gladly provide him with my explanation: that is because he is very spiritless.
CA, p. 157
Deepest within every person there is nonetheless an anxiety about being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. People keep this anxiety at bay by looking at the many people around them, who are related to them as family and friends; but the anxiety is there all the same—one scarcely dare think about how one would feel if all these were taken away.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 239, p. 230
“Let us eat and drink, because tomorrow we shall die.” … This very remark echoes with the anxiety about the next day, the day of annihilation, the anxiety that insanely is supposed to signify joy although it is a shriek from the abyss. He is so anxious about the next day that he plunges himself into a frantic stupor in order, if possible, to forget it—and how anxious he is—is this what it means to be without care about the next day?
CD, p. 77
What is anxiety? It is the next day.
CD, p. 78
The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he meant to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he meant to sacrifice Isaac—but precisely in this contradiction is the anxiety that can make a person sleepless, and yet without this anxiety Abraham is not who he is.
FT, p. 30
Just as a physician might say that there very likely is not one single living human being who is completely healthy, so anyone who really knows mankind might say that there is not one single living human being who does not despair a little, who does not secretly harbor an unrest, an inner strife, a disharmony, an anxiety about an unknown something or a something he does not even dare to try to know, an anxiety about some possibility in existence or an anxiety about himself, so that, just as the physician speaks of going around with an illness in the body, he walks around with a sickness, carries around a sickness of the spirit that signals its presence at rare intervals in and through an anxiety he cannot explain.
SUD, p. 22
Despite its illusory security and tranquillity, all immediacy is anxiety and thus, quite consistently, is most anxious about nothing.
SUD, p. 25
[T]he anxiety that characterizes spiritlessness is recognized precisely by its spiritless sense of security.
SUD, p. 44
The woman has more anxiety than the man; therefore it was she whom the serpent chose to attack, and deceived her through her anxiety.
JN, vol.2, Journal JJ: 511a, p. 286
If a child was told that it is a sin to break one’s leg, what anxiety would the child live in, and he would probably break it more often …
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 377, p. 245
[T]he serpent’s power consists precisely of anxiety; it is not so much the cunning that is wily as the cunning that knows how to create anxiety.
JN, vol. 6, Journal NB12: 154, p. 240
To suppose that anxiety is an imperfection merely betrays a straightlaced cowardice, since, to the contrary, the greatness of anxiety is the very prophet of the miracle of perfection, and inability to become anxious is a sign of one’s being either an animal or an angel, which according to the teaching of scriptures, is less perfect than being a human being.
JP, vol. 1, no. 97, p. 39
Just as the gospel about the lilies contains a warning to the poor against pecuniary worries, it also has a word for the corresponding kind of worry which the rich in particular usually have. “No one can add one cubit to his stature.” The hypochondriacal concern that one’s heart is not beating properly, that one is constipated, etc.
JP, vol. 1, no. 99, p. 40
If a person could be entirely free of anxiety, temptation would not have access to him.
JP, vol. 1, no. 102, p. 41
Anxiety is the first reflex of possibility, a glimpse, and yet a terrible sorcery.
JP, vol. 1, no. 102, p. 41
Anxiety is the vehicle by which the subject appropriates sorrow and assimilates it. Anxiety is the motive power by which sorrow penetrates a person’s heart. But the movement is not swift like that of an arrow; it is consecutive; it is not once and for all, but it is continually becoming. As a passionately erotic glance craves its object, so anxiety looks cravingly upon sorrow.
EO,1, p. 154
DEPRESSION/MELANCHOLY
In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant—my depression. In the midst of my joy, in the midst of my work, she beckons to me, calls me aside, even though physically I remain on the spot. My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known—no wonder, then, that I return the love.
EO,1, p. 20
I have only one friend, and that is echo. Why is it my friend? Because I love my sorrow, and echo does not take it away from me. I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night. Why is it my confidant? Because it remains silent.
EO,1, p. 33
By way of precaution, I shall promptly point out that a person can have sorrow and care—indeed, this can be so deep that it may follow him his whole life, and this can even be beautiful and true—but only through his own fault does a person become depressed.
EO,2, p. 185
What, then, is depression? It is hysteria of the spirit.
EO,2, p. 188
There is something unexplainable in depression [Tungsind]. A person with a sorrow or a worry knows why he sorrows or worries. If a depressed person is asked what the reason is, what it is that weighs [tynge] on him, he will answer: I do not know; I cannot explain it. Therein lies the limitlessness of depression.
EO,2, p. 189
But depression is sin, is actually a sin instar omnium [that stands for all], for it is the sin of not willing deeply and inwardly, and this is a mother of all sins.
EO,2, p. 189
It is a cowardly craving of depression to want to become dizzy in the emptiness and to seek the final diversion in this dizziness …
TDIO, p. 87
As a woman who is unhappy in her house spends a great deal of time at the window, so does the soul of the melancholic spend a great deal of time at the eye, seeking diversions. Another form of melancholia is that which completely closes its eye in order to darken everything around itself.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 125, p. 189
[D]epression is something real that one does not delete with the stroke of the pen.
SLW, p. 175
Precisely because he is depressed he has an abstract notion that life for others is so pleasant and happy. But what the unfamiliar is like one cannot know in abstracto. Here, too, is the fraudulence that is inseparable from all depression.
SLW, p. 175
Depression is my nature, that is true, but thanks be to the power who, even if it bound me in this way, nevertheless also gave me a consolation. There are animals that are only poorly armed against their enemies, but nature has provided them with a cunning by which they nevertheless are saved. I, too, was given a cunning such as this, a capacity for cunning that makes me just as strong as everyone against whom I have tested my strength. My cunning is that I am able to hide my depression; my deception is just as cunning as my depression is deep.
SLW, pp. 195–96
Everything is asleep; at this hour only the dead emerge from the grave and live their lives over again. And I am not doing even that, for since I am not dead I cannot live my life over again, and if I were dead, I could not relive it either, for, after all, I have never lived.
SLW, p. 211
Alas, why were nine months in the womb enough to make me an old man! Alas, why was I not swaddled in joy? Why was I born not only in pain but to pain? Why were my eyes opened not to what is happy but only to peer into that kingdom of sighs and to be unable to tear myself away from it?
SLW, p. 263
What is my sickness? Depression. Where does this sickness have its seat? In the power of the imagination, and possibility is its nourishment. But eternity takes away possibility. And was not this sickness oppressive enough in time—that I not only suffered but also became guilty because of it?
SLW, p. 391
If something is to be truly depressing, a presentiment must first emerge, amid all possible favorable circumstances, that, despite everything, something might nonetheless be amiss. One does not oneself become conscious of anything particularly wrong; rather, it must lie in the familial situation. Then the corrosive power of original sin manifests itself …
JN, vol. 2, Journal FF: 35, p. 75
Enough has been said about the light-mindedness of the age; it is high time, I think to say a little about its depression, and I hope that everything will turn out better. Or is not depression the defect of the age, is it not that which echoes even in its light-minded laughter; is it not depression that has robbed us of the courage to command, the courage to obey, the power to act, the confidence to hope?
EO,2, pp. 23–24
SELF/SPIRIT
To be spirit, that is the human being’s invisible glory.
UDVS, p. 193
[N]o science can say what the self is without again stating it quite generally.
CA, p. 78
A perfect spirit cannot be conceived as sexually qualified.
CA, p. 79
Man, then, is a synthesis of psyche and body, but he is also a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal.
CA, p. 85
And he who is not so spiritually mature as to apprehend that even immortal honor throughout all generations is merely a qualification of the temporal, he who does not apprehend that this for which men strive and which keeps them sleepless with wishes and desire is exceedingly imperfect … will not get far in his explanation of spirit and immortality.
CA, pp. 102–3
Every human life is religiously designed.
CA, p. 105
There is nothing of which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of.
JP, vol. 1, no. 1007, p. 440
The phrase “know yourself” means: separate yourself from the other.
CI, p. 177
Development of spirit is self-activity; the spiritually developed individual takes his spiritual development along with him in death. If a succeeding individual is to attain it, it must occur through his self-activity; therefore he must skip nothing.
CUP, p. 345
To have been young, then to have grown older, and then finally to die is a mediocre existence, for the animal also has that merit. But to unite the elements of life in contemporaneity, that is precisely the task.
CUP, p. 348
On the battlefield, it so happens that if the first line of combatants has been victorious, then the second is not led into battle at all but merely shares in the triumph. In the world of the spirit, it is not this way.
EUD, p. 394
Just like poisonous fumes over the fields, like the hosts of grasshoppers over Egypt, so excuses and the hosts of them become a general plague that nibbles off the sprout of the eternal, become a corrupting infection among the people—with everyone who catches it there is always one more excuse available for the next person.
UDVS, p. 68
The person who lives ethically always has a way out when everything goes against him; when the darkness of the storm clouds so envelops him that his neighbor cannot see him, he still has not perished, there is always a point to which he holds fast, and that point is—himself.
EO,2, p. 253
A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.
SUD, p. 13
The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.
SUD, p. 14
A person cannot rid himself of the relation to himself any more than he can rid himself of his self, which, after all, is one and the same thing, since the self is the relation to oneself.
SUD, p. 17
As a rule, a person is considered to be healthy when he himself does not say that he is sick, not to mention when he himself says that he is well. But the physician has a different view of sickness. Why? Because the physician has a defined and developed conception of what it is to be healthy and ascertains a man’s condition accordingly. The physician knows that just as there is merely imaginary sickness there is also merely imaginary health …
SUD, p. 23
The more consciousness, the more self; the more consciousness, the more will; the more will, the more self. A person who has no will at all is not a self; but the more will he has, the more self-consciousness he has also.
SUD, p. 29
When all is said and done, whatever of feeling, knowing, and willing a person has depends upon what imagination he has, upon how that person reflects himself—that is, upon imagination.
SUD, p. 31
[F]or a self is the last thing the world cares about and the most dangerous thing of all for person to show signs of having. The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss—an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.—is sure to be noticed.
SUD, pp. 32–33
Despairing narrowness is to lack primitivity or to have robbed oneself of one’s primitivity, to have emasculated oneself in a spiritual sense. Every human being is primitively intended to be a self, destined to become himself, and as such every self certainly is angular, but that only means that it is to be ground into shape, not that it is to be ground down smooth …
SUD, p. 33
When a self becomes lost in possibility in this way, it is not merely because of a lack of energy; at least it is not to be interpreted in the usual way. What is missing is essentially the power to obey, to submit to the necessity in one’s life, to what may be called one’s limitations.
SUD, p. 36
In order for a person to become aware of his self and of God, imagination must raise him higher than the miasma of probability, it must tear him out of this and teach him to hope and to fear—or to fear and to hope—by rendering possible that which surpasses the quantum satis [sufficient standard] of any experience.
SUD, p. 41
However vain and conceited men may be, they usually have a very meager conception of themselves nevertheless, that is, they have no conception of being spirit, the absolute that a human being can be; but vain and conceited they are—on the basis of comparison.
SUD, p. 43
Imagine a house with a basement, first floor, and second floor planned so that there is or is supposed to be a social distinction between the occupants according to floor. Now, if what it means to be a human being is compared with such a house, then all too regrettably the sad and ludicrous truth about the majority of people is that in their own house they prefer to live in the basement.
SUD, p. 43
There is indeed in all darkness and ignorance a dialectical interplay between knowing and willing, and in comprehending a person one may err by accentuating knowing exclusively or willing exclusively.
SUD, p. 48
The man of immediacy does not know himself, he quite literally identifies himself only by the clothes he wears, he identifies having a self by externalities (here again the infinitely comical). There is hardly a more ludicrous mistake, for a self is indeed infinitely distinct from an externality.
SUD, p. 53
When the self with a certain degree of reflection in itself wills to be responsible for the self, it may come up against some difficulty or other in the structure of the self, in the self’s necessity. For just as no human body is perfect, so no self is perfect.
SUD, p. 54
There are very few persons who live even approximately within the qualification of spirit; indeed, there are not many who even try this life, and most of those who do soon back out of it. They have not learned to fear, have not learned “to have to” without any dependence, none at all, upon whatever else happens.
SUD, p. 57
The criterion for the self is always: that directly before which it is a self, but this in turn is the definition of “criterion.” Just as only entities of the same kind can be added, so everything is qualitatively that by which it is measured, and that which is its qualitative criterion [Maalestok] is ethically its goal [Maal] …
SUD, p. 79
It is exceedingly comic that a speaker with sincere voice and gestures, deeply stirred and deeply stirring, can movingly depict the truth, can face all the powers of evil and of hell boldly, with cool self-assurance in his bearing, a dauntlessness in his air, and an appropriateness of movement worthy of admiration—it is exceedingly comic that almost simultaneously, practically still “in his dressing gown,” he can timidly and cravenly cut and run away from the slightest inconvenience.
SUD, p. 91
No one is born devoid of spirit, and no matter how many go to their death with this spiritlessness as the one and only outcome of their lives, it is not the fault of life.
SUD, p. 102
Qualitatively a self is what its criterion is. That Christ is the criterion is the expression, attested by God, for the staggering reality that a self has, for only in Christ is it true that God is man’s goal and criterion, or the criterion and goal.—But the more self there is, the more intense is sin.
SUD, p. 114
In every person there is something that up to a point hinders him from becoming completely transparent to himself, and this can be the case to such a high degree, he can be so inexplicably intertwined in the life—relations that lie beyond him, that he cannot open himself.
EO,2, p. 160
And this is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness; they outlive themselves, not in the sense that life’s content successively unfolds and is now possessed in this unfolding, but they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.
EO,2, pp. 168–69
Every human being, no matter how slightly gifted he is, however subordinate his position in life may be, has a natural need to formulate a life-view, a conception of the meaning of life and of its purpose.
EO,2, p. 179
The truth of the matter is this. All of us human beings are more or less intoxicated. But we are like a drunk man who is not completely drunk so that he has lost his consciousness—no, he is definitely conscious that he is a little drunk and for that very reason is careful to conceal it from others, if possible from himself. What does he do then? He looks for something to sustain himself; he walks close to the buildings and walks erect without becoming dizzy—a sober man.
FSE, p. 113
Just as the spirit is invisible, so also is its language a secret, and the secret lies in its using the same words as the child and the simpleminded person but using them metaphorically …
WL, pp. 209–10
If a person does not have sufficient passion to make either of the movements, if he skulks through life repenting a little and thinking everything will come out in the wash, then he has once and for all renounced living in the idea, and in this way he can very easily achieve the highest and help others achieve it as well—that is, beguile himself and others into thinking that things happen in the world of spirit as in a game in which everything happens by chance.
FT, pp. 99–100
[T]o give in the slightest with regard to principles is to give them up, and to give up one’s principles is to give up one’s self.
TM, p. 319
If a man with talent is actually to become spirit, he must first of all acquire a distaste for all the satisfactions the talent has to offer—just as a lad apprenticed to the pastry trade has permission from the start to eat as many cakes and cookies as he wants—in order to acquire a distaste for cakes and cookies.
JP, vol. 4, no. 4358, p. 253
DESPAIR
Doubt is thought’s despair; despair is personality’s doubt.
EO,2, p. 211
But every life-view that has a condition outside itself is despair.
EO,2, p. 235
Not to be in despair is not the same as not being lame, blind, etc. If not being in despair signifies neither more nor less than not being in despair, then it means precisely to be in despair.
SUD, p. 15
When death is the greatest danger, we hope for life; but when we learn to know the even greater danger, we hope for death. When the danger is so great that death becomes the hope, then despair is the hopelessness of not even being able to die.
SUD, p. 18
If a person were to die of despair as one dies of sickness, then the eternal in him, the self, must be able to die in the same sense as the body dies of sickness. But this is impossible; the dying of despair continually converts itself into a living.
SUD, p. 18
To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself—this is the formula for all despair.
SUD, p. 20
[N]o human being ever lived and no one lives outside of Christendom who has not despaired and no one in Christendom if he is not a true Christian, and insofar as he is not wholly that, he still is to some extent in despair.
SUD, p. 22
As soon as man ceases to be regarded as defined by spirit (and in that case there can be no mention of despair, either) but only as psychical-physical synthesis, health is an immediate qualification, and mental or physical sickness is the only dialectical qualification. But to be unaware of being defined as spirit is precisely what despair is.
SUD, p. 25
[B]ut happiness is not a qualification of spirit, and deep, deep within the most secret hiding place of happiness there dwells also anxiety, which is despair; it very much wishes to be allowed to remain there, because for despair the most cherished and desirable place to live is in the heart of happiness.
SUD, p. 25
And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is an eternity, then—whether you were man or woman, rich or poor, dependent or independent, fortunate or unfortunate, whether you ranked with royalty and wore a glittering crown or in humble obscurity bore the toil and heat of the day, whether your name will be remembered as long as the world stands and consequently as long as it stood or you are nameless and run nameless in the innumerable multitude, whether the magnificence encompassing you surpassed all human description or the most severe and ignominious human judgment befell you—eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not …
SUD, p. 27
[I]f you have lived in despair, then, regardless of what else you won or lost, everything is lost for you, eternity does not acknowledge you, it never knew you—or, still more terrible, it knows you as you are known and it binds you to yourself in despair.
SUD, p. 28
But if the self does not become itself, it is in despair, whether it knows that or not.
SUD, p. 30
Despair itself is a negativity; ignorance of it, a new negativity. However, to reach the truth, one must go through every negativity, for the old legend about breaking a certain magic spell is true: the piece has to be played through backwards or the spell is not broken.
SUD, p. 44
Every human existence that is not conscious of itself as spirit or conscious of itself before God as spirit, every human existence that does not rest transparently in God but vaguely rests in and merges in some abstract universality (state, nation, etc.) or, in the dark about his self, regards his capacities merely as powers to produce without becoming deeply aware of their source, regards his self, if it is to have intrinsic meaning, as an indefinable something—every such existence, whatever it achieves, be it most amazing, whatever it explains, be it the whole of existence, however intensively it enjoys life esthetically—every such existence is nevertheless despair.
SUD, p. 46
[T]he distinction must be made as to whether or not the person who is conscious of his despair has the true conception of what despair is. Admittedly, he can be quite correct, according to his own idea of despair, to say that he is in despair; he may be correct about being in despair, but that does not mean that he has the true conception of despair.
SUD, p. 47
[I]t is imperative to have clarity about oneself—that is, insofar as simultaneous clarity and despair are conceivable.
SUD, p. 47
The opposite to being in despair is to have faith.
SUD, p. 49
[H]e stands and points to what he calls despair but it is not despair, and in the meantime, sure enough, despair is right there behind him without his realizing it. It is as if someone facing away from the town hall and courthouse pointed straight ahead and said: There is the town hall and courthouse. He is correct, it is there—if he turns around.
SUD, p. 52
[T]he self in despair is satisfied with paying attention to itself, which is supposed to bestow infinite interest and significance upon his enterprises, but it is precisely this that makes them imaginary constructions.
SUD, p. 69
Most men are characterized by a dialectic of indifference and live a life so far from the good (faith) that it is almost too spiritless to be called sin—indeed, almost too spiritless to be called despair.
SUD, p. 101
Despairing as he was, he thought: What is lost is lost—yet he could not help but turn around once more in longing for the good …
UDVS, p. 33
But is only that person mortal who is dead, would not the person who is alive be called mortal when death is his certainty; likewise, is not that person in despair who has not even begun to despair because he has not detected that he was in despair!
UDVS, p. 278
[D]espair is the lack of the eternal.
WL, p. 41
When it is made impossible to possess the beloved in time, eternity says, “You shall love”—that is, eternity then saves love from despair by making it eternal. Suppose it is death that separates the two—then what will be of help when the survivor would sink into despair? Temporal help is an even more lamentable kind of despair; but then eternity helps. When it says, “You shall love,” it is saying, “Your love has an eternal worth.”
WL, p. 41
There is indeed the danger of soul: that the world will come to be empty and everything a matter of indifference to you, life without taste and nourishment, truth itself a toilsome fabrication, and death a vague thought that neither alarms nor beckons.
EUD, p. 350
It takes courage not to surrender to the shrewd or sympathetic counsel of despair that allows a person to erase himself from the number of the living; but this does not necessarily mean that every sausage peddler, fed and fattened on self-confidence, has more courage than the person who succumbed to despair.
CI, p. 327
FREEDOM
It is frightful when, right from childhood, a person’s consciousness has acquired a burden that all of the soul’s elasticity and all of freedom’s energy cannot lift.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 71, p. 150
The entire question of the relation of God’s omnipotence and God’s goodness to evil can perhaps—instead of making the distinction that God accomplishes the good and merely permits what is evil—be solved quite simply in the following manner. The absolutely greatest thing that can be done for a being, greater than anything one could make it into, is to make it free. It is precisely here that omnipotence is required.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 69, p. 56
[F]reedom’s possibility is not the ability to choose the good or the evil…. The possibility is to be able.
CA, p. 49
How unreasonable people are! They never use the freedoms they have but demand those they do not have; they have freedom of thought—they demand freedom of speech.
EO,1, p. 19
But what is this self of mine? If I were to speak of a first moment, a first expression for it, then my answer is this: It is the most abstract of all, and yet in itself it is also the most concrete of all—it is freedom.
EO,2, p. 214
The good is because I will it, and otherwise it is not at all. This is the expression of freedom, and the same is also the case with evil—it is only inasmuch as I will it.
EO,2, p. 224
Inasmuch as the learner is in untruth but is that by his own act (and, according to what has already been said, there is no other way he can be that), he might seem to be free, for to be on one’s own certainly is freedom. And yet he is indeed unfree and bound and excluded, because to be free from the truth is indeed to be excluded, and to be excluded by oneself is indeed to be bound.
PF, p. 15
[B]elief is not a knowledge but an act of freedom, an expression of will.
PF, p. 83
A pure heart. Usually we say instead that a free heart is required for love or giving oneself in love. This heart must not belong to anyone else or to anything else; yes, even the hand that gives it away must be free. It must not be the hand that takes the heart by force and gives it away, but it must rather be the heart that gives away the hand. This heart, free as it is, will then find total freedom in giving itself away.
WL, p. 147
[N]o one is as resigned as God, because he communicates creatively in such a way that in creating he gives independence vis-à-vis himself. The most resigned a human being can be is to acknowledge the given independence in every human being and to the best of one’s ability do everything in order truly to help someone retain it.
CUP, p. 260
The apparent abundance of thoughts and ideas that one feels in abstract possibility is just as unpleasant and elicits a similar anxiety to that which cows suffer when they are not milked on time. So when external circumstances won’t help, the best thing is, as it were, to milk oneself.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 28c, p. 221
Fools and young people say that everything is possible for a human being. But that is a gross error. Spiritually speaking, everything is possible, but in the finite world there is much that is not possible.
FT, p. 44
My soul has lost possibility. If I were to wish for something, I would wish not for wealth or power but for the passion of possibility, for the eye, eternally young, eternally ardent, that sees possibility everywhere. Pleasure disappoints; possibility does not.
EO,1, p. 41
When someone faints, we call for water, eau de Cologne, smelling salts; but when someone wants to despair, and the word is: Get possibility, get possibility, possibility is the only salvation. A possibility—then the person in despair breathes again, he revives again, for without possibility a person seems unable to breathe.
SUD, pp. 38–39
FIGURE 5. Kierkegaard at high desk.
Portrait by Luplau Janssen, 1902. The National Museum of History, Frederiksborg.
The philistine–bourgeois mentality thinks that it controls possibility, that it has tricked this prodigious elasticity into the trap or madhouse of probability, thinks that it holds it prisoner; it leads possibility around imprisoned in the cage of probability …
SUD, pp. 41–42
CHOICE/DECISION
It is said that a golden key opens up everything. But it is certain that decisiveness and determination also open things up …
JN, vol. 5, NB7: 87, p. 126
The choice itself is crucial for the content of the personality: through the choice the personality submerges itself in that which is being chosen, and when it does not choose, it withers away in atrophy.
EO,2, p. 163
[T]here eventually comes a moment where it is no longer a matter of an Either/Or, not because he has chosen, but because he has refrained from it, which also can be expressed by saying: Because others have chosen for him—or because he has lost himself.
EO,2, p. 164
Already prior to one’s choosing, the personality is interested in the choice, and if one puts off the choice, the personality or the obscure forces within it unconsciously chooses.
EO,2, p. 164
[W]hat is important in choosing is not so much to choose the right thing as the energy, the earnestness, and the pathos with which one chooses.
EO,2, p. 167
As soon as a person can be brought to stand at the crossroads in such a way that there is no way out for him except to choose, he will choose the right thing.
EO,2, p. 168
Rather than designating the choice between good and evil, my Either/Or designates the choice by which one chooses good and evil or rules them out. Here the question is under what qualifications one will view all existence and personally live.
EO,2, p. 169
There are many who attach great importance to having seen some extraordinary world-historical individuality face to face. They never forget this impression; it has given their souls an ideal image that ennobles their natures, and yet, however significant this very moment can be, it is nothing compared with the moment of choice.
EO,2, pp. 176–77
When around one everything has become silent, solemn as a clear, starlit night, when the soul comes to be alone in the whole world, then before one there appears, not an extraordinary human being, but the eternal power itself, then the heavens seem to open, and the I chooses itself or, more correctly, receives itself.
EO,2, p. 177
Choose despair, then, because the despair itself is a choice, because one can doubt [tvivle] without choosing it, but one cannot despair [fortvivle] without choosing it. And in despairing a person chooses again, and what then does he choose? He chooses himself, not in his immediacy, not as this accidental individual, but he chooses himself in his eternal validity.
EO,2, p. 211
Now he possesses himself as posited by himself—that is, as chosen by himself, as free—but in possessing himself in this way, an absolute difference becomes manifest, the difference between good and evil. As long as he has not chosen himself, this difference is latent.
EO,2, p. 223
The first condition for a resolution is to have, that is, to will to have a true conception of life and of oneself.
TDIO, p. 52
Resolution is a waking up to the eternal …
EUD, p. 347
Everything that becomes historical is contingent, inasmuch as precisely by coming into existence, by becoming historical, it has its element of contingency … therein lies again the incommensurability between a historical truth and an eternal decision.
CUP, p. 98
[T]o have been very close to making the leap is nothing whatever, precisely because the leap is the category of decision.
CUP, p. 99
What does it mean to assert that a decision is to a certain degree? It means to deny decision. Decision is designed specifically to put an end to that perpetual prattle about “to a certain degree.”
CUP, p. 221
[T]he solution of doubt lies not in reflection but in resolution.
CA, p. ix
THE ETHICAL
Just as metaphysics has replaced theology, so it will finally end with physics replacing moral reflection. The whole modern statistical way of thinking of morals contributes to that.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 425, p. 260
Long ago, when people were not so calculating, one sometimes saw a noble, a magnanimous, an inspired act, genuine heroism. Now shrewdness stifles everything. If people do not manage to break free of this and learn to be quite scrupulous in scorning shrewdness (the contemptible peddler hawking earthly advantage), if they do not see that shrewdness, i.e., behaving shrewdly, corrupts oneself much more than stealing and murdering, simply because everything here is intended to lull the conscience to sleep—if they do not succeed, everything is lost.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 76, p. 171
Ethics points to ideality as a task and assumes that every man possesses the requisite conditions. Thus ethics develops a contradiction, inasmuch as it makes clear both the difficulty and the impossibility.
CA, p. 16
The more ideal ethics is, the better. It must not permit itself to be distracted by the babble that it is useless to require the impossible. For even to listen to such talk is unethical and is something for which ethics has neither time nor opportunity.
CA, p. 17
The longer life goes on and the longer the existing person through his action is woven into existence, the more difficult it is to separate the ethical from the external …
CUP, p. 138
In order to study the ethical, every human being is assigned to himself.
CUP, p. 141
To ask about this ethical interiority in another individual is already unethical inasmuch as it is a diversion.
CUP, p. 323
The ethical as such is the universal, and as the universal it applies to everyone, which from another angle means that it applies at all times.
FT, p. 54
If the one who is to act wants to judge himself by the result, he will never begin.
FT, p. 63
An ethics that ignores sin is a completely futile discipline, but if it affirms sin, then it has eo ipso exceeded itself.
FT, pp. 98–99
To desert one’s post, to flee in battle, is always dishonorable, but then sagacity has come up with an ingenious turn that obligingly forestalls flight—it is evasion. Therefore, through evasion one never gets into danger and as a result does not lose one’s honor by fleeing in danger.
UDVS, p. 82
And this is how perhaps the great majority of men live: they work gradually at eclipsing their ethical and ethical–religious comprehension, which would lead them out into decisions and conclusions that their lower nature does not much care for …
SUD, p. 94
But what does it mean to live esthetically, and what does it mean to live ethically? What is the esthetic in a person, and what is the ethical? To that I would respond: the esthetic in a person is that by which he spontaneously and immediately is what he is; the ethical is that by which he becomes what he becomes.
EO,2, p. 178
When a person has felt the intensity of duty with all his energy, then he is ethically matured, and then duty will break forth within him. The fundamental point, therefore, is not whether a person can count on his fingers how many duties he has, but that he has once and for all felt the intensity of duty in such a way that the consciousness of it is for him the assurance of the eternal validity of his being.
EO,2, p. 266
The ethical thesis that every human being has a calling expresses, then, that there is a rational order of things, in which every human being, if he so wills, fills his place in such a way that he simultaneously expresses the universally human and the individual.
EO,2, p. 292
Kant was of the opinion that man is his own law (autonomy)—that is, he binds himself under the law which he himself gives himself. Actually, in a profounder sense, this is how lawlessness or experimentation are established. This is not being rigorously earnest any more than Sancho Panza’s self-administered blows to his bottom were vigorous.
JP, vol. 1, no. 188, p. 76
DECEPTION/SELF-DECEPTION
But we human beings have such a desire to live in an illusion. Alas, that is precisely why worldly greatness and renown are such a dangerous snare … because being the object of the attention of many people … can so easily mislead a person into drawing the erroneous conclusion that one is also more important for God.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 68, p. 56
Zealousness to learn from life is seldom found, but all the more frequently a desire, inclination, and reciprocal haste to be deceived by life.
TA, p. 10
We can be deceived by believing what is untrue, but we certainly are also deceived by not believing what is true.
WL, p. 5
Which is sadder, the sight that promptly and unconditionally moves one to tears, the sight of someone unhappily deceived in love, or the sight that in a certain sense could tempt laughter, the sight of the self-deceived, whose fatuous conceit of not being deceived is indeed ridiculous and laughable if the ridiculousness of it were not an even stronger expression for horror, since it shows that he is not worthy of tears.
WL, p. 5
Oh, there is a lot of talk in the world about treachery and faithfulness, and, God help us, it is unfortunately all too true, but still let us never because of this forget that the most dangerous traitor of all is the one every person has within himself.
WL, p. 23
When deception and truth are then placed in the equilibrium of opposite possibilities, the decision is whether there is mistrust or love in you. See, someone says, “Even what appears to be the purest feeling could still be a deception.” Well, yes, that is possible; it must be possible. “Ergo I choose mistrust or choose to believe nothing.” That is, he discloses his mistrust. Let us reverse the conclusion: “Truth and falsity reach unconditionally just as far; therefore it is possible that even something that appears to be the vilest behavior could be pure love.” Well, yes, it is possible, it must be possible. Ergo the one who loves chooses to believe all things—that is, he discloses his love.
WL, p. 228
But here in the world it is not “stupid” to believe ill of a good person; after all, it is an arrogance by which one gets rid of the good in a convenient way. But it is “stupid” to believe well of an evil person; so one safeguards oneself—since what one so greatly fears is being in error. On the other hand, the loving person truly fears being in error; therefore he believes all things.
WL, p. 232
If a mentally deranged person wants to convince a reasonable person of the correctness of his insane thoughts and now in a certain sense he succeeds, is this not the most appalling of all, is this not almost merciless of existence, because if he had failed, then perhaps the mentally deranged person could have become aware that he was mentally deranged, but now it is hidden from him and his mental derangement is probably incurable. The situation of the deceiver is like that …
WL, p. 242
The person who is deceived by the world can still hope that he will not be disappointed some other time under other circumstances, but the person who deceives himself is continually deceived even if he flees to the farthest limits of the world, because he cannot escape himself.
EUD, p. 211
It is the nature of a sickness to crave most vehemently, to love most, precisely that which is most harmful to the one who is sick. But, spiritually understood, the human being in his natural state is sick, he is in error, in a self-deception. Therefore he craves most of all to be deceived; then he is allowed not only to remain in error but to feel really at home in the self-deception.
TM, p. 225
[O]f all deceivers, fear most yourself!
TM, p. 297
Talleyrand’s famous statement that man did not acquire speech in order to reveal his thoughts but in order to conceal them contains a profound irony about the world and from the angle of political prudence corresponds entirely to another genuinely diplomatic principle: mundus vult decipi, decipiatur ergo [the world wants to be deceived; therefore let it be deceived].
CI, pp. 253–54
GUILT
Guilt has for the eye of the spirit the fascinating power of the serpent’s glance.
CA, p. 103
Whoever learns to know his guilt only by analogy to judgments of the police court and the supreme court never really understands that he is guilty, for if a man is guilty, he is infinitely guilty.
CA, p. 161
The situation of the guilty person traveling through life to eternity is like that of a murderer who fled the scene of his act—and his crime—on the express train: alas, just beneath the coach in which he sat ran the telegraph wires carrying his description and orders for his arrest at the first station.
SUD, p. 124
[T]he Omniscient One does not find out anything about the person confessing, but instead the person confessing finds out something about himself.
UDVS, p. 22
Guilt—what does it mean? Is it hexing? Is it not positively known how it comes about that a person is guilty? Will no one answer me?
R, p. 200
Ah, there are crimes that the world does not call crimes, that it rewards and almost honors—and yet, yet I would rather, God forbid, arrive in eternity with three repented murders on my conscience than as a retired slanderer …
WL, p. 291
In paganism the Furies were seen pursuing the guilty, their frightful figures were seen—but remorse cannot be seen, remorse is hidden, a hidden pregnancy of which a bad conscience is the father.
JN, vol. 2, Journal JJ: 334, p. 228
Human justice is very prolix, and yet at times quite mediocre; divine justice is more concise and needs no information from the prosecution … but makes the guilty one his own informer and helps him with eternity’s memory.
EUD, p. 351
ENVY
Human envy will finally come to abolish every essential distinction, replacing it with tyrannical arbitrariness.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 43, p. 43
It is a slow death to let oneself be trampled to death by geese, and to let oneself be worn to death by envy is also a slow way of dying.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB: 209, p. 122
Envy is secret admiration. An admirer who feels that he cannot become happy by abandoning himself to it chooses to be envious of that which he admires.
SUD, p. 86
The man who told Aristides that he was voting to banish him, “because he was tired of hearing him everywhere called the only just man,” actually did not deny Aristides’ excellence but confessed something about himself, that his relation to this excellence was not the happy infatuation of admiration but the unhappy infatuation of envy, but he did not minimize that excellence.
TA, p. 83
Envy in the process of establishing itself takes the form of leveling, and whereas a passionate age accelerates, raises up and overthrows, elevates and debases, a reflective apathetic age does the opposite, it stifles and impedes, it levels.
What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music. It is with him as with the poor wretches in Phalaris’s bronze bull, who were slowly tortured over a slow fire; their screams could not reach the tyrant’s ears to terrify him; to him they sounded like sweet music. And people crowd around the poet and say to him, “Sing again soon”—in other words, may new sufferings torture your soul, and may your lips continue to be formed as before, because your screams would only alarm us, but the music is charming.
EO,1, p. 19
[J]ust as God created man and woman, so he created the hero and the poet or orator. The poet or orator can do nothing that the hero does; he can only admire, love, and delight in him…. He is recollection’s genius.
FT, p. 15
A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.
FT, p. 61
Christianly understood, every poet-existence … is sin, the sin of poetizing instead of being, of relating to the good and the true through the imagination instead of being that—that is, existentially striving to be that.
SUD, p. 77
Poetry and art have been called an anticipation of the eternal. If one wants to call them that, one must nevertheless be aware that poetry and art are not essentially related to an existing person, since the contemplation of poetry and art, “joy over the beautiful,” is disinterested, and the observer is contemplatively outside himself …
CUP, p. 313 (note)
People love the poet above all because he is to them the most dangerous of all.
TM, p. 225
This morning I saw half a score of wild geese fly away in the crisp cool air; they were right overhead at first and then farther and farther away, and at last they separated into two flocks, like two eyebrows over my eyes, which now gazed into the land of poetry.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 96[a], p. 243
As the poet’s song echoes with a sigh from his own unhappy love, so too will all my inspired talk about the ideal of being a Christian echo with a sigh: Alas! I am not a Christian, I am only a Christian poet and thinker.
JN, vol. 5, NB10: 200, p. 379
It is the most interesting time, the period of falling in love, where after the first touch of a wand’s sweeping sensation, from each encounter, every glance … one brings something home, just like a bird busily fetching one stick after the other to her nest, yet always feels overwhelmed by the great wealth.
JN, vol. 1, Journal DD: 154, p. 255
Erotic love and marriage are really only a further confirmation of self-love—inasmuch as two unite in loving the self. It is for this very reason that married people become so satisfied and flourish with such vegetative abundance—for pure love does not conform to earthly existence the way self-love does.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 78, pp. 171–72
[I]n Christendom we have completely forgotten what love is. We pander to erotic love and friendship, honoring and praising them as love, that is, as virtues. Nonsense. Erotic love and friendship are earthly happiness, are temporal goods, just like money, gifts, talents, etc., only even better.
JN, vol. 4, Journal NB2: 83, p. 174
What does erotic love love? Infinity.—What does erotic love fear? Boundaries.
EO,1, p. 442
FIGURE 6. Regine Olsen.
Painting by Emil Baerentzen, 1840. Museum of Copenhagen.
Erotic love [Elskov] is still not the eternal; it is the beautiful dizziness of infinity; its highest expression is the foolhardiness of riddles.
WL, p. 19
So let the harp be tuned; let the poets’ songs begin; let all be festive while erotic love [Elskov] celebrates its triumph, for erotic love is jubilant when it unites equal and equal and is triumphant when it makes equal in erotic love that which was unequal.
PF, p. 27
[S]pirit cannot participate in the culmination of the erotic. Let me express myself in the manner of the Greeks. The spirit is indeed present, because it is spirit that establishes the synthesis, but it cannot express itself in the erotic. It feels itself a stranger. It says, as it were, to the erotic: My dear, in this I cannot be a third party; therefore I shall hide myself for the time being.
CA, p. 71
SILENCE
Do you not believe in silence? I do. When Cain had killed Abel, Abel was silent. But Abel’s blood shouts to heaven; it shouts, … it shouts to heaven; what terrible eloquence that never becomes silent—ah, the power of silence!
FSE, p. 46
And if I were a physician and someone asked me “What do you think should be done?” I would answer, “The first thing, the unconditional condition for anything to be done, consequently the very first thing that must be done is: create silence, bring about silence; God’s Word cannot be heard, and if in order to be heard in the hullabaloo it must be shouted deafeningly with noisy instruments, then it is not God’s Word; create silence!”
FSE, p. 47
Silence … does not consist simply in the absence of speaking. No, silence is like the subdued lighting in a pleasant room, like the friendliness in a modest living room; it is not something one talks about, but it is there and exercises its beneficent power.
FSE, p. 49
Silence is the demon’s trap, and the more that is silenced, the more terrible the demon, but silence is also divinity’s mutual understanding with the single individual.
FT, p. 88
Abraham remains silent—but he cannot speak. Therein lies the distress and anxiety. Even though I go on talking night and day without interruption, if I cannot make myself understood when I speak, then I am not speaking. This is the case with Abraham.
FT, p. 113
Surely it is speech that distinguishes humanity above the animal and then, if you like, far above the lily. But because the ability to speak is an advantage, it does not follow that the ability to be silent would not be an art or be an inferior art. On the contrary, because the human being is able to speak, the ability to be silent is an art, and a great art precisely because this advantage of his so easily tempts him.
WA, p. 10
If, however, you take time and listen more carefully, you hear—how amazing!—you hear silence, because uniformity is nevertheless also silence. In the evening, when silence rests over the land and you hear the distant bellowing from the meadow, or from the farmer’s house in the distance you hear the familiar voice of the dog, you cannot say that this bellowing or this voice disturbs the silence. No, this belongs to the silence, is in a mysterious and thus in turn silent harmony with the silence; this increases it.
WA, p. 13
What is it to chatter? It is the annulment of the passionate disjunction between being silent and speaking. Only the person who can remain essentially silent can speak essentially, can act essentially. Silence is inwardness. Chattering gets ahead of essential speaking, and giving utterance to reflection has a weakening effect on action by getting ahead of it.
TA, p. 97
From men, man learns to speak, from the gods, to be silent.
SUD, p. 127
[S]ilence can also be an untruth …
PV, p. 89
[W]ithout stillness conscience does not exist at all …
TDIO, p. 11
And if anyone notes that darkness falls upon his soul, let him be silent, because in this condition he ought not to speak.—
TDIO, p. 137 (Supplement)
