Søren Kierkegaard

All quotations are from Princeton editions unless stated otherwise. Memes are not mine. Run by a PhD student studying Kierkegaard.

[s-kierkegaard]

You should let the mouth speak out of the abundance of the heart; you should not be ashamed of your feelings and even less of honestly giving each one his due. But one should not love in words and platitudes, and neither should one recognize love by them. - S. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, p.12

[s-kierkegaard]

‘Poetry is illusion before understanding, religiousness illusion after understanding. Between poetry and religiousness, worldly wisdom about life performs its vaudeville. Every individual who does not live either poetically or religiously is obtuse.’

Johannes Climacus, CUP:457

[s-kierkegaard]

‘The subjective thinker is not a scientist-scholar; he is an artist. To exist is an art. The subjective thinker is esthetic enough for his life to have esthetic content, ethical enough to regulate it, dialectical enough in thinking to master it. The subjective thinker’s task is to understand himself in existence.’

Johannes Climacus, CUP1: 351

[s-kierkegaard]

‘This is indeed why we human beings say that, however unhappy one is, to exist is nevertheless always a good, and I recollect a depressed person who, at one time in the midst of his suffering when he wished himself dead, at the sight of a basket of potatoes was prompted to ask himself the question whether he still did not have more joy in existing than a potato.’

Johannes Climacus, CUP, 330

[s-kierkegaard]

Existing ... cannot be done without passion.

Johannes Climacus, CUP1:311

[s-kierkegaard]

The youth's admiration, his enthusiasm, and his limitless confidence in Hegel are precisely the satire on Hegel.

Johannes Climacus, CUP1:311

[s-kierkegaard]

pure thinking would have led to one suicide after another, because suicide is the only existence-consequence of pure thinking

Johannes Climacus, CUP1:308

[s-kierkegaard]

To exist, one thinks, is nothing much, even less an art. Of course, we all exist, but to think abstractly – that is something. But truly to exist, that is, to permeate one's existence with consciousness, simultaneously to be eternal, far beyond it, as it were, and nevertheless present in it and nevertheless in a process of becoming – that is truly difficult.

Johannes Climacus, CUP1:308

[s-kierkegaard]

‘If abstract thinking is assumed to be the highest, it follows that scientific scholarship and thinkers proudly abandon existence and leave the rest of us to put up with the worst.’

Johannes Climacus, CUP.

[s-kierkegaard]

Subjectivity is truth. Objectively Christianity is nothing. ‘No wonder that people are so quickly finished with Christianity …  One becomes objective, one wants to consider objectively – that the god [Guden] was crucified – an event that, when it occurred, did not permit even the temple to be objective, for its curtain tore, did not even permit the dead to remain objective, for they rose up from their graves.’

Kierkegaard as Johannes Climacus, CUP:279.

[s-kierkegaard]

The more purely the broken relationship can be maintained, while terror of the finest quality grows and increases, the more the dialectic can discover.

Johannes Climacus, CUP1:266

[s-kierkegaard]

"But I do not pretend to be better than others. Therefore what the old Bishop once said to me is not true - namely, that I spoke as if the others were going to hell. No, if I can be said to speak at all of going to hell then I say something like this: If the others are going to hell, then I am going along with them. But I do not believe that; on the contrary, I believe that we will all be saved, I, too, and this awakens my deepest wonder."

Soren Kierkegaard, Papirer XI3 B 57.

[s-kierkegaard]

in my opinion the misfortune with our age was just that it had come to know too much and had forgotten what it means to exist and what inwardness is.

Johannes Climacus, CUP1: 259

[s-kierkegaard]

‘Is it not precisely the simple that is most difficult for the wise man to understand?’

Johannes Climacus, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p.160

[unconditionally-bella-love-light]

People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.

Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard

[freelance-philosopher]

“Precisely because a human being has the ability to speak, the ability to keep silent is an art; and precisely because this advantage of his tempts him so easily, the ability to keep silent is a great art.”

— Søren Kierkegaard, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air

[s-kierkegaard]

A shameless self promotion.

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