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.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD, letter to Jette Kierkegaard, The Essential Kierkegaard
For when regret calls to a person it is always late.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits
Is there anyone who thinks that the resolution can come later when it is really needed? So it is not needed then, not on the wedding day, when the eternal pledge is entered into? But then, later? Can he mean that there was no thought of leaving one another, but of enjoying the first gladness of their union-and so united, of finding support in the resolution? Then when toil and trouble come, and need, be it physical or spiritual, stands at the door, then the time is there? Aye, indeed, the time is there-the time for the resolved individual to muster up his resolution; but not just the time to form a resolution. It is true that distress and failure may help a man to seek God in a resolution; but the question is whether the conception is always the right one, whether it is joyful, whether it does not have a certain wretchedness, a secret wish that it were not necessary, whether it may not be out of humor, envious, melancholy, and so no ennobling reflection of the trials of life. There is in the state a loan association to which the indigent may apply. The poor man is helped, but I wonder if that poor man has a pleasant conception of the loan-association. And so there may also be a marriage which first sought God when in difficulty, alas, sought Him as a loan-association; and everyone who first seeks God for the first time when in difficulties, always runs this danger. Is then such a late resolution, which even if it were a worthy one, was not without shame and not without great danger, bought at the last moment, is that more beautiful, and wiser than the resolution at the beginning of marriage?
SOREN KIERKEGAARD, Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Life
One must learn to know oneself before knowing anything else.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD, journal, August 1, 1835
One understands only in proportion to becoming himself that which he understands.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD, attributed, The Logic of Subjectivity
God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD, The Journals of Kierkegaard
I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations -- one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it -- you will regret both.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
The godly grief of repentance and the concern of inwardness must above all not be confused with impatience. Experience teaches that to repent at once is not always even the right time to repent, because in this moment of haste, when the engaged thoughts and various passions are still busily in motion or at least tensed in the relaxation, repentance can so easily be mistaken about what really should be repented, can so easily confuse itself with the opposite: with momentary remorse, that is, with impatience; with a painful, tormentingly worldly grief, that is, with impatience. But impatience, however long it continues to rage, however darkened the mind becomes, never becomes repentance; its weeping, however convulsed with sobs, never becomes the weeping of repentance; its tears are as devoid of beneficent fruitfulness as clouds without ran, as a spasmodic shower. But if a person incurred some greater guilt but also improved and year by year steadily made progress in the good, it is certain that year after year, with greater inwardness-all in proportion to his progress in the greater inwardness-he will repent of that guilt from which he year after year distances himself in the temporal sense. It is indeed true that guilt must stand vividly before a person if he is truly to repent, but momentary repentance is very dubious and is not to be hoped for at all simply because it perhaps is not the deep inwardness of concern that sets forth the guilt so vividly, but only a momentary feeling. Then regret is selfish, sensuous, sensuously powerful in the moment, inflamed in expression, impatient in the most contradictory overstatements-and for this very reason it is not repentance.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits
The absurd is a category, the negative criterion, of the divine or of the relationship to the divine. When the believer has faith, the absurd is not the absurd -- faith transforms it, but in every weak moment it is again more or less absurd to him.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD, Journals of Soren Kierkegaard
What wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD, Either/Or
Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD, Either/Or
There is no special difficulty connected with being an idealist in the imagination; but to exist as an idealist is an extremely strenuous task, because existence itself constitutes a hindrance and an objection.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments
So we shall now consider: mercifulness, a work of love even if it can give nothing and is able to do nothing. We shall endeavor according to the capacities granted to us to make as clear as possible, as inviting as possible, to bring as close as possible to the poor person what comfort he has in being able to be merciful.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD, Works of Love
Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy -- to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. Therefore, whenever I see a fly settling, in the decisive moment, on the nose of such a person of affairs; or if he is spattered with mud from a carriage which drives past him in still greater haste; or the drawbridge opens up before him; or a tile falls down and knocks him dead, then I laugh heartily.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD, Selections from the writings of Kierkegaard
The moment of choice is for me very serious, less on account of the rigorous pondering of the alternatives, and of the multitude of thoughts that attack to each separate link, than because there is a danger afoot that at the next moment it may not be in my power to make the same choice, that something has already been lived that must be lived over again. For it is a delusion to think one can keep one's personality blank, or that one can in any real sense arrest and interrupt personal life. The personality already has interest in the choice before one chooses, and if one postpones the choice the personality makes the choice unconsciously, or it is made by the dark powers within it. Then when at last the choice is made, if, as I remarked earlier, one has not gone into complete dissolution, one discovers that there is something that must be done over again, that must be retracted, and that is often very difficult.
