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21 " The most common form of despair is not being who you are. "
― Søren Kierkegaard
22 " The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins. "
― Søren Kierkegaard , The Journals of Kierkegaard
23 " The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays. "
24 " 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. "
25 " The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing. But because he wants to do it in his own strength, he is fighting not with man, but with God. "
26 " For he who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God. "
― Søren Kierkegaard , Fear and Trembling
27 " People try to persuade us that the objections against Christianity spring from doubt. That is a complete misunderstanding. The objections against Christianity spring from insubordination, the dislike of obedience, rebellion against all authority. As a result, people have hitherto been beating the air in their struggle against objections, because they have fought intellectually with doubt instead of fighting morally with rebellion. "
28 " In relationship to God one can not involve himself to a certain degree. God is precisely the contradiction to all that is 'to a certain degree'. "
― Søren Kierkegaard , Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard
29 " Don't forget to love yourself. "
30 " People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness. "
31 " 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 in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not. "
32 " Once you are born in this world you’re old enough to die. "
33 " What looks like politics, and imagines itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious movement. "
34 " Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in everygeneration may not come that far, but none comes further. "
35 " to have faith is precisely to lose one's mind so as to win God. "
― Søren Kierkegaard , The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening
36 " Sitting calmly on a ship in fair weather is not a metaphor for having faith; but when the ship has sprung a leak, then enthusiastically to keep the ship afloat by pumping and not to seek the harbor--that is the metaphor for having faith. (Concluding Unscientific Postscript) "
37 " Faith is a marvel, and yet no human being is excluded from it; for that in which all human life is united is passion, and faith is a passion. "
38 " It takes a purely human courage to renounce the whole temporal realm in order to gain eternity, but this I do gain and in all eternity can never renounce—it is a self-contradiction. But it takes a paradoxical and humble courage to grasp the whole temporal realm now by virtue of the absurd, and this is the courage of faith. "
39 " The more he needs God, the more deeply he comprehends he is in need of God, and then the more he in his need presses forward to God, the more perfect he is... To need God is nothing to be ashamed of but is perfection itself. "
40 " If someone who wanted to learn to dance were to say: For centuries, one generation after the other has learned the positions, and it is high time that I take advantage of this and promptly begin with the quadrille--people would presumably laugh a little at him, but in the world of spirit this is very plausible. 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. "