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Fear and Trembling QUOTES

Fear and Trembling QUOTES

1 " If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin. "

― Søren Kierkegaard , Fear and Trembling

2 " If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair? "

― Søren Kierkegaard , Fear and Trembling

3 " 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

4 " 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. "

― Søren Kierkegaard , Fear and Trembling

5 " 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. "

― Søren Kierkegaard , Fear and Trembling

6 " Should one of them after having caught the greatness of Abraham's deed, but also the appallingness of it, venture out on the road, I would saddle my horse and ride along with him. At every stop before we came to the mountain in Moriah I would explain to him that he could still turn back, could rue the misunderstanding that he was called to be tried in a conflict of this nature, could confess that he lacked the courage, so that if God wanted Isaac God must take him himself. "

― Johannes de Silentio, , Fear and Trembling

7 " Abraham I cannot understand; in a way all I can learn from him is to be amazed. If one imagines one can be moved to faith by considering the outcome of this story, one deceives oneself, and is out to cheat God of faith's first movement, one is out to suck the life-wisdom out of the paradox. One or another may succeed, for our age does not stop with faith, with its miracle of turning water into wine; it goes further, it turns wine into water. "

― Johannes de Silentio, , Fear and Trembling

8 " But we are curious about the result, just as we are curious about the way a book turns out. We do not want to know anything about the anxiety, the distress, the paradox. We carry on an esthetic flirtation with the result. It arrives just as unexpectedly but also just as effortlessly as a prize in a lottery, and when we have heard the result, we have built ourselves up. "

― Søren Kierkegaard , Fear and Trembling

9 " For with his little secret that he cannot divulge, the poet buys this power of the word to tell everybody else's dark secrets. A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil. "

― Søren Kierkegaard , Fear and Trembling

10 " He who loved himself became great in himself, and he who loved others became great through his devotion, but he who loved God became greater than all. "

― Søren Kierkegaard , Fear and Trembling

11 " Theology sits rouged at the window and courts philosophy's favor, offering to sell her charms to it. "

― Søren Kierkegaard , Fear and Trembling

12 " Hope is a passion for the possible. "

― Søren Kierkegaard , Fear and Trembling

13 " Battle day and night against the guile of oblivion... "

― Søren Kierkegaard , Fear and Trembling

14 " I am courteous enough to assume that everyone in this so aesthetically voluptuous age, so potent and aroused that conception occurs as easily as with the partridge which, Aristotle says, needs only to hear the voice of the cock or its flight overhead - to assume that at the mere sound of the word 'concealment' everyone can easily shake a dozen romances and comedies from his sleeve. "

― Søren Kierkegaard , Fear and Trembling

15 " People unable to bear the martyrdom [...] unintelligently jump off the path, and choose instead, conveniently enough, the world’s admiration of their proficiency. The true knight of faith is a witness, never a teacher, and in this lies the deep humanity in him which is more worth than this foolish concern for others’ weal and woe which is honoured under the name of sympathy, but which is really nothing but vanity. "

― Søren Kierkegaard , Fear and Trembling

16 " That there may be some who need coercion, who if given free rein would riot in selfish pleasure like unbridled beasts, is no doubt true, but one should show precisely by the fact that one knows how to speak with fear and trembling that one is not of their number. "

― Søren Kierkegaard , Fear and Trembling

17 " ...why bother remembering a past that cannot be made into a present? "

― Søren Kierkegaard , Fear and Trembling

18 " I am convinced that God is love, this thought has for me a primitive lyrical validity. When it is present to me, I am unspeakably blissful, when it is absent, I long for it more vehemently than does the lover for his object. "

― Søren Kierkegaard , Fear and Trembling

19 " If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin. Even though the result may gladden the whole world, that cannot help the hero; for he knows the result only when the whole thing is over, and that is not how he became a hero, but by virtue of the fact that he began. "

― Søren Kierkegaard , Fear and Trembling

20 " When you were called, did you answer or did you not? Perhaps softly and in a whisper? "

― Søren Kierkegaard , Fear and Trembling