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...it Is Not The Obscure Passages In Scripture That Bind You But The Ones You Understand. With These You Are To Comply At Once. If You Understood Only One Passage In All Of Scripture, Well, Then You Must Do That First Of All. It Will Be This Passage God Asks You About. Do Not First Sit Down And Ponder The Obscure Passages. God's Word Is Given In Order That You Shall Act According To It, Not That You Gain Expertise In Interpreting It.

-Soren Kierkegaard

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...it Is Not The

Soren Kierkegaard

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...it Is Not The Obscure Passages In Scripture That Bind You But The Ones You Understand. With These You Are To Comply At Once. If You Understood Only One Passage In All Of Scripture, Well, Then You Must Do That First Of All. It Will Be This Passage God Asks You About. Do Not First Sit Down And Ponder The Obscure Passages. God's Word Is Given In Order That You Shall Act According To It, Not That You Gain Expertise In Interpreting It.

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I Go Fishing For A Thousand Monsters In The Depths Of My Own Self

Preparation For Becoming Attentive To Christianity Does Not Consist In Reading Many Books ... But In Fuller Immersion In Existence.

Love Is The Expression Of The One Who Loves, Not Of The One Who Is Loved. Those Who Think They Can Love Only The People They Prefer Do Not Love At All. Love Discovers Truths About Individuals That Others Cannot See

Destroy Your Primitivity, And You Will Most Probably Get Along Well In The World, Maybe Achieve Great Success--but Eternity Will Reject You. Follow Up Your Primitivity, And You Will Be Shipwrecked In Temporality, But Accepted By Eternity.

Irony Is The Birth-pangs Of The Objective Mind (based Upon The Misrelationship, Discovered By The I , Between Existence And The Idea Of Existence). Humor Is The Birth -pangs Of The Absolute Mind (based Upon The Misrelationship, Discovered By The I , Between The I And The Idea Of The I .

I Have Only One Confidant, And That Is The Silence Of Night.

To Be A Teacher Does Not Mean Simply To Affirm That Such A Thing Is So, Or To Deliver A Lecture, Etc.

Fate, Then, Is The Nothing Of Anxiety.

...it Is Not The Obscure Passages In Scripture That Bind You But The Ones You Understand. With These You Are To Comply At Once. If You Understood Only One Passage In All Of Scripture, Well, Then You Must Do That First Of All. It Will Be This Passage God Asks You About. Do Not First Sit Down And Ponder The Obscure Passages. God's Word Is Given In Order That You Shall Act According To It, Not That You Gain Expertise In Interpreting It.

Truth Is Not Introduced Into The Individual From Without, But Was Within Him All The Time.

The Person Who Praises God Is On The Tracks Of Justice.

Thought Provoking

Don't You Know That A Midnight Hour Comes When Everyone Has To Take Off His Mask? Do You Think Life Always Lets Itself Be Trifled With? Do You Think You Can Sneak Off A Little Before Midnight To Escape This?

The Highest Of All Is Not To Understand The Highest But To Act Upon It.

And This Is One Of The Most Crucial Definitions For The Whole Of Christianity; That The Opposite Of Sin Is Not Virtue But Faith.

Irony Limits, Finitizes, And Circumscribes And Thereby Yields Truth, Actuality, Content; It Disciplines And Punishes And Thereby Yields Balance And Consistency.

The More One Suffers, The More, I Believe, Has One A Sense For The Comic. It Is Only By The Deepest Suffering That One Acquires True Authority In The Use Of The Comic, An Authority Which By One Word Transforms As By Magic The Reasonable Creature One Calls Man Into A Caricature.

My Scholarly Expectation Is Then That I May Succeed In Becoming Clever In Philosophy In Spite Of My Stupidity.

Christ Was Crucified Because He Would Have Nothing To Do With The Crowd (even Though He Addressed Himself To All). He Did Not Want To Form A Party, An Interest Group, A Mass Movement, But Wanted To Be What He Was, The Truth, Which Is Related To The Single Individual. Therefore Everyone Who Will Genuinely Serve The Truth Is By That Very Fact A Martyr. To Win A Crowd Is No Art; For That Only Untruth Is Needed, Nonsense, And A Little Knowledge Of Human Passions. But No Witness To The Truth Dares To Get Involved With The Crowd.

It Is Perhaps The Misfortune Of My Life That I Am Interested In Far Too Much But Not Decisively In Any One Thing; All My Interests Are Not Subordinated In One But Stand On An Equal Footing.

If You Want To Be Loathsome To God, Just Run With The Herd.

For He Who Loves God Without Faith Reflects On Himself, While The Person Who Loves God In Faith Reflects On God.

The God That Can Be Named Is Not God.

The Truth Is Lived Before It Is Understood. It Must Be Fought For, Tested, And Appropriated. Truth Is The Way... Anyone Will Easily Understand It If He Just Gives Himself To It.

I Have Just Now Come From A Party Where I Was Its Life And Soul; Witticisms Streamed From My Lips, Everyone Laughed And Admired Me, But I Went Away - Yes, The Dash Should Be As Long As The Radius Of The Earth's Orbit ——————————— And Wanted To Shoot Myself.

It Is So Hard To Believe Because It Is So Hard To Obey.

The Best News The World Has Ever Heard Came From A Graveyard - Christ Is Risen!

I Have, I Believe, The Courage To Doubt Everything; I Have, I Believe, The Courage To Fight Against Everything; But I Do Not Have The Courage To Acknowledge Anything, The Courage To Possess, To Own Anything.

No, I Won't Leave The World--i'll Enter A Lunatic Asylum And See If The Profundity Of Insanity Reveals To Me The Riddles Of Life. Idiot, Why Didn't I Do That Long Ago, Why Has It Taken Me So Long To Understand What It Means When The Indians Honour The Insane, Step Aside For Them? Yes, A Lunatic Asylum--don't You Think I May End Up There?

Confidence Is The Present Tense Of Hope.

What Is Existence For But To Be Laughed At If Men In Their Twenties Have Already Attained The Utmost?

Only One Deception Is Possible In The Infinite Sense, Self-deception.

Patience Is Necessary, And One Cannot Reap Immediately Where One Has Sown.

To Venture Causes Anxiety. Not To Venture Is To Lose Oneself.

I'm So Misunderstood That People Misunderstand Me Even When I Tell Them I'm Misunderstood.

In The Life Of The Individual When Love Awakens It Is Older Than Everything Else, Because When It Exists It Seems As If It Has Existed For A Long Time; It Presupposes Itself Back Into The Distant Past Until All Searching Ends In The Inexplicable Origin.

He Who Does Not Know How To Encircle A Girl So That She Loses Sight Of Everything He Does Not Want Her To See, He Who Does Not Know How To Poetize Himself Into A Girl So That It Is From Her That Everything Proceeds As He Wants It-he Is And Remains A Bungler

Faith Is The Highest Passion In A Man.

It Is Very Important In Life To Know When Your Cue Comes.

Genius Never Desires What Does Not Exist.

The More People Who Believe Something, The More Apt It Is To Be Wrong. The Person Who's Right Often Has To Stand Alone.

In The Deepest Sense, The Being In A State Of Sin Is The Sin, The Particular Sins Are Not The Continuation Of Sin, They Are Expressions Of Its Continuation.

The Extreme Rarity Of Transitional Forms In The Fossil Record Persists As The Trade Secret Of Paleontology.

Doubt Is Thought's Despair; Despair Is Personality's Doubt. . . . Doubt And Despair . . . Belong To Completely Different Spheres; Different Sides Of The Soul Are Set In Motion. . . . Despair Is An Expression Of The Total Personality, Doubt Only Of Thought.

I Found I Had Less And Less To Say, Until Finally, I Became Silent, And Began To Listen. I Discovered In The Silence, The Voice Of God

No Time Of Life Is So Beautiful As The Early Days Of Love, When With Every Meeting, Every Glance, One Fetches Something New Home To Rejoice Over.

Adversity Draws Men Together And Produces Beauty And Harmony In Life's Relationships, Just As The Cold Of Winter Produces Ice-flowers On The Window-panes, Which Vanish With The Warmth.

What A Misfortune To Be A Woman! And Yet, The Worst Misfortune Is Not To Understand What A Misfortune It Is.

Talent Warms-up The Given (as They Say In Cookery) And Makes It Apparent; Genius Brings Something New. But Our Time Lets Talent Pass For Genius. They Want To Abolish The Genius, Deify The Genius, And Let Talent Forge Ahead.

Love Believes All Things And Yet Is Never Deceived.

At The Bottom Of Enmity Between Strangers Lies Indifference.

Why I So Much Prefer Autumn To Spring Is That In The Autumn One Looks At Heaven--in The Spring At The Earth.

You Should Therefore Say: Alone In One's Boat, Alone With One's Care, Alone With One's Despair, Which One Is Craven Enough To Want Rather To Keep Than Submit To The Pain Of Being Healed.

I Do Not Lack The Courage To Think A Thought Whole.

A Poet Is An Unhappy Creature Whose Heart Is Tortured By Deepest Suffering But Whose Lips Are So Formed That When His Sighs And Cries Stream Out Over Them, Their Sound Beomes Like The Sound Of Beautiful Music . . . . And Men Flock About The Poet Saying, Sing For Us Soon Again; That Is To Say, May New Sufferings Torture Your Soul, And May Your Lips Continue To Be Formed As Before.

There Are Two Kinds Of Geniuses. The Characteristic Of The One Is Roaring, But The Lightning Is Meagre And Rarely Strikes; The Other Kind Is Characterized By Reflection By Which It Constrains Itself Or Restrains The Roaring. But The Lightning Is All The More Intense; With The Speed And Sureness Of Lightning It Hits The Selected Particular Points - And Is Fatal.

This Fact, That The Opposite Of Sin Is By No Means Virtue, Has Been Overlooked. The Latter Is Partly A Pagan View, Which Is Content With A Merely Human Standard, And Which For That Very Reason Does Not Know What Sin Is, That All Sin Is Before God. No, The Opposite Of Sin Is Faith.

My Tactics Were, By God's Aid, To Employ Every Means To Make It Clear What The Requirement Of Christianity Truly Is.

Anxiety Is The Dizziness Of Freedom.

You Wanted God's Ideas About What Was Best For You To Coincide With Your Ideas, But You Also Wanted Him To Be The Almighty Creator Of Heaven And Earth So That He Could Properly Fulfill Your Wish. And Yet, If He Were To Share Your Ideas, He Would Cease To Be The Almighty Father.

As My Prayer Became More Attentive And Inward, I Had Less And Less To Say. I Finally Became Completely Silent... This Is How It Is. To Pray Does Not Mean To Listen To Oneself Speaking. Prayer Involves Becoming Silent, And Being Silent, And Waiting Until God Is Heard.

...there Is One Thing That All Satan's Cunning And All The Snares Of Temptation Cannot Take By Surprise - An Undivided Will.

Do You Know Of Any More Overwhelming And Humbling Expression For God's Condescension And Extravagance Towards Us Human Beings Than That He Places Himself, So To Say, On The Same Level Of Choice With The World, Just So That We May Be Able To Choose; That God, If Language Dare Speak Thus, Woos Humankind - That He, The Eternally Strong One, Woos Sapless Humanity? Yet, How Insignificant Is The Young Lover's Choice Between Her Pursuers By Comparison With This Choice Between God And The World.

Death Induces The Sensual Person To Say: Let Us Eat And Drink, Because Tomorrow We Shall Die - But This Is Sensuality's Cowardly Lust For Life, That Contemptible Order Of Things Where One Lives In Order To Eat And Drink Instead Of Eating And Drinking In Order To Live.

Take A Chance And You May Lose. Take Not A Chance And You Have Lost Already.

We Live As If We Were Unaware Of Our Impending Destruction

Irony Is A Disciplinarian Feared Only By Those Who Do Not Know It, But Cherished By Those Who Do. He Who Does Not Understand Irony And Has No Ear For Its Whispering Lacks Of What Might Called The Absolute Beginning Of The Personal Life. He Lacks What At Moments Is Indispensable For The Personal Life, Lacks Both The Regeneration And Rejuvenation, The Cleaning Baptism Of Irony That Redeems The Soul From Having Its Life In Finitude Though Living Boldly And Energetically In Finitude.

Irony Is The Cultivation Of The Spirit And Therefore Follows Next After Immediacy; Then Comes The Ethicist, Then The Humourist, Then The Religious Person.

Learning To Know Anxiety Is An Adventure Which Every Man Has To Affront If He Would Not Go To Perdition Either By Not Having Known Anxiety Or By Sinking Under It. He Therefore Who Has Leaned Rightly To Be In Anxiety Has Learned The Most Important Thing.

It Is Very Dangerous To Go Into Eternity With Possibilities Which One Has Oneself Prevented From Becoming Realities. A Possibility Is A Hint From God. One Must Follow It.

It Is Intelligent To Ask Two Questions: (1) Is It Possible? (2) Can I Do It?. But It Is Unintelligent To Ask These Questions: (1) Is It Real? (2) Has My Neighbor Done It?

No One Is So Terribly Deceived As He Who Does Not Himself Suspect It.

Never Cease Loving A Person, And Never Give Up Hope For Him, For Even The Prodigal Son Who Had Fallen Most Low, Could Still Be Saved; The Bitterest Enemy And Also He Who Was Your Friend Could Again Be Your Friend; Love That Has Grown Cold Can Kindle.

Falling In Love

To Be Lost In Spiritlessness Is The Most Terrible Thing Of All.

Terrible Things

To Grumble About The World And Its Unhappiness Is Always Easier Than To Beat One's Breast And Groan Over Oneself.

Only The Noble Of Heart Are Called To Difficulty.

Imagine Hidden In A Simpler Exterior A Secret Receptacle Wherein The Most Precious Treasure Is Deposited - There Is A Spring Which Has To Be Pressed, But The Spring Is Hidden, And The Pressure Must Have A Certain Strength, So That An Accidental Pressure Would Not Be Sufficient. So Likewise Is The Hope Of Eternity Hidden In Man's Inmost Parts, And Affliction Is The Pressure. When It Presses The Hidden Spring, And Strongly Enough, Then The Contents Appear In All Their Glory.

In The Eyes Of God, The Infinite Spirit, All The Millions That Have Lived And Now Live Do Not Make A Crowd. He Only Sees Each Individual

It Seems To Be My Destiny To Discourse On Truth, Insofar As I Discover It, In Such A Way That All Possible Authority Is Simultaneously Demolished.

It Is More Blessed To Give Than To Receive, But Then It Is Also More Blessed To Be Able To Do Without Than To Have To Have.

The More A Person Limits Himself, The More Resourceful He Becomes.

All The Shrewdness Of 'man' Seeks One Thing: To Be Able To Live Without Responsibility.

Above All, Do Not Lose Your Desire To Walk.

I Would Rather Be A Swineherd, Understood By The Swine, Than A Poet Misunderstood By Men.

What Looks Like Politics, And Imagines Itself To Be Political, Will One Day Unmask Itself As A Religious Movement.

There Is Nothing With Which Every Man Is So Afraid As Getting To Know How Enormously Much He Is Capable Of Doing And Becoming.

The Truth Is A Trap: You Cannot Get It Without It Getting You; You Cannot Get The Truth By Capturing It, Only By Its Capturing You.

My Sorrow Is My Castle.

Let Others Mock At You, Oppose You, When You Are Under The Influence Of Any Passion; Do Not Be In The Least Offended With Those Who Mock At Or Oppose You, For They Do You Good; Crucify Your Self-love And Acknowledge The Wrong, The Error Of Your Heart. But Have The Deepest Pity For Those Who Mock At Words And Works Of Faith And Piety, Of Righteousness; For Those Who Oppose The Good Which You Are Doing... God Preserve You - Getting Exasperated At Them.

God Has Given Each Of Us Our "marching Order." Our Purpose Here On Earth Is To Find Those Orders And Carry Them Out. Those Orders Acknowledge Our Special Gifts.

For The Sadness In Legitimate Humour Consists In The Fact That Honestly And Without Deceit It Reflects In A Purely Human Way Upon What It Is To Be A Child.

A Man Who Cannot Seduce Men Cannot Save Them Either.

People Demand Freedom Of Speech As A Compensation For The Freedom Of Thought Which They Seldom Use.

No One May Pride Himself At Being More Than An Individual, And No One Despondently Think That He Is Not An Individual.

... All Comparisons Injure.

The Ever Increasing Intensity Of Despair Depends Upon The Degree Of Consciousness Or Is Proportionate To This Increase: The Greater The Degree Of Consciousness, The More Intensive The Despair. This Is Everywhere Apparent, Most Clearly In Despair At Its Maximum And Minimum. The Devil's Despair Is The Most Intensive Despair, For The Devil Is Sheer Spirit And Hence Unqualified Consciousness And Transparency; There Is No Obscurity In The Devil That Could Serve As A Mitigating Excuse. Therefore, His Despair Is The Most Absolute Defiance. . . .

On The Whole, The Longing For Solitude Is A Sign That There Still Is Spirit In A Person And Is A Measure Of What Spirit There Is.

My Melancholy Is The Most Faithful Sweetheart I Have Had.

Be That Self Which One Truly Is.

The Thing Is To Understand Myself: The Thing Is To Find A Truth Which Is True For Me, To Find The Idea For Which I Can Live And Die. That Is What I Now Recognize As The Most Important Thing.

The More A Man Can Forget, The Greater The Number Of Metamorphoses Which His Life Can Undergo; The More He Can Remember, The More Divine His Life Becomes.

That Which Is Truly Human No Generation Learns From The One Before It. No Generation Learns From Another How To Love. No Generation Has A Shorter Task Assigned To It Except Insofar As The Previous Generation Shirked Its Task And Deluded Itself.

Truth Is Not Something You Can Appropriate Easily And Quickly. You Certainly Cannot Sleep Or Dream Yourself To The Truth. No, You Must Be Tried, Do Battle, And Suffer If You Are To Acquire The Truth For Yourself. It Is A Sheer Illusion To Think That In Relation To The Truth There Is An Abridgement, A Short Cut That Dispenses With The Necessity For Struggling For It.

How Ironical That It Is By Means Of Speech That Man Can Degrade Himself Below The Level Of Dumb Creation -- For A Chatterbox Is Truly Of A Lower Category Than A Dumb Creature.

When You Were Called, Did You Answer Or Did You Not? Perhaps Softly And In A Whisper?

It Will Be Easy For Us The First Time We Receive That Ball Of Yarn From Ariadne (love) And Then Go Through All The Mazes Of The Labyrinth (life) And Kill The Monster. But How Many There Are Who Plunge Into Life (the Labyrinth) Without Taking That Precaution?

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.

It Is The Duty Of The Human Understanding To Understand That There Are Things Which It Cannot Understand.

I Have Never Fought In Such A Way As To Say: I Am The True Christian, Others Are Not Christians.

To Despair Over One's Sins Indicates That Sin Has Become Or Wants To Be Internally Consistent. It Wants Nothing To Do With The Good, Does Not Want To Be So Weak As To Listen Occasionally To Other Talk. No, It Insists On Listening Only To Itself, On Having Dealings Only With Itself; It Closes Itself Up Within Itself, Indeed, Locks Itself Inside One More Inclosure, And Protects Itself Against Every Attack Or Pursuit By The Good By Despairing Over Sin.

The Unhappy Person Is Never Present To Themself Because They Always Live In The Past Or The Future.

Silence Is The Demon's Trap, And The More One Is Silenced, The More Terrible The Demon; But Silence Is Also The Divinity's Mutual Understanding With The Single Individual.

Once You Are Born In This World You’re Old Enough To Die.

If Anyone Proposes To Believe, I.e., Imagines Himself To Believe, Because Many Good And Upright People Living Here On The Hill Have Believed, I.e., Have Said That They Believedthen He Is A Fool, And It Is Essentially Indifferent Whether He Believes On Account Of His Own And Perhaps A Widely Held Opinion About What Good And Upright People Believe, Or Believes A Münchhausen.

This, Then, Is The Ultimate Paradox Of Thought: To Want To Discover Something That Thought Itself Cannot Think.

Every Mental Act Is Composed Of Doubt And Belief, But It Is Belief That Is The Positive, It Is Belief That Sustains Thought And Holds The World Together.

Just As In Earthly Life Lovers Long For The Moment When They Are Able To Breathe Forth Their Love For Each Other, To Let Their Souls Blend In A Soft Whisper, So The Mystic Longs For The Moment When In Prayer He Can, As It Were, Creep Into God.

The Bible Is Very Easy To Understand. But We Christians Are A Bunch Of Scheming Swindlers. We Pretend To Be Unable To Understand It Because We Know Very Well That The Minute We Understand, We Are Obliged To Act Accordingly.

I Must Find A Truth That Is True For Me.

To Pace About, Looking To Obtain Status, Looking To Attain 'importance' - I Can Think Of Nothing More Ridiculous.

Deep Within Every Human Being There Still Lives The Anxiety Over The Possibility Of Being Alone In The World, Forgotten By God, Overlooked Among The Millions And Millions In This Enormous Household. One Keeps This Anxiety At A Distance By Looking At The Many Round About Who Are Related To Him As Kin And Friends, But The Anxiety Is Still There, Nevertheless, And One Hardly Dares Think Of How He Would Feel If All This Were Taken Away.

The Absurd . . . The Fact That With God All Things Are Possible. The Absurd Is Not One Of The Factors Which Can Be Discriminated Within The Proper Compass Of The Understanding: It Is Not Identical With The Improbable, The Unexpected, The Unforeseen.

If I Could Prescribe Only One Remedy For All The Ills Of The Modern World, I Would Prescribe Silence.

Compared With The Person Who Is Conscious Of His Despair, The Despairing Individual Who Is Ignorant Of His Despair Is Simply A Negativity Further Away From The Truth And Deliverance. . . . Yet Ignorance Is So Far From Breaking The Despair Or Changing Despair To Nondespairing That It Can In Fact Be The Most Dangerous Form Of Despair. . . . An Individual Is Furthest From Being Conscious Of Himself As Spirit When He Is Ignorant Of Being In Despair. But Precisely This-not To Be Conscious Of Oneself As Spirit-is Despair, Which Is Spiritlessness. . . .

To Defend Something Is Always To Discredit It. Let A Man Have A Warehouse Full Of Gold, Let Him Be Willing To Give Away A Ducat To Every One Of The Poor - But Let Him Also Be Stupid Enough To Begin This Charitable Undertaking Of His With A Defense In Which He Offers Three Good Reasons In Justification; And It Will Almost Come To The Point Of People Finding It Doubtful Whether Indeed He Is Doing Something Good. But Now For Christianity. Yes, The Person Who Defends That Has Never Believed In It.

A Poet Is Not An Apostle; He Drives Out Devils Only By The Power Of The Devil.

Critical Thinking

Most People Are Subjective Toward Themselves And Objective Toward All Others, Frightfully Objective Sometimes--but The Task Is Precisely To Be Objective Toward Oneself And Subjective Toward All Others.

It Is Impossible To Exist Without Passion

Concepts, Like Individuals, Have Their Histories And Are Just As Incapable Of Withstanding The Ravages Of Time As Are Individuals. But In And Through All This They Retain A Kind Of Homesickness For The Scenes Of Their Childhood.

For Without Risk There Is No Faith, And The Greater The Risk, The Greater The Faith.

It Is Human Self-renunciation When A Man Denies Himself And The World Opens Up To Him. But It Is Christian Self-renunciation When He Denies Himself And, Because The World Precisely For This Shuts Itself Up To Him, He Must As One Thrust Out By The World Seek God's Confidence. The Double-danger Lies Precisely In Meeting Opposition There Where He Had Expected To Find Support, And He Has To Turn About Twice; Whereas The Merely Human Self-resignation Turns Once.

The Paradox Is Really The Pathos Of Intellectual Life And Just As Only Great Souls Are Exposed To Passions It Is Only The Great Thinker Who Is Exposed To What I Call Paradoxes, Which Are Nothing Else Than Grandiose Thoughts In Embryo.

To Dare Is To Risk Losing Your Foothold For A Moment, Not To Dare Is To Risk Losing Yourself.

Listen To The Cry Of A Woman In Labor At The Hour Of Giving Birth - Look At The Dying Man's Struggle At His Last Extremity, And Then Tell Me Whether Something That Begins And Ends Thus Could Be Intended For Enjoyment.

People Commonly Travel The World Over To See Rivers And Mountains, New Stars, Garish Birds, Freak Fish, Grotesque Breeds Of Human; They Fall Into An Animal Stupor That Gapes At Existence And They Think They Have Seen Something.

Who Is Also Aware Of The Tremendous Risk Involved In Faith - When He Nevertheless Makes The Leap Of Faith - This [is] Subjectivity ... At Its Height.

The Individual (no Matter How Well-meaning He Might Be, No Matter How Much Strength He Might Have, If Only He Would Use It) Does Not Have The Passion To Rip Himself Away From Either The Coils Of Reflection Or The Seductive Ambiguities Of Reflection; Nor Do The Surroundings And Times Have Any Events Or Passions, But Rather Provide A Negative Setting Of A Habit Of Reflection, Which Plays With Some Illusory Project Only To Betray Him In The End With A Way Out: It Shows Him That The Most Clever Thing To Do Is Nothing At All.

It Is A Frightful Satire And An Epigram On The Modern Age That The Only Use It Knows For Solitude Is To Make It A Punishment, A Jail Sentence.

If A Man Wants To Set Up As An Innkeeper And He Does Not Succeed, It Is Not Comic. If, On The Contrary, A Girl Asks To Be Allowed To Set Up As A Prostitute And She Fails, As Sometimes Happens, It Is Comic.

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.

It Is The Normal State Of The Human Heart To Try To Build Its Identity Around Something Besides God.

The Self-assured Believer Is A Greater Sinner In The Eyes Of God Than The Troubled Disbeliever.

For Like A Poisonous Breath Over The Fields, Like A Mass Of Locusts Over Egypt, So The Swarm Of Excuses Is A General Plaque, A Ruinous Infection Among Men, That Eats Off The Sprouts Of The Eternal.

Not Just In Commerce But In The World Of Ideas Too Our Age Is Putting On A Veritable Clearance Sale. Everything Can Be Had So Dirt Cheap That One Begins To Wonder Whether In The End Anyone Will Want To Make A Bid.

It Is Perfectly True, As Philosophers Say, That Life Must Be Understood Backwards. But They Forget The Other Proposition, That It Must Be Lived Forwards.

It Requires Courage Not To Surrender Oneself To The Ingenious Or Compassionate Counsels Of Despair That Would Induce A Man To Eliminate Himself From The Ranks Of The Living; But It Does Not Follow From This That Every Huckster Who Is Fattened And Nourished In Self-confidence Has More Courage Than The Man Who Yielded To Despair.

Self Confidence

If I Were To Wish For Anything, I Should Not Wish For Wealth And Power, But For The Passionate Sense Of The Potential, For The Eye Which, Ever Young And Ardent, Sees The Possible. Pleasure Disappoints, Possibility Never. And What Wine Is So Sparkling, What So Fragrant, What So Intoxicating, As Possibility!

Pleasure Disappoints, Possibility Never. And What Wine Is So Sparkling, Who So Fragrant, What So Intoxicating, As Possibility.

Where Am I? Who Am I? How Did I Come To Be Here? What Is This Thing Called The World? How Did I Come Into The World? Why Was I Not Consulted? And If I Am Compelled To Take Part In It, Where Is The Director? I Want To See Him.

Love Is All, It Gives All, And It Takes All.

If I Am Capable Of Grasping God Objectively, I Do Not Believe, But Precisely Because I Cannot Do This I Must Believe. If I Wish To Preserve Myself In Faith I Must Constantly Be Intent Upon Holding Fast The Objective Uncertainty So As To Remain Out Upon The Deep, Over Seventy Thousand Fathoms Of Water, Still Preserving My Faith.

A Road Well Begun Is The Battle Half Won. The Important Thing Is To Make A Beginning And Get Under Way.

The Most Common Form Of Despair Is Not Being Who You Are.

A Man Who As A Physical Being Is Always Turned Toward The Outside, Thinking That His Happiness Lies Outside Him, Finally Turns Inward And Discovers That The Source Is Within Him.

... The More One Needs God The More Perfect He Is. To Need God Is Nothing To Be Ashamed Of But Is Perfection Itself. It Is The Saddest Thing In The World If A Human Being Goes Through Life Without Discovering That He Needs God!

...a Human Being Not Only Can Choose But... He Must Choose... For In This Way God Retains His Honor While At The Same Time Has A Fatherly Concern For Humankind. Though God Has Lowered Himself To Being That Which Can Be Chosen, Yet Each Person Must On His Part Choose. God Is Not Mocked. Therefore The Matter Stands Thus: If A Person Avoids Choosing, This Is The Same As The Presumption Of Choosing The World.

Faith Is The Highest Passion In A Human Being. Many In Every Generation May Not Come That Far, But None Comes Further.

Love Does Not Alter The Beloved, It Alters Itself.

May New Sufferings Torment Your Soul.

The Tyrant Dies And His Rule Is Over, The Martyr Dies And His Rule Begins.

You Train Yourself In The Art Of Being Mysterious To Everyone. My Dear Friend! What If There Were No One, Who Cared About Guessing Your Riddle, What Pleasure Would You Then Take In It?

Death Is Not Earnest In The Same Way The Eternal Is. To The Earnestness Of Death Belongs Precisely That Remarkable Capacity For Awakening, That Resonance Of A Profound Mockery Which, Detached From The Thought Of The Eternal, Is An Empty And Often Brash Jest, But Together With The Thought Of The Eternal Is Just What It Should Be, Utterly Different From The Insipid Solemness Which Least Of All Captures And Holds A Thought With Tension Like That Of Death.

Do Not Interrupt The Flight Of Your Soul; Do Not Distress What Is Best In You; Do Not Enfeeble Your Spirit With Half Wishes And Half Thoughts. Ask Yourself And Keep On Asking Until You Find The Answer, For One May Have Known Something Many Times, Acknowledged It; One May Have Willed Something Many Times, Attempted It - And Yet, Only The Deep Inner Motion, Only The Heart's Indescribable Emotion, Only That Will Convince You That What You Have Acknowledged Belongs To You, That No Power Can Take It From You - For Only The Truth That Builds Up Is Truth For You.

Reflection Is Not The Evil; But A Reflective Condition And The Deadlock Which It Involves, By Transforming The Capacity For Action Into A Means Of Escape From Action, Is Both Corrupt And Dangerous, And Leads In The End To A Retrograde Movement.

Job Endured Everything - Until His Friends Came To Comfort Him, Then He Grew Impatient.

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, And You Could Never Get More Out Of Reading, Even If You Read The Best Of Books.

It Is Not The Path Which Is The Difficulty; Rather, It Is The Difficulty Which Is The Path.

The Difference Between A Man Who Faces Death For The Sake Of An Idea And An Imitator Who Goes In Search Of Martyrdom Is That Whilst The Former Expresses His Idea Most Fully In Death It Is The Strange Feeling Of Bitterness Which Comes From Failure That The Latter Really Enjoys; The Former Rejoices In His Victory, The Latter In His Suffering.

The Task Must Be Made Difficult, For Only The Difficult Inspires The Noble-hearted.

Prayer Does Not Change God, But It Changes Him Who Prays.

When All Combine In Every Way To Make Everything Easier, People Will Want Difficulty. I Conceived It As My Task To Make Difficulties Everywhere.

Life Can Only Be Understood Backwards; But It Must Be Lived Forwards.

Life Has Its Own Hidden Forces Which You Can Only Discover By Living.

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.

The Door To Happiness Opens Outward.

...the Reason For [this Age's] Anxiety And Unrest Is Because In One Direction, 'truth' Increases In Scope And Quantity - Via Science And Technology - While In The Other, Certainty And Confidence Steadily Decline. Our Age Is A Master In Developing Truths While Being Wholly Indifferent To Certitude. It Lacks Confidence In The Good.

One Could Construe The Life Of Man As A Great Discourse In Which The Various People Represent Different Parts Of Speech (the Same Might Apply To States).

It Is Better To Try Something And Fail Than To Try Nothing And Succeed. The Result May Be The Same, But You Won't Be. We Always Grow More Through Defeats Than Victories.

Busyness, Keeping Up With Others, Hustling Hither And Yon, Makes It Almost Impossible For An Individual To Form A Heart.

Philosophy Always Requires Something More, Requires The Eternal, The True, In Contrast To Which Even The Fullest Existence As Such Is But A Happy Moment.

Whoever Has The World's Treasures Has Them No Matter How He Got Them. In The World Of The Spirit It Is Otherwise.

Since Boredom Advances And Boredom Is The Root Of All Evil, No Wonder, Then, That The World Goes Backwards, That Evil Spreads. This Can Be Traced Back To The Very Beginning Of The World. The Gods Were Bored; Therefore They Created Human Beings.

What Labels Me, Negates Me.

Spirit Is The Third, Yet In Such A Way That One Can Speak Of A Synthesis Only When The Spirit Is Posited.

The Resolving Of The Ethical, Is Freedom; The Negative Resolution Also Has This, But The Freedom, Blank And Bare, Is As If Tongue-tied, Hard To Express, And Generally Has Something Hard In Its Nature. Falling In Love, However, Promptly Sets It To Music, Even If This Composition Contains A Very Difficult Passage.

Falling In Love

Who Am I? How Did I Come Into The World? Why Was I Not Consulted?

Questions And Answers

A Curiously Interested Observer Sees A Great Deal, A Scientifically Interested Observer Is Worthy Of All Honor, And Anxiously Interested Observer Sees What Others Do Not See, But A Crazy Observer Sees Perhaps The Most, His Observation Is More Intense And More Persistent, Just As The Senses Of Certain Animals Are Sharper Than Those Of Man.

It Was Completely Fruitless To Quarrel With The World, Whereas The Quarrel With Oneself Was Occasionally Fruitful And Always, She Had To Admit, Interesting.

Positive Attitude

In My Great Melancholy, I Loved Life, For I Love My Melancholy.

This Is The Miracle Of Life: That Each Person Who Heeds Him Or Herself Knows What No Scientist Can Ever Know: Who He Or She Is.

When You Open The Door Which You Shut In Order To Pray To God, The First Person You Meet As You Go Out Is Your Neighbour Whom You Shall Love. Wonderful!

Dread Is A Womanish Debility In Which Freedom Swoons. Psychologically Speaking, The Fall Into Sin Always Occurs In Impotence. But Dread Is At The Same Time The Most Egotistic Thing.

Choose To Be Who You Are. . . The Individual Who Would Become A Person Must At Some Point Take Over His Entire Being - Must, That Is, Choose Herself.

However Much One Generation Learns From Another, It Can Never Learn From Its Predecessor The Genuinely Human Factor. In This Respect Every Generation Begins Afresh. Thus No Generation Has Learned From Another How To Love, No Generation Can Begin Other Than At The Beginning.

Now, With God's Help, I Shall Become Myself.

It Is Not A Gain That Guilt Should Be Wholly Forgotten. On The Contrary, It Is Loss And Perdition. But It Is A Gain To Win An Inner Intensity Of Heart Through A Deeper And Deeper Inner Sorrowing Over Guilt.

The Question Is Not "to Be Or Not To Be," It Is What We Should Be Until We Are Not.

Be Or Not To Be

Out Of Love For Mankind, And Out Of Despair At My Embarrassing Situation, Seeing That I Had Accomplished Nothing And Was Unable To Make Anything Easier Than It Had Already Been Made, And Moved By A Genuine Interest In Those Who Make Everything Easy, I Conceived It As My Task To Create Difficulties Everywhere.

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.

I Begin With The Principle That All Men Are Bores. Surely No One Will Prove Himself So Great A Bore As To Contradict Me In This.

It Belongs To The Imperfection Of Everything Human That Man Can Only Attain His Desire By Passing Through Its Opposite.

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