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It Is Only All Too Easy To Understand The Requirements Contained In God's Word ('give All Your Goods To The Poor.' 'if Anyone Strikes You On The Right Cheek, Turn The Left.' 'if Anyone Takes Your Coat, Let Him Have Your Cloak Also. Rejoice Always.' 'count It Sheer Joy When You Meet Various Temptations' Etc.). The Most Ignorant, Poor Creature Cannot Honestly Deny Being Able To Understand God's Requirements. But It Is Tough On The Flesh To Will To Understand It And To Then Act Accordingly. It Is Not A Question Of Interpretation, But Action.

-Soren Kierkegaard

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It Is Only All

Soren Kierkegaard

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It Is Only All Too Easy To Understand The Requirements Contained In God's Word ('give All Your Goods To The Poor.' 'if Anyone Strikes You On The Right Cheek, Turn The Left.' 'if Anyone Takes Your Coat, Let Him Have Your Cloak Also. Rejoice Always.' 'count It Sheer Joy When You Meet Various Temptations' Etc.). The Most Ignorant, Poor Creature Cannot Honestly Deny Being Able To Understand God's Requirements. But It Is Tough On The Flesh To Will To Understand It And To Then Act Accordingly. It Is Not A Question Of Interpretation, But Action.

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The Difference Between An Admirer And A Follower Still Remains, No Matter Where You Are. The Admirer Never Makes Any True Sacrifices. He Always Plays It Safe. Though In Words, Phrases, Songs, He Is Inexhaustible About How Highly He Prizes Christ, He Renounces Nothing, Gives Up Nothing, Will Not Reconstruct His Life, Will Not Be What He Admires, And Will Not Let His Life Express What It Is He Supposedly Admires.

Philosophy Is Life's Dry-nurse, Who Can Take Care Of Us - But Not Suckle Us.

Oh, Can I Really Believe The Poet's Tales, That When One First Sees The Object Of One's Love, One Imagines One Has Seen Her Long Ago, That All Love Like All Knowledge Is Remembrance, That Love Too Has Its Prophecies In The Individual.

God Is Present In The Moment Of Choice, Not In Order To Watch But In Order To Be Chosen. Therefore, Each Person Must Choose. Terrible Is The Battle, In A Person's Innermost Being, Between God And The World. The Crowning Risk Involved Lies In The Possession Of Choice.

Where There Are Two People, There Is Untruth.

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.

You Live Life Looking Forward, You Understand Life Looking Backward.

Looking Forward

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

During The First Period Of A Man's Life The Greatest Danger Is Not To Take The Risk.

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

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.

In A Theatre It Happened That A Fire Started Off Stage. The Clown Came Out To Tell The Audience. They Thought It Was A Joke And Applauded. He Told Them Again, And They Became Still More Hilarious. This Is The Way, I Suppose, That The World Will Be Destroyed-amid The Universal Hilarity Of Wits And Wags Who Think It Is All A Joke.

The Most Terrible Fight Is Not When There Is One Opinion Against Another, The Most Terrible Is When Two Men Say The Same Thing -- And Fight About The Interpretation, And This Interpretation Involves A Difference Of Quality.

What The Philosophers Have To Say About Reality Is Often As Disappointing As A Sign You See In A Shop Window, Which Reads Pressing Done Here. If You Brought Your Clothes In To Be Pressed, You Would Be Fooled: For The Sign Is Only For Sale.

Whoever Has Learned To Be Anxious In The Right Way Has Learned The Ultimate.

Boredom Is The Root Of All Evil - The Despairing Refusal To Be Oneself.

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.

Where Am I? Who Am I? How Did I Come To Be Here? What Is This Thing Called The World?

If The Ethical - That Is, Social Morality- Is The Highest ... Then No Categories Are Needed Other Than The Greek Philosophical Categories.

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.

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

The Minority Is Always Stronger Than The Majority, Because The Minority Is Generally Formed By Those Who Really Have An Opinion.

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.

...why Bother Remembering A Past That Cannot Be Made Into A Present?

Absolute Passion Cannot Be Understood By A Third Party.

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.

Nowadays Not Even A Suicide Kills Himself In Desperation. Before Taking The Step He Deliberates So Long And So Carefully That He Literally Chokes With Thought. It Is Even Questionable Whether He Ought To Be Called A Suicide, Since It Is Really Thought Which Takes His Life. He Does Not Die With Deliberation But From Deliberation.

A Man Prayed, And At First He Thought That Prayer Was Talking. But He Became More And More Quiet Until In The End He Realized Prayer Is Listening.

...knowing God Is The Condition For The Sanctification Of A Human Being By God's Assistance And According To His Intention. Wherever God Is, There He Is Always Creating... He Wants To Create A New Human Being. To Need God Is To Become New. And To Know God Is The Crucial Thing.

The Greatest Hazard Of All, Losing One’s Self, Can Occur Very Quietly In The World, As If It Were Nothing At All. No Other Loss Can Occur So Quietly; Any Other Loss - An Arm, A Leg, Five Dollars, A Wife, Etc. - Is Sure To Be Noticed.

It Is Modest Of The Nightingale Not To Require Anyone To Listen To It; But It Is Also Proud Of The Nightingale Not To Care Whether Any One Listens To It Or Not.

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.

To The Frivolous Christianity Is Certainly Not Glad Tidings, For It Wishes First Of All To Make Them Serious.

Prayer Is A Silent Surrendering Of Everything To God.

Worldly Wisdom Thinks That Love Is A Relationship Between Man And Man. Christianity Teaches That Love Is A Relationship Between Man-god-man, That Is, That God Is The Middle Term.

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.

Irony Is A Qualification Of Subjectivity.

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.

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

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

If I Am Capable Of Grasping God Objectively, I Do Not Believe, But Precisely Because I Cannot Do This I Must Believe.

Far From Idleness Being The Root Of All Evil, It Is Rather The Only True Good.

Christianity Does Not Oppose Debauchery And Uncontrollable Passions And The Like As Much As It Opposes... Flat Mediocrity, This Nauseating Atmosphere, This Homey, Civil Togetherness, Where Admittedly Great Crimes, Wild Excesses, And Powerful Aberrations Cannot Easily Occur - But Where God's Unconditional Demand Has Even Greater Difficulty In Accomplishing What It Requires: The Majestic Obedience Of Submission.

The Only Analogy I Have Before Me Is Socrates. My Task Is A Socratic Task, To Revise The Definition Of What It Is To Be A Christian. For My Part I Do Not Call Myself A "christian" (thus Keeping The Ideal Free), But I Am Able To Make It Evident That The Others Are Still Less Than I.

May New Sufferings Torment Your Soul.

God Does Not Think; He Creates. He Does Not Exist; He Is Eternal.

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

Certainty... Lurks At The Door Of Faith And Threatens To Devour It.

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.

To Have Faith Is Precisely To Lose One's Mind So As To Win God.

The Gods Were Bored And So They Created Man. Adam Was Bored Because He Was Alone, So Eve Was Created. Thus Boredom Entered The World, And Increased In Proportion To The Increase In Population. Adam Was Bored Alone, Then Adam And Eve Were Bored Together; Them Adam And Eve And Cain And Abel Were Bored En Famille; Then The Population Of The World Increased, And The People Were Bored En Masse.

This Is What Is Sad When One Contemplates Human Life, That So Many Live Out Their Lives In Quiet Lostness...they Live, As It Were, Away From Themselves And Vanish Like Shadows. Their Immortal Souls Are Blown Away, And They Are Not Disquieted By The Question Of Its Immortality, Because They Are Already Disintegrated Before They Die.

In A Mathematical Proposition, For Example, The Objectivity Is Given, But Therefore Its Truth Is Also An Indifferent Truth.

... All Comparisons Injure.

With The Daguerreotype, Everyone Will Be Able To Have Their Portrait Taken . . . And At The Same Time Everything Is Being Done To Make Us All Look Exactly The Same.

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

The Human Race In The Course Of Time Has Taken The Liberty Of Softening And Softening Christianity Until At Last We Have Contrived To Make It Exactly The Opposite Of What It Is In The New Testament.

Truth Has Always Had Many Loud Proclaimers, But The Question Is Whether A Person Will In The Deepest Sense Acknowledge The Truth, Allow It To Permeate His Whole Being, Accept All Its Consequences, And Not Have An Emergency Hiding Place For Himself And A Judas Kiss For The Consequence.

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

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

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.

On The Secretly Blushing Cheek Is Reflected The Glow Of The Heart

Man Is Spirit. But What Is Spirit? Spirit Is The Self. But What Is The Self? The Self Is A Relation Which Relates Itself To Itself.

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.

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?

To The Christian, Love Is The Works Of Love. To Say That Love Is A Feeling Or Anything Of The Kind Is An Unchristian Conception Of Love. That Is The Aesthetic Definition And Therefore Fits The Erotic And Everything Of That Nature. But To The Christian Love Is The Works Of Love. Christ's Love Was Not An Inner Feeling, A Full Heart And What Not, It Was The Work Of Love Which Was His Life.

Thus Our Own Age Is Essentially One Of Understanding, And On The Average, Perhaps, More Knowledgeable Than Any Former Generation, But It Is Without Passion. Every One Knows A Great Deal, We All Know Which Way We Ought To Go And All The Different Ways We Can Go, But Nobody Is Willing To Move.

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

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.

A Possibility Is A Hint From God. One Must Follow It.

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.

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

Faith Is The Highest Passion In A Man.

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.

A Man May Perform Astonishing Feats And Comprehend A Vast Amount Of Knowledge, And Yet Have No Understanding Of Himself. But Suffering Directs A Man To Look Within. If It Succeeds, Then There, Within Him, Is The Beginning Of His Learning.

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.

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

Spiritual Superiority Only Sees The Individual. But Alas, Ordinarily We Human Beings Are Sensual And, Therefore, As Soon As It Is A Gathering, The Impression Changes - We See Something Abstract, The Crowd, And We Become Different. But 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.

Most People Rush After Pleasure So Fast That They Rush Right Past It.

It Is A Wonderful Thing To See A First-rate Philosopher At Prayer. Tough-minded Thinking And Tenderhearted Reverence Are Friends, Not Enemies. We Have For Too Long Separated The Head From The Heart, And We Are The Lesser For It. We Love God With The Mind And We Love God With The Heart. In Reality, We Are Descending With The Mind Into The Heart And There Standing Before God In Ceaseless Wonder And Endless Praise. As The Mind And The Heart Work In Concert, A Kind Of Loving Rationality Pervades All We Say And Do. This Brings Unity To Us And Glory To God.

Human Justice Is Very Prolix, And Yet At Times Quite Mediocre; Divine Justice Is More Concise And Needs No Information From The Prosecution, No Legal Papers, No Interrogation Of Witnesses, But Makes The Guilty One His Own Informer And Helps Him With Eternity's Memory.

One Can Advise Comfortably From A Safe Port.

When You Read God's Word, You Must Constantly Be Saying To Yourself, "it Is Talking To Me, And About Me".

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

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

Hope Is Passion For What Is Possible.

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.

Most People Believe That The Christian Commandments, E.g. To Love One's Neighbor As Oneself, Are Intentionally A Little Too Severe - Like Setting A Clock Half An Hour Ahead To Make Sure Of Not Being Late In The Morning.

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

Jurists Say That A Capital Crime Submerges All Lesser Crimes; And So It Is With Faith. Its Absurdity Makes All Petty Difficultiesvanish.

In Order To Learn True Humility (i Use This Expression To Describe The State Of Mind Under Discussion), It Is Good For A Person To Withdraw From The Turmoil Of The World (we See That Christ Withdrew When The People Wanted To Proclaim Him King As Well As When He Had To Walk The Thorny Path), For In Life Either The Depressing Or The Elevating Impression Is Too Dominant For A True Balance To Come About. Here, Of Course, Individuality Is Very Decisive.

There Are Men Who Are Wanting In The Comparative, They As A Rule Are The Most Interesting.

Most Interesting

Most People Live Dejectedly In Worldly Joys Or Sorrows. They Sit On The Sidelines And Do Not Join The Dance.

I Would Have Perished Had I Not Perished.

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.

Everyone Looks The Same To Me In A Photograph: Stupid.

...even The Richest Personality Is Nothing Before He Has Chosen Himself, And On The Other Hand Even What One Might Call The Poorest Personality Is Everything When He Has Chosen Himself; For The Great Thing Is Not To Be This Or That But To Be Oneself, And This Everyone Can Be If He Wills It.

The Stone That Was Rolled Before Christ's Tomb Might Appropriately Be Called The Philosopher's Stone Because Its Removal Gave Not Only The Pharisees But, Now For 1800 Years, The Philosophers So Much To Think About.

There Are, As Is Known, Insects That Die In The Moment Of Fertilization. So It Is With All Joy: Life's Highest, Most Splendid Moment Of Enjoyment Is Accompanied By Death.

The Self Is A Relation Which Relates Itself To Its Own Self, Or It Is That In The Relation That The Relation Relates Itself To Its Own Self; The Self Is Not The Relation But That The Relation Relates Itself To Its Own Self.

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.

Humor (is) Intrinsitc To Christianity.

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.

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

What If Everything In The World Were A Misunderstanding, What If Laughter Were Really Tears?

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.

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

It Is (to Describe It Figuratively) As If An Author Were To Make A Slip Of The Pen, And As If This Clerical Error Became Conscious Of Being Such. Perhaps This Was No Error But In A Far Higher Sense Was An Essential Part Of The Whole Exposition. It Is, Then, As If This Clerical Error Were To Revolt Against The Author, Out Of Hatred For Him, Were To Forbid Him To Correct It, And Were To Say, "no, I Will Not Be Erased, I Will Stand As A Witness Against Thee, That Thou Art A Very Poor Writer."

Old Age Realizes The Dreams Of Youth: Look At Dean Swift; In His Youth He Built An Asylum For The Insane, In His Old Age He Was Himself An Inmate.

You Love The Accidental. A Smile From A Pretty Girl In An Interesting Situation, A Stolen Glance, That Is What You Are Hunting For, That Is A Motif For Your Aimless Fantasy. You Who Always Pride Yourself On Being An Observateur Must, In Return, Put Up With Becoming An Object Of Observation. Ah, You Are A Strange Fellow, One Moment A Child, The Next An Old Man; One Moment You Are Thinking Most Earnestly About The Most Important Scholarly Problems, How You Will Devote Your Life To Them, And The Next You Are A Lovesick Fool. But You Are A Long Way From Marriage.

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 A Man Cannot Forget, He Will Never Amount To Much.

Marriage Brings One Into Fatal Connection With Custom And Tradition, And Traditions And Customs Are Like The Wind And Weather, Altogether Incalculable.

I Stick My Finger Into Existence And It Smells Of Nothing.

Confidence Is The Present Tense Of Hope.

Faith Is Holding Onto Uncertainties With Passionate Conviction.

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.

It Was Not To Save A Nation That Abraham Went To Sacrifice Isaac, Nor To Appease Angry Gods... Then Why Does Abraham Do It? For God's Sake... He Does It For The Sake Of God Because God Demands Proof Of His Faith... He Was Not Justified By Being Virtuous, But By Being An Individual Submitted To God In Faith.

Most People Believe That The Christian Commandments Are Intentionally A Little Too Severe

Repetition Is The Reality And The Seriousness Of Life.

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.

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

What I Really Need Is To Get Clear About What I Must Do, Not What I Must Know, Except Insofar As Knowledge Must Precede Every Act. What Matters Is To Find A Purpose, To See What It Really Is That God Wills That I Shall Do; The Crucial Thing Is To Find A Truth Which Is Truth For Me, To Find The Idea For Which I Am Willing To Live And Die.

Only The Noble Of Heart Are Called To Difficulty.

It Is Easy To See, Though It Scarcely Needs To Be Pointed Out, Since It Is Involved In The Fact That Reason Is Set Aside, That Faith Is Not A Form Of Knowledge; For All Knowledge Is Either A Knowledge Of The Eternal, Excluding The Temporal And Historical As Indifferent, Or It Is Pure Historical Knowledge. No Knowledge Can Have For Its Object The Absurdity That The Eternal Is The Historical.

Since My Earliest Childhood A Barb Of Sorrow Has Lodged In My Heart. As Long As It Stays I Am Ironic - If It Is Pulled Out I Shall Die.

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

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.

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

Only One Human Being Recognized As One's Neighbour Is Necessary In Order To Cure A Man Of Self-love

To Love Another Person Is To Help Them Love God.

...christ Did Not Appoint Professors, But Followers. If Christianity ... Is Not Reduplicated In The Life Of The Person Expounding It, Then He Does Not Expound Christianity, For Christianity Is A Message About Living And Can Only Be Expounded By Being Realized In Men's Lives.

We Live As If We Were Unaware Of Our Impending Destruction

Trouble Is The Common Denominator Of Living. It Is The Great Equalizer.

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.

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.

The Thinker Without A Paradox Is Like A Lover Without A Feeling: A Paltry Mediocrity.

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

The Question Of Immortality Is Of Its Nature Not A Scholarly Question. It Is A Question Welling Up From The Interior Which The Subject Must Put To Itself As It Becomes Conscious Of Itself.

The Presence Of Irony Does Not Necessarily Mean That The Earnestness Is Excluded. Only Assistant Professors Assume That.

Be That Self Which One Truly Is.

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

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.

Love Does Not Alter The Beloved, It Alters Itself.

Your Own Tactic Is To Train Yourself In The Art Of Becoming Enigmatic To Everybody. My Young Friend, Suppose There Was No One Who Troubld Himself To Guess Your Riddle--what Joy, Then, Would You Have In It?

The Highest And Most Beautiful Things In Life Are Not To Be Heard About, Nor Read About, Nor Seen But, If One Will, Are To Be Lived.

What I Really Need Is To Get Clear Out About What I Must Do, Not What I Must Know, Except Insofar As Knowledge Precedes Every Act.

It Goes Against The Grain For Me To Do What So Often Happens, To Speak Inhumanly About The Great As If A Few Millennia Were An Immense Distance. I Prefer To Speak Humanly About It, As If It Happened Yesterday, And Let Only The Greatness Itself Be The Distance.

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.

If You Think You Understand, It Isn't God.

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.

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

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.

The Great Trick With A Woman Is To Get Rid Of Her While She Think's She's Rid Of You.

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

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?

A Human Being Is A Spirit. But What Is Spirit? Spirit Is The Self. But What Is Self? The Self Is A Relation That Relates Itself To Itself Or Is The Relation's Relating Itself To Itself In The Relation.

I Divide My Time As Follows: Half The Time I Sleep, The Other Half I Dream. I Never Dream When I Sleep, For That Would Be A Pity, For Sleeping Is The Highest Accomplishment Of Genius.

Pain Reconciles One To Existence. Infinite Resignation Is That Shirt In The Old Fable. The Thread Is Spun With Tears, Bleached By Tears, The Shirt Sewn In Tears, But Then It Also Gives Better Protection Than Iron. The Secret In Life Is That Everyone Must Sew It For Himself.

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.

My Life Is Absolutely Meaningless. When I Consider The Different Periods Into Which It Falls, It Seems Like The Word Schnur In The Dictionary, Which Means In The First Place A String, In The Second, A Daughter-in-law. The Only Thing Lacking Is That The Word Schnur Should Mean In The Third Place A Camel, In The Fourth, A Dust-brush.

And Then The Spirit Brings Hope, Hope In The Strictest Christian Sense, Hope Which Is Hoping Against Hope. For An Immediate Hope Exists In Every Person; It May Be More Powerfully Alive In One Person Than In Another; But In Death Every Hope Of This Kind Dies And Turns Into Hopelessness. Into This Night Of Hopelessness (it Is Death That We Are Describing) Comes The Life-giving Spirit And Brings Hope, The Hope Of Eternity. It Is Against Hope, For There Was No Longer Any Hope For That Merely Natural Hope; This Hope Is Therefore A Hope Contrary To Hope.

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

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

The Truth Must Essentially Be Regarded As In Conflict With This World; The World Has Never Been So Good, And Will Never Become So Good That The Majority Will Desire The Truth.

It Doesn't Occur To Me At This Moment To Say More; Another Time, Perhaps Tomorrow, I May Have More To Say, But Always The Same Thing And About The Same, For Only Gypsies, Robber Gangs And Swindlers Follow The Adage That Where A Person Has Once Been He Is Never To Go Again.

The God That Can Be Named Is Not God.

Above All, Do Not Lose Your Desire To Walk.

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 Door To Happiness Opens Outward.

Therefore Do Not Deceive Yourself! Of All Deceivers Fear Most Yourself!

The Most Painful State Of Being Is Remembering The Future, Particularly The One You'll Never Have.

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.

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.

Men Who Not Religious Or Artists Are Fools.

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

In Order To Help Another Effectively, I Must Understand What He Understands. If I Do Not Know That, My Greater Understanding Will Be Of No Help To Him... Instruction Begins When You Put Yourself In His Place So That You May Understand What He Understands And In The Way He Understands It.

How Did I Get Into The World? Why Was I Not Asked About It And Why Was I Not Informed Of The Rules And Regulations But Just Thrust Into The Ranks As If I Had Been Bought By A Peddling Shanghaier Of Human Beings? How Did I Get Involved In This Big Enterprise Called Actuality? Why Should I Be Involved? Isn't It A Matter Of Choice? And If I Am Compelled To Be Involved, Where Is The Manager—i Have Something To Say About This. Is There No Manager? To Whom Shall I Make My Complaint?

Rules And Regulations

In The Christianity Of Christendom The Cross Has Become Something Like The Child’s Hobby-horse And Trumpet.

It Occurs To Me That Artists Go Forward By Going Backward, Something Which I Have Nothing Against Intrinsically When It Is A Reproduced Retreat - As Is The Case With The Better Artists.

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

. . .the Larger The Crowd, The More Probable That That Which It Praises Is Folly, And The More Improbable That It Is Truth; And The Most Improbable Of All That It Is Any Eternal Truth.

Sleeping Is The Height Of Genius

Deep Within Every Man There Lies The Dread Of Being Alone In The World, Forgotten By God, Overlooked Among The Tremendous Household Of Millions And Millions.

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.

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.

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.

Idleness, We Are Accustomed To Say, Is The Root Of All Evil. To Prevent This Evil, Work Is Recommended.... Idleness As Such Is By No Means A Root Of Evil; On The Contrary, It Is Truly A Divine Life, If One Is Not Bored.

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

A Genius May Perhaps Be A Century Ahead Of His Age And Hence Stands There As A Paradox, But In The End, The Race Will Assimilate What Was Once A Paradox, So It Is No Longer Paradoxical.

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.

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.

How Absurd Men Are! They Never Use The Liberties They Have, They Demand Those They Do Not Have. They Have Freedom Of Thought, They Demand Freedom Of Speech.

Theology Sits Rouged At The Window And Courts Philosophy's Favor, Offering To Sell Her Charms To It.

Shows Itself In The Notion That What May Be Objectively True May In The Mouth Of Certain People Become False.

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

Critical Thinking

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

Christians Remind Me Of Schoolboys Who Want To Look Up The Answers To Their Math Problems In The Back Of The Book Rather Than Work Them Through.

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 Lose One's Footing Momentarily. Not To Dare Is To Lose Oneself.

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Ernest Borgnine

Aung San Suu Kyi

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