A poet is an unhappy being whose heart it torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music.
søren Kierkegaardquotes
1813 - 1855
A heavy melancholy hung over Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s (1813-1855) life that is said to have been inherited from his gloomy and guilt-ridden father. They believed a curse hung over the family because his now successful father had cursed God when he was a young, poor shepherd. Out of Kierkegaard’s six siblings, only one other besides himself survived past the age of 34, which seemed to offer proof of God’s punishment.
If he inherited his father’s guilt, he inherited his wealth as well and that enabled Kierkegaard to live as a freelance writer. Initially, Kierkegaard entered the University of Copenhagen to study theology but switched to philosophy. His primary interest was asking how life ought to be lived, particularly as a Christian, and he said that his writing was on the whole religious.
His first work of importance, Either/Or, considered two spheres of existence that man chooses to live within, either the aesthetic or the ethical. Later, in Fear and Trembling, he offers a third sphere, namely, the religious. In his works, philosophers have identified the beginnings of existentialism and have considered Kierkegaard the father of that movement.
Colliding often with the Church of Denmark, Kierkegaard felt that Christianity had been lost in Christendom and needed to be reintroduced (Training in Christianity). Before his death in 1855, he had written numerous short pieces attacking the church as counterfeit. Kierkegaard never married, but a broken engagement haunted him for life. He dedicated all of his works to his beloved, Regine Olsen.
To stand on one leg and prove God’s existence is a very different thing from going on one’s knees and thanking Him.
Deep within every man there lies the dread of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the household of millions upon millions.
Alone / dread / God / overlooked / World
All this is only fooling, for if it is true that every man must work for his own salvation, then all the prophecies about the future of the world are only valuable and allowable as a recreation, or a joke, like playing bowls or cards.
fooling / prophecies / recreation / salvation
‘On principle’ one can do anything and what one does is, fundamentally, a matter of indifference, just as a man’s life remains insignificant even though ‘on principle’ he gives his support to all the needs of the times.
By comparison with a passionate age, an age without passion gains in scope what is loses in intensity.
age / intensity / passionate / scope
Instead of proclaiming the ideals, they educe what experience teaches, what the experience of all the centuries has taught, that the millions get no further than mediocrity.
experience / ideals / mediocrity / teaches
For our times are not satisfied with faith and not even with the miracle of changing water into wine – they ‘go right on,’ changing wine into water.
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.
It is in your power to review your life, to look at things you saw before, but from another point of view.