Tag: Kierkegaard
Most people prefer to have two advisers, one for the hour of danger, when they are afraid—and then, when things go well again, then they would prefer not to have anything to do with him, because the sight of him reminds them of how weak they were, and now they prefer to imagine that they have triumphed by dint of their own strength—not by God’s.
The Quotable Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
No one teaches joy better than one who is joyful oneself.
Indeterminableness is the basis of dizziness … Therefore the remedy for dizziness is limitation; and in the spiritual sense all discipline is limitation.
The Omniscient One does not find out anything about the person confessing, but instead the person confessing finds out something about himself.
It is a slow death to let oneself be trampled to death by geese, and to let oneself be worn to death by envy is also a slow way of dying.
To pray is also to breathe, and possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing.
The Quotable Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
But art – I’ll offer a criterion – does not recruit people to believe or act or feel in a particular way. Søren Kierkegaard put it like this:
The indirect mode of communication makes communication an art in quite a different sense than when it is conceived in the usual manner … To stop a man on the street and stand still while talking to him, is not so difficult as to say something to a passer-by in passing, without standing still and without delaying the other, without attempting to persuade him to go the same way, but giving him instead an impulse to go precisely his own way.
Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction
Keith Oatley
Bibliography citation:
Kierkegaard, S. (1846). Concluding unscientific postscript (D.F. Swenson and W. Lowrie, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (current edition 1968).
Every human being is tried this way in the active service of expectancy. Now comes the fulfillment and relieves him, but soon he is again placed on reconnaissance for expectancy; then he is again relieved, but as long as there is any future for him, he has not yet finished his service. And while human life goes on this way in very diverse expectancy, expecting very different things according to different times and occasions and in different frames of mind, all life is again one nightwatch of expectancy.
Søren Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses: “Patience in Expectancy”
wikiquote
related post, William James on Expectation
PHOTO: By Lake Erie Arboretum at Frontier Park (http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/byways/photos/59503) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
SK via wikiquote