209 quotes
Philosophy is life's dry-nurse, who can take care of us -- but not suckle us.
There was a thinker who became a hero by his death; he said that he could demonstrate the existence of God with a single straw.
Concepts, like individuals, have their histories, and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals.
On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841)
God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but He does what is still more wonderful: He makes saints out of sinners.
When one has once fully entered the realm of Love, the world — no matter how imperfect — becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for Love.
Works of Love (1847)
There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys; they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves.
That is what Christianity is for – which straightaway bars the way to procreation. This means: stop!
Who is to blame but her and the third factor, from whence no one knows, which moved me with its stimulus and transformed me?
Repetition (1843)
Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.
The Concept of Anxiety (1844)
Can one blame the atheist for assuming His Reverence to be a bit lunatic, quite literally understood? The difficult discourse with which the orthodox began has become balderdash.
It is Christian heroism—a rarity, to be sure—to venture wholly to become oneself, an individual human being, this specific individual human being, alone before God, alone in this prodigious strenuousness and this prodigious responsibility.
The Sickness Unto Death (1849)
The most ruinous evasion of all is to be hidden in the crowd in an attempt to escape God's supervision.
If the genius is an artist, then he accomplishes his work as art, but neither he nor his work of art has a telos outside him.
Two Ethical-Religious Minor Essays (1849)
The truth is a trap: you can not get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.
Sin is this: before God, or with the conception of God, to be in despair at not willing to be oneself, or in despair at willing to be oneself.
The Sickness Unto Death (1849)
People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation.
The Fitzhenry & Whiteside Book of Quotations (1981)
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.
Either/Or (1843)
A son is a mirror in which the father sees himself reflected, and the father is a mirror in which the son sees himself as he will be in the future.
Stages on Life's Way (1845)
Above all do not forget your duty to love yourself.
As the world changes, the forms of corruption also gradually become more cunning, more difficult to point out - but they certainly do not become better.
Works of Love (1847)