209 quotes
People think the world needs a republic, and they think it needs a new social order, and a new religion, but it never occurs to anyone that what the world really needs, confused as it is by much learning, is a new Socrates.
The Sickness Unto Death (1849)
It will be easy for us once we receive the ball of yarn from Ariadne (love) and then go through all the mazes of the labyrinth (life) and kill the monster. But how many are there who plunge into life (the labyrinth) without taking that precaution?
Every human being can come to know everything about love, just as every human being can come to know that he, like every human being, is loved by God. Some find this thought adequate for the longest life others find this thought so insignificant ...
Works of Love (1847)
The demonstration of the existence of God is something with which one learnedly and metaphysically occupies oneself only on occasion, but the thought of God forces itself upon a man on every occasion. What is it that such an individuality lacks? Inwardness.
What the world actually admires as sagacity is knowledge of evil—whereas wisdom is knowledge of the good. The one who loves does not have and does not want to have knowledge of evil; in this regard he is and remains, he wants to be and wants to remain, a child.
Works of Love (1847)
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.
Stages on Life's Way (1845)
I have worked for this restlessness oriented toward inward deepening. But “without authority.” Instead of conceitedly making myself out to be a witness for the truth and causing others rashly to want to be the same, I am an unauthorized poet who influences by means of the ideas.
For Self-Examination (1851)
In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant. ... My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known—no wonder, then, that I return the love.
Where is the boundary for the single individual in his concrete existence between what is lack of will and what is lack of ability; what is indolence and earthly selfishness and what is the limitation of finitude?
Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846)
To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner, put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and the way he understands it.
That which distinguishes the Christian narrow way from the common human narrow way is the voluntary. Christ was not someone who coveted earthly things but had to be satisfied with poverty – no, he chose poverty.
For Self-Examination (1851)
For as only one thing is necessary, and as the theme of the talk is the willing of only one thing: hence the consciousness before God of one's eternal responsibility to be an individual is that one thing necessary.
Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847)
People are scarcely aware that it is a slavery they are creating; they forget this in their zeal to make people free by overthrowing dominions. They are scarcely aware that it is slavery; how could it be possible to be a slave in relation to equals?
Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847)
There is something terribly callous in such a view of life, to murder in cold blood all the joy in life for everyone who does not have money. This is indeed what the monied person does, for it is at least his view that without money there is no joy in life.
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.
Fear and Trembling (1843)
The greatest danger, that of losing one's own self, may pass off as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife etc., is sure to be noticed.
The Sickness unto Death (1849)
The individuals of the contemporary generation are fearful of existence ... only in great masses do they dare to live, and they cluster together en masse in order to feel that they amount to something.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846)
What came first, the fruit-tree or the stone?
One must learn to know oneself before knowing anything else (gnocchi seauton). Not until a person has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does his life gain peace and meaning.
All of this positive [knowledge] fails to express the state of the knowing subject in existence, hence it pertains to a fictive objective subject, and to mistake oneself for such a subject is to be fooled and remain fooled.