Philosopher Kierkegaard Quotes

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.

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.

I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.

As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard noted, life can only be understood backwards—but it must be lived forwards.

For I have trained myself and am training myself always to be able to dance lightly in the service of thought

Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said that life can only be understood backward but it must be lived forward.

Joy said she hadn't really understood the meaning of life until Tyffanie had come along, but now she understood it perfectly. Well, great, I felt like saying. Make sure you share the news with Plato and Kierkegaard and all those other philosophers who'd banged their heads against the wall, trying to figure things out.

I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it...but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill.

For Kierkegaard, for Heidegger, for Sartre, the more profound the awareness, the more authentic the existence. They measure honesty and the essence of experience by the degree of awareness. But is our humanity really built on awareness? Doesn't awareness--that forced, extreme awareness--arise among us, not from us, as something created by effort, the mutual perfecting of ourselves in it, the confirming of something that one philosopher forces onto another? Isn't man, therefore, in his private reality, something childish and always beneath his own awareness? And doesn't he feel awareness to be, at the same time, something alien, imposed and unimportant? If this is how it is, this furtive childhood, this concealed degradation are ready to explode your systems sooner or later.

What philosophers say about actuality [Virkelighed] is often just as disappointing as it is when one reads on a sign in a secondhand shop: Pressing Done Here. If a person were to bring his clothes to be pressed, he would be duped, for the sign is merely for sale.

It isn't at all difficult for philosophy to begin. Far from it: it begins with nothing and can accordingly always begin. What seems so difficult to philosophy and the philosophers is to stop.

My opinion is, of course, completely my own. I would not impose it on anyone else and decline any pressure to change it.

A superstitious belief which embraces an error keeps the possibility open that the truth may come to arouse it; but when the truth is there, and the superstitious mode of apprehending it transforms it into a lie, no saving awakening is possible.

one cannot seek for what he knows, and it seems equally impossible for him to seek for what he does not know. For what a man knows he cannot seek, since he knows it; and what he does not know he cannot seek, since he does not even know for what to seek.

The prideful, rational mind, comfortable with its certainty, enamoured of its own brilliance, is easily tempted to ignore error, and to sweep dirt under the rug. Literary, existential philosophers, beginning with Søren Kierkegaard, conceived of this mode of Being as “inauthentic.” An inauthentic person continues to perceive and act in ways his own experience has demonstrated false. He does not speak with his own voice.

There are any number of reasons to want novels to survive. The way [Jonathan] Franzen thinks about it is that books can do things, socially useful things, that other media can't. He cites -- as one does -- the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and his idea of busyness: that state of constant distraction that allows people to avoid difficult realities and maintain self-deceptions. With the help of cell phones, e-mail and handheld games, it's easier to stay busy, in the Kierkegaardian sense, than it's ever been. Reading, in its quietness and sustained concentration, is the opposite of busyness. "We are so distracted by and engulfed by the technologies we've created, and by the constant barrage of so-called information that comes our way, that more than ever to immerse yourself in an involving book seems socially useful," Franzen says. "The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.

Often we have to feel dissatisfied and anxious and terrible for a long time before we’ll admit to the truth that we should be doing something else. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher, wrote about how anxiety is a necessary emotion that should be listened to—it is cuing you that change is needed. It is a feeling of uprooting, which is unsettling, but it prepares you for action. Often one must feel the anxiety and the instability in order to make great changes. So it’s time to leave what you’ve been doing and wander around in the dark for a while. You have to go find what does actually satisfy you. It is the start of a journey, and the thing you are searching for won’t be obvious immediately.

If a pastor's activity in the church is merely a once-a-week attempt to tow the congregation's cargo ship a little closer to eternity, the whole thing comes to nothing. A human life, unlike a cargo ship, cannot lie in the same place until the next Sunday.

Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards. – Soren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Danish Philosopher and Theologian

Ce n'est pas le chemin qui est difficile, c'est le difficile qui est le chemin.

As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote: “It is perfectly true … that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.

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. And if one thinks over that proposition it becomes more and more evident that life can never really be understood in time because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting-place from which to understand it.

The Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard believed that boredom was the root of all evil. In other words, boredom isn’t just boring. It’s wrong. You cannot be in the presence of God and be bored at the same time. For that matter, you cannot be in the will of God and be bored at the same time. If you follow in the footsteps of Jesus, it will be anything but boring.

As Preach waited for her to appear, he couldn’t get a quote from Kierkegaard out of his mind. “The truth is a trap,” the philosopher had once written. “You cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.

It seems to me that the stone laid before Christ’s grave might well be called the philosopher’s stone, in so far as its overturning has given not just the Pharisees but now for 1,800 years the philosophers, too, so much to busy themselves with.

The present writer is nothing of a philosopher, he has not understood the System, does not know whether it actually exists, whether it is completed; already he has enough for his weak head in the thought of what a prodigious head everybody in our day must have, since everybody has such a prodigious thought.

...The discrepancy is that the ethical self should be found immanently in the despair, that the individual won himself by persisting in the despair. True, he has used something within the category of freedom, choosing himself, which seem to remove the difficulty, one that presumably has not struck many, since philosophically doubting everything and then finding the true beginning goes one, two, three. But that does not help. In despairing, I use myself to despair, and therefore I can indeed despair of everything by myself. But if I do this, I cannot come back by myself. It is in this moment of decision that the individual needs divine assistance, whereas it is quite correct that in order to be at this point one must first have understood the existence-relation between the aesthetic and the ethical; that is to say, by being there in passion and inwardness, one surely becomes aware of the religious - and of the leap.

Neo-orthodoxy’s defining insight, taken from the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, was that people and God are known by personal encounter, not by rational analysis.11 The revelation of God comes not in an inspired book, but in the person of Jesus Christ, who is God incarnate.12 The Bible is a witness to Christ.

Is pathological anxiety a medical illness, as Hippocrates and Aristotle and modern pharmacologists would have it? Or is it a philosophical problem, as Plato and Spinoza and the cognitive-behavioral therapists would have it? Is it a psychological problem, a product of childhood trauma and sexual inhibition, as Freud and his acolytes would have it? Or is it a spiritual condition, as Søren Kierkegaard and his existentialist descendants claimed? Or, finally, is it—as W. H. Auden and David Riesman and Erich Fromm and Albert Camus and scores of modern commentators have declared—a cultural condition, a function of the times we live in and the structure of our society?

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” concluded the seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal. The nineteenth-century Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard prescribed quiet to remedy “all the ills of the world.” The twentieth-century monk Thomas Merton embraced monastic silence as a way of coming closer to God.

... he will seek vainly to the right and to the left and in the newspapers for a guarantee that he has actually been amused. For a sophisticated person, on the other hand, who is still unembarrassed enough to dare to be amused all by himself, who has enough self-confidence to know, without seeking advice from anyone else, whether he has been amused, farce will perhaps have a very special meaning, in that now with the spaciousness of abstraction and now with the presentation of a tangible actuality, it will affect his mood differently. He will, of course refrain from bringing a fixed and definite mood with him so that everything affects him in relation to that mood. He will have perfected his mood, in that he will be able to keep himself in a condition where no particular mood is present, but where all moods are possible.

The judicious words of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), the first existentialist philosopher, are apropos to end this lumbering manuscript. 1. “One must learn to know oneself before knowing anything else.” 2. “Life always expresses the results of our dominate thoughts.” 3. “Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.” 4. “Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.” 5. “Love is all, it gives all, and it takes all.” 6. “Don’t forget to love yourself.” 7. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” 8. “Life has its own hidden forces, which you can only discover by living.” 9. “The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, or read about, nor seen, but if one will, are to be lived.” 10. “Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.” 11. “It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate on only what is most significant and important.” 12. “To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.” 13. “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.” 14. “A man who as a physical being is always turned to the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside of him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.” 15. “Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend into a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God.” Kierkegaard warned, “The greatest hazard of all, losing the 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.” Kierkegaard said that the one method to avoid losing oneself is to live joyfully in the moment, which he described as “to be present in oneself in truth,” which in turn requires “to be today, in truth be today.

Hume’s purported fideism had serious impact on some religious thinkers. One of these, the German philosopher J. G. Hamann, decided that Hume, intentionally or not, was the greatest voice of religious orthodoxy—for insisting that there was no rational basis for religious belief, and that there was no rational evidence for Christianity. When the Dialogues appeared, Hamann became quite excited; he translated the first and last dialogues into German so that Immanuel Kant might read them and become a serious Christian. Hamann’s use of Hume as the voice of orthodoxy led the great Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard to become the most important advocate of fideistic Christianity in the nineteenth century. So, although most of Hume’s influence has been in creating doubts and leading thinkers to question accepted religious views, he also played an important role in the development of fideistic orthodoxy, culminating in Kierkegaard’s views.

Everybody, whether they are religious or not, implicitly knows that religion is costly, counterfactual, and even counterintuitive. The more one accepts what is materially false to be really true, and the more one spends material resources in displays of such acceptance, the more others consider one’s faith deep and one’s commitment sincere. For the moral philosopher and Christian votary Søren Kierkegaard, true faith could be motivated only by “a gigantic passion” to commit to the “absurd.

There were philosophers who tried, before Hegel, to explain […] history. And providence could really not but smile when it saw these attempts. But providence did not laugh outright, for there was a human, honest sincerity about them. But Hegel! Here I need Homer's language. How did the gods roar with laughter! Such a horrid little professor who has simply seen through the necessity of anything and everything there is, and who now plays the whole affair on his barrel-organ: listen, ye gods of Olympus!

He made the arrangements, the summer passed, and he went to Berlin to study. When he returned at the end of his year, he brought back a new blend: the methods of German phenomenology, mixed with ideas from the earlier Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and others, set off with the distinctively French seasoning of his own literary sensibility. He applied phenomenology to people’s lives in a more exciting, personal way than its inventors had ever thought to do, and thus made himself the founding father of a philosophy that became international in impact, but remained Parisian in flavour: modern existentialism. The

In actuality, silence is strength—particularly early on in any journey. As the philosopher (and as it happens, a hater of newspapers and their chatter) Kierkegaard warned, “Mere gossip anticipates real talk, and to express what is still in thought weakens action by forestalling it.” And that’s what is so insidious about talk. Anyone can talk about himself or herself. Even a child knows how to gossip and chatter. Most people are decent at hype and sales. So what is scarce and rare? Silence. The ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation and subsist without its validation. Silence is the respite of the confident and the strong.

The danger now is that anti-intellectualism [...] is spreading all over the areas of so-called "Western civilisation". It can take many forms, from aggressive clericalism and atom-bomb militarism to the mild but dangerous pessimisms of Kierkegaard and Satre. All these forms have something in common. They all express the belief that man's state cannot be improved by conscious intelligent co-operation. They want less knowledge and more faith and are unanimous in attacking countries where men are trying to build up a scientific civilisation through their own efforts, and in belittling the beliefs which are leading them to do so - the philosophic system of dialectical materialism.

Professor A. H. Maslow, for example, has conducted a series of researches into extremely healthy people that have led him to conclude that health and optimism are far more positive principles in human psychology than Freud would ever have admitted. Man is a slave to the delusion that he is a passive creature, a creature of circumstance; this is because he makes the mistake of identifying himself with his limited everyday consciousness, and is unaware of the immense forces that lie just beyond the threshold of consciousness. But these forces, although he is unaware of them on a conscious level, are still a far more active influence in his life than any external circumstances. Freudian psychology, for all its achievements, has made a twofold error: it has tried to anatomize the human mind as a pathologist would dissect a corpse, and it has limited its researches to sick human beings. Sick men talk about their illness far more than healthy people talk about their health; in fact, healthy people are usually too absorbed in living to bother with self-revelation. Psychology has consequently been inclined to divide the world into sick people and “normal” people, regarding occasional super-normality as the exception; Maslow has shown that super-normality is a great deal commoner than would be supposed; in fact as common as sub-normality. Ordinarily healthy people often experience a sense of intense life-affirmation (which Maslow calls “peak experiences”); and examination of peak experiences has led Maslow to conclude that the evolutionary drive (which is so clear in art and philosophy) is as basic a part of human psychology as the Freudian libido or the Adlerian will to self-assertion. — Colin Wilson, “‘Six Thousand Feet Above Men and Time‘: Remarks on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard” (1965) (Wilson C. “Six Thousand Feet Above Men and Time”: Remarks on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard // Stanley C. (Ed.). Colin Wilson: Collected Essays on Philosophers. — Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. Pp. 110–111.)

So there are long conversations in cafés about Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus and Raymond Queneau, and all the boys that we were just beginning to get excited about in London when the first French literature filtered across after the Liberation. My God, Leo, there is some very interesting stuff being written in France at present on the philosophical and literary front. I begin to get some glimmering too about ‘existentialism’ the latest philosophy of France – Sartre, out of Husserl, Heidegger and Kierkegaard. Last week I had a very great experience. Jean-Paul Sartre came to Brussels to give a lecture on existentialism, and I met him after the lecture, and on the following day during an interminable café séance. He is small, squints appallingly, is very simple and charming in manner and extremely attractive. What versatility! Philosophy, novels, plays, cinema, journalism! No wonder the stuffy professional philosophers are suspicious. I don’t make much yet of his phenomenology, but his theories on morals, which derive from Kierkegaard, seem to me first rate and just what English philosophy needs to have injected into its veins, to expel the loathsome humours of Ross and Prichard.

In his attempt to discover own self, the client typically uses the relationship to explore, to examine the various aspects of his own experience, to recognize and face up to the deep contradictions which he often discovers. He learns how much of his behavior, even how much of the feeling he experiences, is not real, is not something which flows from the genuine reactions of his organism but is a facade, a front, behind which he has been hiding. He discovers how much of his life is guided by what he thinks he should be, not by what he is. Often he discovers that he exists only in response to the demands of others, that he seems to have no self of his own, that he is only trying to think, and feel, and behave in the way that others believe he ought to think, and feel and behave. In this connection I have been astonished to find how accurately the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, pictured the dilemma of the individual more than a century ago, with keen psychological insight. He points out that the most common despair is to be in despair at not choosing, or willing, to be oneself; but that the deepest form of despair is to choose "to be another than himself." On the other hand "to will to be that self which one truly is, is indeed the opposite of despair," and this choice is the deepest responsibility of man. As I read some of his writings I almost feel that he must have listened in on the statements made by our clients as they search and explore for the reality of self--often a painful and troubling search. This exploration becomes even more disturbing when they find themselves involved in removing the false faces which they had not known were false face. They begin to engage in the frightening task of exploring the turbulent and sometimes violent feelings within themselves. To remove a mask which you had thought was part of your real self can be a deeply disturbing experience, yet when there is freedom to think and feel and be, the individual moves toward such a goal.

Although I am still far from this kind of interior understanding of myself, with profound respect for its significance I have sought to preserve my individuality―worshipped the unknown God. With a premature anxiety I have tried to avoid coming in close contact with those things whose force of attraction might be too powerful for me. I have sought to appropriate much from them, studied their distinctive characteristics and meaning in human life, but at the same time guarded against coming, like the moth, too close to the flame. I have had little to win or to lose in association with the ordinary run of men, partly because what they do―so-called practical life―does not interest me much, partly because their coldness and indifference to the spiritual and deeper currents in man alienate me even more from them. With few exceptions my companions have had no special influence upon me. A life that has not arrived at clarity about itself must necessarily exhibit an uneven side-surface; confronted by certain facts [*Facta*] and their apparent disharmony, they simply halted there, for, as I see it, they did not have sufficient interest to seek a resolution in a higher harmony or to recognize the necessity of it. Their opinion of me was always one-sided, and I have vacillated between putting too much or too little weight on what they said. I have now withdrawn from their influence and the potential variations of my life's compass resulting from it. Thus I am again standing at the point where I must begin again in another way. I shall now calmly attempt to look at myself and begin to initiate inner action; for only thus will I be able, like a child calling itself "I" in its first consciously undertaken act, be able to call myself "I" in a profounder sense. But that takes stamina, and it is not possible to harvest immediately what one has sown. I will remember that philosopher's method of having his disciples keep silent for three years; then I dare say it will come. Just as one does not begin a feast at sunrise but at sundown, just so in the spiritual world one must first work forward for some time before the sun really shines for us and rises in all its glory; for although it is true as it says that God lets his sun shine upon the good and the evil and lets the rain fall on the just and the unjust, it is not so in the spiritual world. So let the die be cast―I am crossing the Rubicon! No doubt this road takes me into battle, but I will not renounce it. I will not lament the past―why lament? I will work energetically and not waste time in regrets, like the person stuck in a bog and first calculating how far he has sunk without recognizing that during the time he spends on that he is sinking still deeper. I will hurry along the path I have found and shout to everyone I meet: Do not look back as Lot's wife did, but remember that we are struggling up a hill." ―from_Journals_, (The Search for Personal Meaning)

The philosophical problem of Either/Or, as Kierkegaard referred to it, is therefore largely a factitious problem, in which philosophers attempt to synthesize or reconcile oppositions that are created primarily by their own categorizations. We are told that a thing is either A or not-A, and logically these categories are exclusive. But such division is not intrinsic in reality, in which elements flow into each other and possess similar properties.

each philosopher realized that life does not follow the continuous flow of logical argument and that one often has to risk moving beyond the limits of the rational in order to live life to the fullest. As Kierkegaard remarked, many people have offered proofs for the immortality of the soul, but Socrates, after hypothesizing that the soul might be immortal, risked his life with that possibility in mind.

If only he could say what is true!” said Totochabo. Marcellin and I looked at him. He went on: “You heard. If only you could stop dreaming for a minute, we could talk perhaps. But talk about what?” And with a shrug of the spine, he made as if to go. Marcellin held him back by the tail of his coat, and declared: “Now listen. I’m very much aware that I can’t think. I’m a poet. But I cannot think. I was never shown how. I’m always being teased about it. When I hear my friends holding philosophical discussions, I’d like to join in too, but they always go too fast for me. They tell me to read Plato, the Upanishads, Kierkegaard, Spinoza, Hegel, Benjamin Fondane, the Tao-Teh, Karl Marx, and even the Bible. I’ve had many goes at reading all of them, except the Bible, because (Bible indeed!) they must be having me on. It’s all crystal clear as I read the stuff, but afterwards I forget, or can’t talk about it, or come up with contradictory ideas which I can’t choose between, in a word, it doesn’t work.” “My dear Marcellin,” I began, “first, you should …” “Shut up, I said!” the old man shouted again and the superior smile blooming on my lips slid down into my stomach. “Carry on!” he said to Marcellin who proceeded to finish what he was saying: “Well, now. I want you to tell me once and for all if I am an idiot and, if I’m not, what you have to do in order to think.” “Think about what?” Totochabo said wearily and he turned away. This time, we were both too dismayed to try and stop him. But, more important, we were thirsty and it did not take us too long to discover a small demijohn which fitted the bill very nicely. As we drank, lounging like ancient Romans, we recited convoluted poems. Just before my eyes closed, I had a vague twinge of conscience just as you do sometimes when you take a few steps back and rise onto the tips of your woes so as to get a good run at sleep and I remarked to Marcellin that I was much more of an idiot than he believed but a much less of one than I thought, which was almost true.

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, summed up in a playful, but bleakly realistic and exasperated, outburst in his masterpiece, Either/Or: ‘Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.’ We deserve pity; we will make disastrous decisions, but we can – says Kierkegaard – be consoled by a bitter truth: we have no better options, for the conditions of existence are intrinsically rather than accidentally frustrating.

Concerned about attitudes toward worship and practices in worship in the churches of his time, Søren Kierkegaard, a nineteenth-century Danish philosopher/theologian, compared what was taking place in the theater and what was happening in Christian worship. In a theater, actors, prompted by people offstage, perform for their audiences. To his dismay, Kierkegaard found that this theatrical model dominated the worship practices of many churches. A minister was viewed as the on-stage actor, God as the offstage prompter, and the congregation as the audience. Unfortunately, that understanding of worship remains as prevalent as it is wrong. Each ingredient of the theatrical model mentioned by Kierkegaard is an essential component in Christian worship. Crucial, though, is a proper identification of the role of each one. In authentic worship, the actor is, in fact, many actors and actresses—the members of the congregation. The prompter is the minister, if singular, or, if plural, all of the people who lead in worship (choir members, instrumentalists, soloists, readers, prayers, preachers). The audience is God. Always, without exception, the audience is God! If God is not the audience in any given service, Christian worship does not take place. If worship does occur and God is not the audience, all present participate in the sin of idolatry.3

In a journal entry the famed philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once wrote about some tame geese who, week after week, attended church and heard teachings on God's great gift to geese - wings.  With wings, the preaching gander reminded them, they could fly and experience the many blessings known only through the utilization of that gift.  But, laments Kierkegaard, week after week they waddled home without flapping their way to the flight they were told was their destiny.  In a sobering conclusion Kierkegaard reports that these waddling geese were very well liked by the humans of the land.  They grew fat and plump and were then butchered, and eaten.  And that, says the philosopher, was the end of that.   Lesson?  God gives us wings

Kierkegaard wrote of “eternal consciousness”; the French sociologist Émile Durkheim of “collective consciousness”; the British writer H. G. Wells of a “world brain”; the French philosopher Edouard Le Roy of the “noosphere”—which the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called a “new skin” on the earth.

What I am about to say is no secret to the scientist, but it is not generally known by the layman. The secret is simply this: the scientist, in practicing the scientific method, cannot utter a single word about an individual thing or creature insofar as it is an individual, but only insofar as it resembles other individuals. [...] If the scientist cannot address himself to this reality, who can? My discovery, of course, was that the writer can, and most particularly the novelist. Oddly enough, it was the reading of two nineteenth-century writers, Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, which convinced me that only the writer, the existential philosopher or the novelist, can explore the gap with all the passion and seriousness and expectation of, say, an Einstein discovering that Newtonian physics no longer works.

Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want. —Anna Lappe, author and activist • Do a quick review of the money you spend each month: How much is spent on your children’s dreams? Your spouse’s dreams? The dreams of your extended family, friends, the world? How much is spent on yours? • How can we harness Charles Dickens’ advice to make a down payment on our own dreams? • If you do not currently generate paid income, are any funds in your household budget allocated to you? Are you comfortable with the arrangement you have? To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself. —Søren Kierkegaard, nineteenth-century Danish philosopher • As you think about making space for your dream, are you finding yourself uncomfortable, unnerved, even physically sick?

Following the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, he suggests that (1) prudential, (2) moral, and (3) religious reason mark the three stages of a journey on life’s way – a spiritual and moral journey. On this journey we move from selfish motivations to selfless ones as we grow spiritually. We begin in a pre-moral state of consciousness, move through the moral, and finally into the spiritual or religious. This third level enables one to live the ethical life with selfless compassion. A

As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard noted, life can only be understood backwards—but it must be lived forwards.

Existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote: “If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions

But he found a kindred spirit in Kierkegaard, who vehemently insisted on the infinite qualitative difference between God and humanity; when the finite tries to bear the infinite through itself, it will always end up with something less than truly transcendent.

the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard noted, life can only be understood backwards—but it must be lived forwards.

Life is best understood backward but must be lived forward, observed the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Maybe we would trust providence more if we could watch our lives in reverse, like a home movie played backward. Maybe providence is always working in our favor, but we’re too close to appreciate it. Only time provides the distance needed to admire its handiwork.

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.” Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855) PHILOSOPHER

In actuality, silence is strength—particularly early on in any journey. As the philosopher (and as it happens, a hater of newspapers and their chatter) Kierkegaard warned, “Mere gossip anticipates real talk, and to express what is still in thought weakens action by forestalling it.

Kierkegaard’s analysis of this “fear of freedom” is an intriguing one, pursued and expanded on by philosophers as different as Jean-Paul Sartre and Erich Fromm (1900–80). It can make individuals and whole societies “inauthentic”. People, as individuals or en masse, are too often happy to “escape” this fear by retreating into an obedience to ideologies dictated by others.

Ben sat on his bed, reading Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments. Unlike many of the people he’d met in his classes, his interest in philosophy wasn’t pure posturing. He didn’t read Nietzsche so he could justify his youthful angst and he didn’t memorize lines of Sartre so that he could wax intellectual with the arty kids who smoked clove cigarettes in the dorm lounge. Rather, he loved philosophy because it fashioned a slim doorway to abstraction. It granted him moments of reprieve from the solid, too-sharply defined world, moments in which he could wade in contemplative formlessness. Ideas didn’t require substance or volume; they merely required someone to believe. Ben found solace in this controlled ephemerality.

As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard noted, life can only be understood backwards—but it must be lived forwards. Looking back, you can always see exactly when you should have bought and sold your stocks. But don’t let that fool you into thinking you can see, in real time, just when to get in and out.

Life can only be understood backward; but it must be lived forwards,” said the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.

Remember Friedrich Nietzsche, from earlier in our journey. “Only thoughts which come from walking have any value,” he maintained. Søren Kierkegaard felt similarly. “I have walked myself into my best thoughts,” remarked the Danish philosopher. Walking is “gymnastics for the mind,” observed the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I am unable to reflect when I am not walking; the moment I stop, I think no more, and as soon as I am again in motion, my head resumes its workings,” averred the Swiss-born philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The French philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne lamented that his thoughts often came to him when he was on the move, at moments when “I have nothing to jot them down on”; this was wont to happen “especially on my horse, the seat of my widest musings.

Existentialism dates back to Soren Kierkegaard, and, in his case, represented (1) a rejection of the abstract terms beloved by most Western philosophers, (2) a preference for defining words and concepts in relation to concrete individuals and their concrete choices in real-life situations, and (3) a new and tricky way of defending Christianity against the onslaughts of rationalists.

In his work The Sickness Unto Death, Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard explains that the most common form of human despair is not being who you are.21 Consider the tragic self-identification of a generation of Israelites, who had witnessed God’s miraculous presence and provision under the leadership of Moses, when they looked with fear on the inhabitants of the land promised to them by God: “We were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight” (Num. 13:33 KJV, emphasis added).

Suzuki also liked to compare Zen to Western philosophy, to Zen's advantage: "The philosopher according to whom cogito ergo sum is generally weak-minded. The Zen master has nothing to do with such quibbles" (Suzuki 1970, 408). We may also question the accuracy of his understanding of Western philosophy. If Meister Eckhart, despite (or because of) his undeniable spirituality, cannot be said to represent the entire Christian tradition, neither can the intellectualist strain emphasized by Suzuki be said to represent the entire Western philosophical tradition. From the pre-Socratics, Socrates and the Stoics, all the way to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, philosophy was a path of self-transformation, not merely the intellectual pastime that Suzuki describes.

With Hegel something cornes to an end. After Hegel, there is a philosophical void. This is not to say that there has been a lack of thinkers or of geniuses, but that Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche start from a denial of philosophy. We might say that with the latter we enter an age of non-philosophy. But perhaps such a destruction of philosophy constitutes its very realization. Perhaps it preserves the essence of philosophy, and it may be, as Husserl wrote, that philosophy is reborn from its ashes.

We are each of us—every single one of us—meant to be a lens for truths that we ourselves cannot see. “The system cannot include the systematizer,” Kierkegaard once said, a clunky but accurate formulation of a problem that applies even to people who don’t have a philosophical bone in their bodies. Our lives burn up, and our minds within them, and all that we have sought so hard to retain in art or durable projects or familial memory. But to live in faith is to live toward a truth that we can but dimly sense, if at all, and to die in faith is to leave an afterimage whose dimensions and meanings we could never even have guessed at. Something of us—something most us, and least us—is saved and made available for others. This is as true of the politician as it is of the poet, as true of the teacher or the preacher, the mother or the father, as it is of a Danish philosopher.

Danish philosopher called Søren Kierkegaard: ‘Life can be understood only backward, but it must be lived forward.

Anxiety, said the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, ‘is the dizziness of freedom.

Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard described the tension so many of us feel between thought and action this way: “The Bible is very easy to understand—but we pretend to be unable to understand it, because we know very well that the minute we do, we are obligated to act accordingly.

Anxiety, to quote the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, may be the “dizziness of freedom,

This was the background for Benn's harsh objections. Versed in the arguments put forward by Philosophical Anthropology, Benn was anything but a concerned humanist; he was not irritated by the denial of man's higher status but by Uexkiill's putative blindness to man's fundamentally problematic nature. This critique of Uexkull (which will resurface time and again) is a kind of speciesism in a minor key that tries to reclaim a special place for humans not as the masters but as the misfits of creation. There are always faint echoes of Kierkegaard: somehow, we are special because we are broken, lost, abandoned, or derelict incomplete beings. (Alternately, "unfinished" humans may be labeled as evolutionary to-do projects that await completion.) Uexkiill's "jovial" theory appears to be devoid of tragedy. There is—to span the extremes of the German pantheon—too much Goethe and too little Nietzsche. Heaping insult upon insult, Benn acknowledged the similarity between Uexkull and Goethe but then added that in Goethe's time this type of harmonious leveling of differences may have been "worthy of a great man," but nowadays it revealed nothing other than the "primary joviality of the biologist and insect specialist.

Søren Kierkegaard was a philosopher of the human spirit. To come to understand what he is saying is to be challenged as a person, the challenge is in the form of an interrogation, the topic of which is very simple: you are an existing person, a human being; do you treat this fact with the seriousness and respect it demands? Or would you rather avoid the question?

Two such misfits in the nineteenth century had a particularly strong influence on the later existentialists: Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Neither was an academic philosopher: Kierkegaard had no university career, and Nietzsche was a professor of Greek and Roman philology who had to retire because of ill health. Both were individualists, and both were contrarians by nature, dedicated to making people uncomfortable. Both must have been unbearable to spend more than a few hours with. Both sit outside the main story of modern existentialism, as precursors, but had a great impact on what developed later.

Kierkegaard was a born goader. He picked quarrels with his contemporaries, broke off personal relationships, and generally made difficulties out of everything. He wrote: ‘Abstraction is disinterested, but for one who exists his existing is the supreme interest.’ He applied the same argumentative attitude to the personnel of philosophical history. He disagreed, for example, with René Descartes, who had founded modern philosophy by stating Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. For Kierkegaard, Descartes had things back to front. In his own view, human existence comes first: it is the starting point for everything we do, not the result of a logical deduction. My existence is active: I live it and choose it, and this precedes any statement I can make about myself. Moreover, my existence is mine: it is personal. Descartes’ ‘I’ is generic: it could apply to anyone, but Kierkegaard’s ‘I’ is the ‘I’ of an argumentative, anguished misfit.

He formed a link between them and his own generation of dissatisfied students in the late 1920s, bored with their studies and longing for ‘destructive’ new ideas. Further back, he connected them to the whole line of philosophical rebels: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and the rest.

the present book’s inquiry into the elements of an adequate philosophy of consciousness leads to the conclusion that consciousness can be understood as the experience of performing structured combinations of intentional operations that relate the elements of experience to one another in intelligible patterns and that also relate the subjective or “tacit” dimension of consciousness to an objective dimension or pole.

Moderns fancy themselves as more intellectually sophisticated than ancient man, yet they are often ignorant of the fact that their notions of existential angst and individual identity that they think is the erudite offerings of modern existentialist philosophers like Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Nietzsche, were wrestled with millennia before the chaotic narcissistic spasm of the modern period.

My sixth point concerns the effect of existentialism in blasting open philosophical systems thinking and natural science ideology. This process also dates back to the first half of the nineteenth century. Its opening scene played when Kierkegaard objected that Hegel had forgotten the real existing individual when he constructed his system. This approach reached its culmination in the mid-twentieth century when Jean-Paul Sartre, inspired by the phenomenologists Husserl and Heidegger, presented his widely influential theory of committed existence.

Even those who have desired to work out a completely positive philosophy have been philosophers only to the extent that, at the same time, they have refused the right to install themselves in absolute knowledge. They taught not this knowledge, but its becoming in us, not the absolute but, at most, our absolute relation to it, as Kierkegaard said. What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement.

You may tell the other two I've regained my sweet temper and am no longer breathing fire. And don't fret over things you can't change. 'Life must be lived forwardly.' That's from a philosopher Marcus has taken to quoting lately, I can never remember the name." "Kierkegaard," Sebastian said "Life can be understood only by looking back, but has to be lived forwardly.