Works Of Love Kierkegaard Quotes

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.

To grumble about the world and its unhappiness is always easier than to beat one's breast and groan over oneself.

Men think that it is impossible for a human being to love his enemies, for enemies are hardly able to endure the sight of one another. Well, then, shut your eyes--and your enemy looks just like your neighbor.

With respect to love we speak continually about perfection and the perfect person. With respect to love Christianity also speaks continually about perfection and the perfect person. Alas, but we men talk about finding the perfect person in order to love him. Christianity speaks about being the perfect person who limitlessly loves the person he sees.

the measure of a person’s disposition is this: how far is he from what he understands to what he does, how great is the distance between his understanding and his actions.

To have distinctiveness is to believe in the distinctiveness of everyone else, because distinctiveness is not mine but is God’s gift by which he gives being to me, and he indeed gives to all, gives being to all. (p. 271)

All distinctions between the many different kinds of love are essentially abolished by Christianity.

salvation consists primarily in his beginning to sorrow earnestly over himself!

Spontaneous love makes a person free and at the next moment dependent. It is just as with a person’s coming into existence; by coming into existence, by becoming a self, he becomes free, but at the next moment he is dependent on this self.

When the depressed person desires to be rid of life, indeed, of himself, is this not because he is unwilling to learn earnestly and rigorously to love himself?

One can very well eat lettuce before its heart has been formed; still, the delicate crispness of the heart and its lovely frizz are something altogether different from the leaves. It is the same in the world of the spirit. Being too busy has this result: that an individual very, very rarely is permitted to form a heart; on the other hand, the thinker, the poet, or the religious personality who actually has formed his heart, will never be popular, not because he is difficult, but because it demands quiet and prolonged working with oneself and intimate knowledge of oneself as well as a certain isolation.

Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally and happily secured against despair

However ridiculous, however backward, however inexpedient loving one's neighbour may seem in he world, it is still the highest a man is capable of doing.

Solo hay un camino para asegurarse nunca ser engañado, y ese es el de creerlo todo amorosamente.

Hablando en términos humanos, amar es seguir la representación que el amado se haya formado acerca de lo que es el amor, y haciéndolo uno será amado.

Pero entonces, ¿qué es amor? Amor es presuponer amor; tener amor significa presuponer amor en los demás, ser amoroso significa presuponer que los demás son amorosos.

Pues amar a Dios significa amarse de verdad a uno mismo; ayudar a otro ser humano a que ame a Dios es amar a otro ser humano; ser ayudado por otro ser humano para amar a Dios significa ser amado.

Forsake the dissimilarities so that you can love the neighbor. Alas, perhaps it is not even necessary to say this to you; perhaps you found no beloved in this world, no friend along the way, so that you are walking alone.

Love believes all things," for to believe all things means precisely, even though love is not apparent, even though the opposite is seen, to presuppose that love is nevertheless present fundamentally, even in the misguided, even in the corrupt, even in the hateful.

The best defense against hypocrisy is love; indeed, it is not only a defense but a chasmic abyss; in all eternity it has nothing to do with hypocrisy. This also is a fruit by which love is known—it secures the loving one against falling into the snare of the hypocrite.

As the calm lake stems from the deep spring that no eye saw, so too a person's love has a still deeper ground, in God's love. If there were no gushing spring at the bottom, if Hod were not love, then neither would there be the little lake nor either a person's love. As the calm lake stems darkly from the deep spring, so a person's love originate mysteriously in God's. As the calm lake indeed invites you to contemplate it, yet with the darkness of the reflection prevents you from seeing through it, so does love's mysterious origin in God's love prevent you from seeing its ground. When you think you see it, it is a reflection that deceives you, as if what only hides the deeper ground were itself the ground.

Besides my other numerous circle of acquaintances I have one more intimate confidant – my melancholy. In the midst of my joy, in the midst of my work, he waves to me, calls me to one side, even though physically I stay put. My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known; what wonder, then, that I love her in return. […]

The poet can understand everything, in riddles, and wonderfully explain everything, in riddles, but he cannot understand himself or understand that he himself is a riddle

perhaps most individuals live in a diluted social morality and need the rigorous ethical imperative of vision and requirement

(…) hay posibilidad del bien incluso en el último instante, y que hay por tanto esperanza todavía incluso para el más perdido.

The actor’s art is the art of deceiving; the art is the deception. To be able to deceive is the great thing, and to allow oneself to be deceived is just as great. Therefore one must not be able and must not want to see the actor through the costume; therefore it is the pinnacle of art when the actor becomes one with what he represents, because this is the pinnacle of deception.

(…) si pudiera alguien demostrar que no hay que creer absolutamente nada, por causa de la posibilidad del engaño, yo puedo demostrar que hay que creerlo todo, por causa de la posibilidad del engaño.

No poet, if he understands himself, would think of singing its praises. What the poet sings about must have the sadness, which is the riddle of his own life, that it must blossom—and, alas, must perish.

The poet does indeed love solitude, loves it—in order to discover in solitude the missing happiness of erotic love and friendship, just as one who in wonder wants to observe the stars seeks a dark place.

Nosotros los seres humanos tenemos un temor natural a equivocarnos cuando nos formamos una opinión demasiado buena acerca de un ser humano. En cambio, no tememos quizá al error cuando pensamos mal de otro ser humano...

De esta manera el cristianismo tiene siempre consuelo, y su consuelo se distingue de todo consuelo humano en que este siempre es consciente de ser únicamente una compensación por la pérdida de la alegría: el consuelo cristiano es la alegría.

And so when the generation, which itself desired to level and to be emancipated, to destroy authority and at the same time itself, has, through the scepticism of the principle association, started the hopeless forest fire of abstraction; when as a result of levelling with this scepticism, the generation has rid itself of the individual and of everything organic and concrete, and put in its place 'humanity' and the numerical equality of man and man: when the generation has, for a moment, delighted in this unlimited panorama of abstract infinity, unrelieved by even the smallest eminence, undisturbed by even the slightest interest, a sea of desert; then the time has come for work to begin, for every individual must work for himself, each for himself. No longer can the individual, as in former times, turn to the great for help when he grows confused. That is past; he is either lost in the dizziness of unending abstraction or saved for ever in the reality of religion. Perhaps very many will cry out in despair, but it will not help them--already it is too late...Nor shall any of the unrecognizable presume to help directly or to speak directly or to teach directly at the head of the masses, in order to direct their decisions, instead of giving his negative support and so helping the individual to make the decision which he himself has reached; any other course would be the end of him, because he would be indulging in the short-sighted compassion of man, instead of obeying the order of divinity, of an angry, yet so merciful, divinity. For the development is, in spite of everything, a progress because all the individuals who are saved will receive the specific weight of religion, its essence at first hand, from God himself. Then it will be said: 'behold, all is in readiness, see how the cruelty of abstraction makes the true form of worldliness only too evident, the abyss of eternity opens before you, the sharp scythe of the leveller makes it possible for every one individually to leap over the blade--and behold, it is God who waits. Leap, then, into the arms of God'. But the 'unrecognizable' neither can nor dares help man, not even his most faithful disciple, his mother, or the girl for whom he would gladly give his life: they must make the leap themselves, for God's love is not a second-hand gift. And yet the 'unrecognizable' neither can nor dares help man, not even his most faithful disciple, his mother, or the girl for whom he would gladly give his life: they must make the leap themselves, for God's love is not a second-hand gift. And yet the 'unrecognizable' (according to his degree) will have a double work compared with the 'outstanding' man (of the same degree), because he will not only have to work continuously, but at the same time labour to conceal his work.

what paganism called love, as distinguished from self-love, was preference. But if passionate preference is essentially another form of self-love, then one sees here again the truth in the saying of the venerable fathers: “that the virtues of paganism are glittering vices

Knowledge is like the sheerest transparency, precisely the most perfect and purest, like the purest water, which has no taste at all. The magistrate is not defiled because he knows more about the plots than the criminal. No, knowledge does not defile a man; it is mistrust which defiles a man's knowledge just as love purifies it.

O you quiet martyrs of an unhappy erotic love, what you suffered by having, out of love, to hide your love certainly remained a secret; it never became known, so great was your love that involved this sacrifice—yet your love became known by its fruits! And perhaps these very fruits, the ones matured by the quiet fire of a hidden pain, became the most precious.

Typical relationship books, they are about communicating more clearly, being more loving, and making time for your relationship. All of this is lovely advice, only if the other person is noticing or listening! Kierkegaard noted that “Love is the expression of the one who loves, not of the one who is loved.” The challenge is that when this expression is not met with any reciprocity, and in fact the opposite, it can be exhausting and demoralising. If you love more, then you will get more back. It’s not that linear, and while that may apply in a factory— work harder, make more widgets—it does not work in relationships, least of all with a narcissist. Personality patterns tend to be pretty entrenched—and the rules of rescue do not apply.

(…) por muchas que sean las cosas espantosas y repugnantes que hayas visto en el mundo, cosas que desearías poder olvidar porque quebrantan tu ánimo, tu confianza, te causan hastío de vivir y repulsión por la vida, ¡basta con que consideres cómo el amor edifica para que quedes edificado en las ganas de vivir! Hay infinitos objetos de que poder hablar, pero solo hay uno edificante: cómo edifica el amor.

In erotic love and friendship, the two love each other by virtue of the dissimilarity or by virtue of the similarity that is based on dissimilarity (as when two friends love each other by virtue of similar customs, characters, occupations, education, etc., that is, on the basis of the similarity by which they are different from other people, or in which they are like each other as different from other people). Therefore the two can become one self in a selfish sense.

If I could forget you! Is my love then a work of memory? Even if time expunged everything from its tablets, expunged even memory itself, my relation to you would stay just as alive, you would still not be forgotten. If I could forget you! What then should I remember? For after all, I have forgotten myself in order to remember you: so if I forgot you I would come to remember myself; but the moment I remembered myself I would have to remember you again. If I could forget you! What would happen then? There is a picture from antiquity. It depicts Ariadne. She is leaping up from her couch and gazing anxiously after a ship that is hurrying away under full sail. By her side stands Cupid with unstrung bow and drying his eyes. Behind her stands a winged female figure in a helmet. It is usually assumed this is Nemesis. Imagine this picture, imagine it changed a little. Cupid is not weeping and his bow is not unstrung; or would you have become less beautiful, less victorious, if I had become mad? Cupid smiles and bends his bow. Nemesis does not stand inactive by your side; she too draws her bow. In that other picture we see a male figure on the ship, busily occupied. It is assumed it is Theseus. Not so in my picture. He stands on the stern, he looks back longingly, spreads his arms. He has repented, or rather, his madness has left him, but the ship carries him away. Cupid and Nemesis both aim at him, an arrow flies from each bow; their aim is true; one sees that, one understands, they have both hit the same place in his heart, a sign that his love was the Nemesis that wrought vengeance." ―Johannes de Silentio, from_Either/Or: A Fragment of Life_

Without the eternal, one lives with the help of habit, sagacity, aping, experience, custom, and usage. Indeed, take all this, put it all together, cook it over the slow or the merely earthly blazing fire of passions, and you will see that you will get all kinds of things out of it, a variously concocted tough slime that is called practical sagacity. But no one ever got possibility out of it, possibility, this marvelous thing that is so infinitely fragile (the most delicate shoot of spring is not so fragile!), so infinitely frail (the finest woven linen is not so frail!), and yet, brought into being and shaped with the help of the eternal, stronger than anything else, if it is the possibility of the good!

With his Don Juan Mozart enters the little immortal circle of those whose names, whose works, time will not forget, because eternity remembers them. And though it is a matter of indifference, when one has found entrance there, whether one stands highest or lowest, because in a certain sense all stand equally high, since all stand infinitely high, and though it is childish to dispute over the first and the last place here, as it is when children quarrel about the order assigned to them in the church at confirmation, I am still too much of a child, or rather I am like a young girl in love with Mozart, and I must have him in first place, cost what it may. And I will appeal to the parish clerk and to the priest and to the dean and to the bishop and to the whole consistory, and I will implore and adjure them to hear my prayer, and I will invoke the whole congregation on this matter, and if they refuse to hear me, if they refuse to grant my childish wish, I excommunicate myself, and renounce all fellowship with their modes of thought; and I will form a sect which not only gives Mozart first place, but which absolutely refuses to recognize any artist other than Mozart; and I shall beg Mozart to forgive me, because his music did not inspire me to great deeds, but turned me into a fool, who lost through him the little reason I had, and spent most of my time in quiet sadness humming what I do not understand, haunting like a specter day and night what I am not permitted to enter. Immortal Mozart! Thou, to whom I owe everything; to whom I owe the loss of my reason, the wonder that caused my soul to tremble, the fear that gripped my inmost being; thou, to whom I owe it that I did not pass through life without having been stirred by something. Thou, to whom I offer thanks that I did not die without having loved, even though my love became unhappy. Is it strange then that I should be more concerned for Mozart's glorification than for the happiest moment of my life, more jealous for his immortality than for my own existence? Aye, if he were taken away, if his name were erased from the memory of men, then would the last pillar be overthrown, which for me has kept everything from being hurled together into boundless chaos, into fearful nothingness.

With his Don Juan Mozart enters the little immortal circle of those whose names, whose works, time will not forget, because eternity remembers them. And though it is a matter of indifference, when one has found entrance there, whether one stands highest or lowest, because in a certain sense all stand equally high, since all stand infinitely high, and though it is childish to dispute over the first and the last place here, as it is when children quarrel about the order assigned to them in the church at confirmation, I am still too much of a child, or rather I am like a young girl in love with Mozart, and I must have him in first place, cost what it may. And I will appeal to the parish clerk and to the priest and to the dean and to the bishop and to the whole consistory, and I will implore and adjure them to hear my prayer, and I will invoke the whole congregation on this matter, and if they refuse to hear me, if they refuse to grant my childish wish, I excommunicate myself, and renounce all fellowship with their modes of thought; and I will form a sect which not only gives Mozart first place, but which absolutely refuses to recognize any artist other than Mozart; and I shall beg Mozart to forgive me, because his music did not inspire me to great deeds, but turned me into a fool, who lost through him the little reason I had, and spent most of my time in quiet sadness humming what I do not understand, haunting like a specter day and night what I am not permitted to enter. Immortal Mozart! Thou, to whom I owe everything; to whom I owe the loss of my reason, the wonder that caused my soul to tremble, the fear that gripped my inmost being; thou, to whom I owe it that I did not pass through life without having been stirred by something. Thou, to whom I offer thanks that I did not die without having loved, even though my love became unhappy. Is it strange then that I should be more concerned for Mozart's glorification than for the happiest moment of my life, more jealous for his immortality than for my own existence? Aye, if he were taken away, if his name were erased from the memory of men, then would the last pillar be overthrown, which for me has kept everything from being hurled together into boundless chaos, into fearful nothningness.

This is why faith, hope, and love do not name an acquiring of potencies or the supernatural perfection of already given natural endowments. They are not “a direct heightening of the natural life in a person in immediate continuation from and connection with it.” They name instead an emptying of the self, a “dying to,” an “annihilation,” in which the self abides in “the continual understanding that I am able to do nothing at all.” Paradoxically, however, this self-emptying is simultaneously the “ability to do everything,” the ability to undertake every work absolutely freely, without why, outside of oneself, eccentrically, without seeking to translate one’s action into any kind of merit, disposition, or virtue that one would become anxious about protecting or perfecting. The annihilated soul lets go of every work the instant it is performed. It works only to let go, only to empty, only to sink into nothing, into the joy of possibility. Such annihilation does not result in apathy or quietism. It is the condition for an infinite engagement with existence, yet one without teleological ground: “to become nothing before God, and nevertheless infinitely, unconditionally engaged.

Kierkegaard says that all speculative philosophy cannot equal in complexity the dialectic of a woman who has been deceived. He goes on to explain that such a woman cannot find an object for her pain, because love cannot grasp the thought that it has been deceived. In art, it is the system itself that holds out the false promise, that deceives. We might almost say that art is in pain, because it is unable to believe this deception is taking place. The artist feels his work goes badly because he is not reaching technical perfection. Actually, he is looking into the eyes of a deceiver, who constantly throws him back into the dilemma — the paradox. Is it lying to me or not, he asks himself. He ends by believing the lie, in the face of all evidence against it, because he needs this lie to exist in his art.

But love- it, too, is an event, the greatest of all and the happiest of all. Love is a change, the most remarkable of all, but the most desirable- it is precisely in the sense of something better that we say a person possessed by love is changed or becomes altered. Love is a revolution, the most profound of all but the most blessed!

To try am fully, evil needs to victories, not one. The first victory happens when an evil deed is perpetrated; the second victory, when evil is returned." 9 "in the Christian tradition, condemnation is an element of reconciliation, not an isolated independent judgment, even when reconciliation cannot be achi Pp ved. So we condemn most properly in the act of forgiving, and the act of separating the doer from the deed. That is how God in Christ condemned all wrongdoing." 15 "...unhealthy dreams and misdirected labors often become broken realities." 42 "...the story (of Christianity) frames what it means to remember rightly, and the God of this story makes remembering rightly possible." 44 "...peace can be honest and lasting only if it rests on the foundation of truth and justice." 56 "Seekers or truth, as distinct from alleged possessors of truth, will employ 'double vision'- they will give others the benefit of the doubt, they will inhabit imaginatively the world of others, and they will endeavor to view events in question from the perspective of others, not just their own." 57 "Those who love do not remember a persons evil deeds without also remembering her good deeds; they do not remember a person'a vices without also being mindful of their own failings. Thus the full story of wrongdoing becomes clear through the voice of love..."64 "...the highest aim of lovingly truthful memory seeks to bring about the repentance, forgiveness, and transformation of wrongdoers, and reconciliation between wrongdoers and their victims." 65 "And healing of the wrong without involving the wrong tour, therefore, can only be partial. To complete the healing, The relationship between the two needs to be mended. For Christians, this is what reconciliation is all about. Reconciliation with the wrongdoer completes the healing of the person who suffered the wrong. 84 Page 113: "Christ suffered in solidarity...what happened to him will also happen to him." "The dangers of this memory reside in its orientation not just to the past but also to the future." 113 "But let us beware that some accounts of what it means for Christ to have died on behalf of the ungodly...negates the notion of his involvement as a third party." 113 "Christian churches are communities that keep themselves alive- more precisely, that God keeps alive- by keeping alive the memories of the exodus and the passion." 126 "...but often they (churches) simply fail to incorporate right remembering of wrong suffered into the celebration of holy Communion. And even when they do incorporate such remembrance, they often keep it neatly sequestered from the memory of the passion. That memory becomes simply the story of what God has done for us wrongdoers or for a suffers, while remaining mute about how we ourselves remember the wrongs. With such stopping short, suffered wrongs are remembered only for God to comfort us in our pain and lend religious legitimacy to whatever uses we want to put those memories. No wonder we sometimes find revenge celebrating its victory under the mantle of religiously sanctioned struggle for the faith, for self protection, for national preservation, for our way of life- all in the name of God and accompanied by celebration of the self sacrificial love of Christ!" 127 "Communities of sacred memory are, at their best, schools of right remembering - remembering that is truthful and just, that heals individuals without injuring others, that allows the past to motivate a just struggle for justice and the grace-filled work of reconciliation." 128 Quoting Kierkegaard: "no part of life out to have so much meaning for a person that he cannot forget it at any moment he wants to; on the other hand, every single part of life ought to have so much meaning for a person that he can remember it at any moment." 166

(With perhaps pardonable exaggeration, Auden remarked of Kierkegaard that one 'could read through the whole of his voluminous works without discovering that human beings are not ghosts but have bodies of flesh and blood.') And for Auden this deficiency is properly described as theological: Kierkegaard, and other Christian thinkers who share his disregard for embodied human nature, neglect clear and vital Christian teaching about God's redeeming love for this physical world, this whole Creation. (The Poet's Prose)