Fear and Trembling Quotes

“If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“...why bother remembering a past that cannot be made into a present?”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“Hope is a passion for the possible.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“I am convinced that God is love, this thought has for me a primitive lyrical validity. When it is present to me, I am unspeakably blissful, when it is absent, I long for it more vehemently than does the lover for his object.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin. Even though the result may gladden the whole world, that cannot help the hero; for he knows the result only when the whole thing is over, and that is not how he became a hero, but by virtue of the fact that he began.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“For he who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“When you were called, did you answer or did you not? Perhaps softly and in a whisper?”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“For it is not what happens to me that makes me great, but it is what I do.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“Then faith's paradox is this: that the single individual is higher than the universal, that the single individual determines his relation to the universal through his relation to God, not his relation to God through his relation through the universal... Unless this is how it is, faith has no place in existence; and faith is then a temptation.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“He who loved himself became great in himself, and he who loved others became great through his devotion, but he who loved God became greater than all.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“No, not one shall be forgotten who was great in the world. But each was great in his own way, and each in proportion to the greatness of that which he loved.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“Faith is a marvel, and yet no human being is excluded from it; for that in which all human life is united is passion, and faith is a passion.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“Faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“Faith is namely this paradox that the single individual is higher than the universal”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“And to contend with the whole world is a comfort, but to contend with oneself dreadful.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“هر كس به قدر عظمت آن چه با آن زورآزمايى كرد بزرگى يافت:
آن كس كه با جهان ستيز كرد با چيرگى بر جهان بزرگ شد؛
و آن كس كه با خويشتن نبرد كرد با چيرگى بر خويشتن بزرگ شد؛
امّا آن كس كه با خدا زورآزمايى كرد از همه بزرگ تر بود.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he meant to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he meant to sacrifice Isaac—but precisely in this contradiction is the anxiety that can make a person sleepless, and yet without this anxiety Abraham is not who he is.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“Theology sits rouged at the window and courts philosophy's favor, offering to sell her charms to it.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“People unable to bear the martyrdom [...] unintelligently jump off the path, and choose instead, conveniently enough, the world’s admiration of their proficiency. The true knight of faith is a witness, never a teacher, and in this lies the deep humanity in him which is more worth than this foolish concern for others’ weal and woe which is honoured under the name of sympathy, but which is really nothing but vanity.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“Only the lower natures forget themselves and become something new. Thus the butterfly has entirely forgotten that it was a caterpillar, perhaps it may in turn so entirely forget it was a butterfly that is becomes a fish.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“I am convinced that God is love, this thought has for me a primitive lyrical validity. When it is present to me, I am unspeakably blissful, when it is absent, I long for it more vehemently than does the lover for his object; but I do not believe, this courage I lack. For me the love of God is, both in a direct and in an inverse sense, incommensurable with the whole of reality. I am not cowardly enough to whimper and complain, but neither am I deceitful enough to deny that faith is something much higher. I can well endure living in my way, I am joyful and content, but my joy is not that of faith, and in comparison with that it is unhappy.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“Great Shakespeare!, you who can say everything, everything, everything exactly as it is – and yet why was this torment one you never gave voice to? Was it perhaps that you kept it to yourself, like the beloved whose name one still cannot bear the world to mention? For a poet buys this power of words to utter all the grim secrets of others at the cost of a little secret he himself cannot utter.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“...for our times are not satisfied with faith and not even with the miracle of changing water into wine - they 'go right on,' changing wine into water.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“No one shall be forgotten who was great in this world; but everyone was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion to the greatness of what he loved.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“I am courteous enough to assume that everyone in this so aesthetically voluptuous age, so potent and aroused that conception occurs as easily as with the partridge which, Aristotle says, needs only to hear the voice of the cock or its flight overhead - to assume that at the mere sound of the word 'concealment' everyone can easily shake a dozen romances and comedies from his sleeve.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“Man is the synthesis of the infinite and the finite, the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man is not yet a self.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“For the outward world is subjected to the law of imperfection, and again and again the experience is repeated that he too who does not work gets the bread, and that he who sleeps gets it more abundantly than the man who works. In the outward world everything is made payable to the bearer, this world is in bondage to the law of indifference, and to him who has the ring, the spirit of the ring is obedient, whether he be Noureddin or Aladdin, and he who has the world's treasure, has it, however he got it. It is different in the world of spirit. Here an eternal divine order prevails, here it does not rain both upon the just and upon the unjust, here the sun does not shine both upon the good and upon the evil, here it holds good that only he who works gets the bread, only he who was in anguish finds repose, only he who descends into the underworld rescues the beloved, only he who draws the knife gets Isaac.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“وفي حالة ذلك الشاب الغني الذي التقى به المسيح في الطريق وباع كل بضاعته وأعطى الفقير-فإننا ينبغي أن نمجده كما نمجد كل شئ عظيم-وإن كنا لا نستطيع أن نفهمه دون أن نكدح”
― سرن كيركجور, خوف ورعدة

“The true knight of faith is always absolute isolation, the false knight is sectarian. This sectarianism is an attempt to leap away from the narrow path of the paradox and become a tragic hero at a cheap price. The tragic hero expresses the universal and sacrifices himself for it. The sectarian punchinello, instead of that, has a private theatre, i.e. several good friends and comrades who represent the universal just about as well as the beadles in The Golden Snuffbox represent justice. The knight of faith, on the contrary, is the paradox, is the individual, absolutely nothing but the individual, without connections or pretensions. This is the terrible thing which the sectarian manikin cannot endure. For instead of learning from this terror that he is not capable of performing the great deed and then plainly admitting it (an act which I cannot but approve, because it is what I do) the manikin thinks that by uniting with several other manikins he will be able to do it. But that is quite out of the question. In the world of spirit no swindling is tolerated.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling