Søren Kierkegaard
Cues
Showing 7 of 7 cues
“I sacrifice myself for my profession, my wife, my children, or, more properly expressed, I do not sacrifice myself for them, but I find in them my satisfaction and joy.”
“To be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain understanding must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself ... the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.”
“If a person does not become what he understands, then he does not understand it either.”
“Most men are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes - but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.”
“By not venturing, it is so dreadfully easy to lose that which it would be difficult to lose in even the most venturesome venture ... For if I have ventured amiss - very well, then life helps me by its punishment. But if I have not ventured at all - who then helps me?”
Grasping at finiteness
We are attracted to freedom's power but repelled by its demands, so we draw back, deny it and 'grasp at finiteness', living as if our situation were fixed and immune to change. This relieves anxiety at the cost of growth.
“It is true that life must be understood backwards. But we forget the other truth: it must be lived forwards. The more I think about this, the clearer it becomes that life can never be fully understood while we are living it.”