What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?
— Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
Kierkegaard wrote this in The Concept of Anxiety (1844). He compares anxiety to the dizziness of someone looking down into an abyss, and notes the cause lies as much in the eye as in the abyss. In the same way, anxiety arises when freedom looks down into its own possibility, just before a leap that he says no science can explain.
Source: The Concept of Anxiety (1844), p. 61
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What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?
— Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
— The Journals of Kierkegaard
God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.
— The Journals of Kierkegaard
For he who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God.
— Fear and Trembling
In relationship to God one can not involve himself to a certain degree. God is precisely the contradiction to all that is 'to a certain degree'.
— Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard
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.
— Fear and Trembling