The Wisdom of Kierkegaard

A Collection of Quotations on Faith and Life

Clifford Williams

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9781606084854
  9781498253086
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498275484
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Tucked away in the complicated prose that fills many of Soren Kierkegaard's books are numerous insightful declarations. They arrest the reader with their depth of understanding. They often are expressed in a lilting and lyrical manner. Encountering them makes working through the intricate prose eminently worthwhile. The Wisdom of Kierkegaard contains two hundred fifty such passages, chosen partly because of their ability to be understood apart from their context and partly because of their ability to provoke an "Ah! That's true" response. Many of them contain a "twist" that imparts an incisive jab. Some are on themes for which Kierkegaard is well known, but many are on a variety of other significant themes. The passages are organized in alphabetical sections, which are introduced by a brief essay.

C

We humans are well practiced in self-deception. Although we genuinely desire to do what is good, we also want to evade it. But we do not want to know that we evade it. So we cleverly hide our evasions.

We may have heard that an acquaintance is in trouble, depressed, or hurt in some way. We become concerned, but we also become curious. What is going on with her? Who has hurt her? Is she so depressed that she is suicidal? Our cleverness substitutes curiosity for concern and makes us think that in satisfying our curiosity we are gaining knowledge that will increase our concern. We may indeed increase our concern by gaining knowledge, but in this case our motive is simply to satisfy curiosity, and cleverness hides that from us.

We may find ourselves wanting more from doing what is good than the intrinsic reward of doing it. So we look for further satisfaction—a look of admiration that an onlooker gives or a compliment from someone who hears about what we have done. We cleverly conceal the fact that we are using these further satisfactions as a substitute for the intrinsic reward. To use Kierkegaard’s words, we earn a little on the side and thereby sidestep the good itself.

Of course, if we can describe the ways in which we cleverly deceive ourselves in these ways, as Kierkegaard does so extensively, we might suppose that we can just as cleverly uncover them. And indeed we can uncover them. But not always simply. And certainly not automatically. For we can think we have uncovered our evasions even though we have not. We may read insightful descriptions of evasions and recognize the truth in them, but still be evading. We can, that is, consciously distinguish genuine concern for someone’s trouble from simple curiosity about those troubles, want to have only genuine concern, but still indulge ourselves in curiosity. This dividedness is one of the most fascinating, though disheartening, features of the human psyche. How, then, can we be sure that we are not at any given moment still evading?

Kierkegaard never decisively answers this question. His copious descriptions of evasions make one wonder whether we can be sure. Perhaps the most that can be said is that if we are to rid ourselves of evasions, it will have to be done slowly, with constant attention, and with more honesty than we are accustomed to. This may be the most acute lesson we can learn from reading Kierkegaard.

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Cares

Anyone who has cares, especially the more deeply and the longer they penetrate into the soul or the longer they penetrate it deeply, is perhaps also tempted to be impatiently unwilling to hear any human words about comfort and hope. (UDVS, 160)

Cheating at life

There are many people who arrive at conclusions in life much the way schoolboys do; they cheat their teachers by copying the answer out of the arithmetic book without having worked the problem themselves. (JP, IV, 275)

Cheating God

When a person has succeeded in killing the thought of God and every feeling and mood that like his emissaries bring him to mind, then that person lives on as if he were his own master, himself the architect of his fortune, himself the one who must take care of everything but also the one who is entitled to everything—that is, he cheats God of what is due him. (CD, 66-67)

Cleverness

The decision is to will to do everything for the good—it is not sagaciously to will to have advantage from the good. Alas, but in every human being there is a power, a dangerous and also a great power. This power is sagacity. Sagacity is continually averse to the decision; it fights for its life and honor, because if the decision wins, then sagacity is the same as having been put to death, reduced to being a disdained servant, to whose words one pays great attention but whose advice one disdains to follow. (UDVS, 82)

The sagacious person’s secret is that he cannot be totally satisfied with the good’s meager reward but must earn a little on the side—by going around a little on the side. (UDVS, 87)

Clinging to sin

There is nothing to which a human being so desperately firmly clings as to his sin. (WA, 143)

Comparison

A collected mind . . . has collected itself from all distraction and thus also from all comparison, whether it tempts to earthly and incidental despondency because the person comparing must himself confess that he is behind many others, or whether it tempts to arrogance because he, humanly speaking, seems to be further ahead than many others. (UDVS, 152)

Compassion

To make oneself quite literally one with the most wretched (and this, this alone is divine compassion), this is “too much” for people, something they can shed a few emotional tears over during a quiet Sunday hour. . . . The point is that it is too lofty for them to bear seeing it in daily use; it must be at a distance for them to be able to bear it. (PC, 59)

Conquering hardship

It is one thing to conquer in the hardship, to overcome the hardship as one overcomes an enemy, while continuing in the idea that the hardship is one’s enemy; but it is more than conquering to believe that the hardship is one’s friend, that it is not the opposition but the road, is not what obstructs but develops, is not what disheartens but ennobles. (UDVS, 303)

Consumed

The religious person has lost the relativity of immediacy, its diversion, its whiling away of time—precisely its whiling away of time. The absolute conception of God consumes him like the fire of the summer sun when it refuses to set, like the fire of the summer sun when it refuses to cease. (CUP, I, 485)

Convenience

What we want in fact is the most convenient religion possible, a kind of accompaniment to all our finite striving. (JP, III, 108)

Conversion

Conversion goes slowly. . . . It is easy to become impatient: if it cannot happen at once, one may just as well let it go, begin tomorrow, and enjoy today; this is the temptation. (JP, I, 171).

Cowardliness

Cowardliness prevents a person from doing the good, from accomplishing the truly great and noble to which he has attached himself in a resolution. (EUD, 363)

Crowd behavior

One must see it for himself (otherwise he would not believe it), how even nice, good-natured people become like different creatures as soon as they form a “crowd.” . . . The hardheartedness with which otherwise kind people act in the capacity of the public, because they regard their participation or nonparticipation as a small matter—a small matter which becomes enormous through the contribution of the many. (J...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• A
• B
• C
• H
• M
• S