Quotations of Soren Kierkegaard

“To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”

“There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.”

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

"The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”

“Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.”

“People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.”

“Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted? And If I am compelled to take part in it, Where is the director? I want to see him.”

“Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth -look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.”

“If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.”

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”

“Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.”

“Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion -- and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion... while truth again reverts to a new minority.”

“The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins”

During the first period of a man's life the greatest danger is not to take the risk.”

“Pleasure disappoints, possibility never”

“Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.”

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”

“The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever”

“The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo, the more he can remember the more divine his life becomes.”

Simplicity

Our problems - social, environmental, political, religious - are so complex that we can solve them only by being simple, not by becoming extraordinarily erudite and clever. Because, a simple person sees much more directly, has a more direct experience, than the complex person. And, our minds are so crowded with an infinite knowledge of facts of what others have said that we have become incapable of being simple and having direct experience ourselves. These problems demand a new approach, and they can be so approached only when we are simple, inwardly really simple. That simplicity comes only through self-knowledge, through understanding ourselves: the ways of our thinking and feeling, the movements of our thoughts, our responses, how we conform through fear to public opinion, to what others say, what the Buddha, the Christ, the great saints have said - all of which indicates our nature to conform, to be safe, to be secure. And, when one is seeking security, one is obviously in a state of fear, and therefore there is no simplicity. - Talks in Ojai, California, 1949

A New Consciousness

One has to be a light to oneself; this light is the law. There is no other law. All the other laws are made by thought and so are fragmentary and contradictory. To be a light to oneself is not to follow the light of another, however reasonable, logical, historical, and however convincing. You cannot be a light to yourself if you are in the dark shadows of authority, of dogma, of conclusion.

A new consciousness and a totally new morality are necessary to bring about a radical change in the present culture and social structure. This is obvious, yet the Left and the Right and the revolutionary seem to disregard it. Any dogma, any formula, any ideology is part of the old consciousness; they are the fabrications of thought whose activity is fragmentation - the Left, the Right, the centre. This activity will inevitably lead to bloodshed of the Right or of the Left or to totalitarianism. This is what is going on around us. One sees the necessity of social, economic, and moral change but the response is from the old consciousness, thought being the principal actor.

The mess, the confusion, and the misery that human beings have got into are within the area of the old consciousness, and without changing that profoundly,every human activity - political, economic or religious - will only bring us to the destruction of each other and of the earth. This is so obvious to the sane.

- J. Krishnamurti "This Light in Oneself"


The Transformation of Society

Is it not, therefore, an obvious fact that what I am in my relationship to another creates society and that, without radically transforming myself, there can be no transformation of the essential function of society? When we look to a system for the transformation of society, we are merely evading the question, because a system cannot transform man; man always transforms the system, which history shows. Until I, in my relationship to you, understand myself I am the cause of chaos, misery, destruction, fear, brutality. Understanding myself is not a matter of time; I can understand myself at this very moment.

- J.K, "The First and Last Freedom" Chapter 1