Philosopher Kierkegaard Quotes & Sayings

It really matters whether people are working on generating clean energy or improving transportation or making the Internet work better and all those things. And small groups of people can have a really huge impact. — Larry Page

Even those who have desired to work out a completely positive philosophy have been philosophers only to the extent that, at the same time, they have refused the right to install themselves in absolute knowledge. They taught not this knowledge, but its becoming in us, not the absolute but, at most, our absolute relation to it, as Kierkegaard said. What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

It is a wonderful thing to see a first-rate philosopher at prayer. Tough-minded thinking and tenderhearted reverence are friends, not enemies. We have for too long separated the head from the heart, and we are the lesser for it. We love God with the mind and we love God with the heart. In reality, we are descending with the mind into the heart and there standing before God in ceaseless wonder and endless praise. As the mind and the heart work in concert, a kind of loving rationality pervades all we say and do. This brings unity to us and glory to God. — Soren Kierkegaard

The stone that was rolled before Christ's tomb might appropriately be called the philosopher's stone because its removal gave not only the pharisees but, now for 1800 years, the philosophers so much to think about. — Soren Kierkegaard

Gary Greenberg is a thoughtful comedian and a cranky philosopher and a humble pest of a reporter, equal parts Woody Allen, Kierkegaard, and Columbo. The Book of Woe is a profound, and profoundly entertaining, riff on malady, power, and truth. This book is for those of us (i.e. all of us) who've ever wondered what it means, and what's at stake, when we try to distinguish the suffering of the ill from the suffering of the human. — Gideon Lewis-Kraus

I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it ... but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. — Soren Kierkegaard

On the other hand, I believe there's hope, because the breakdown and the repair are happening simultaneously. — Kathryn Bigelow

I feel totally female. I didn't compete with men and I don't want to look like a man! I love being a lady and dressing up and masquerading and wearing all the fineries. I'm breaking down the idea that the artist has to look poor, with berets. — Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

For Kierkegaard, for Heidegger, for Sartre, the more profound the awareness, the more authentic the existence. They measure honesty and the essence of experience by the degree of awareness. But is our humanity really built on awareness? Doesn't awareness
that forced, extreme awareness
arise among us, not from us, as something created by effort, the mutual perfecting of ourselves in it, the confirming of something that one philosopher forces onto another? Isn't man, therefore, in his private reality, something childish and always beneath his own awareness? And doesn't he feel awareness to be, at the same time, something alien, imposed and unimportant? If this is how it is, this furtive childhood, this concealed degradation are ready to explode your systems sooner or later. — Witold Gombrowicz

And he stood so closely behind her that she felt his breath feather her neck. Blanche leaped away, putting a polite distance between them, her heart suddenly thundering in her chest. His body hadn't touched hers, but it might as well have, for she had felt his heat. — Brenda Joyce

In a journal entry the famed philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once wrote about some tame geese who, week after week, attended church and heard teachings on God's great gift to geese - wings. With wings, the preaching gander reminded them, they could fly and experience the many blessings known only through the utilization of that gift. But, laments Kierkegaard, week after week they waddled home without flapping their way to the flight they were told was their destiny. In a sobering conclusion Kierkegaard reports that these waddling geese were very well liked by the humans of the land. They grew fat and plump and were then butchered, and eaten. And that, says the philosopher, was the end of that. Lesson? God gives us wings — Matt Friedeman

Sometimes, at dawn, perched on the edge of his unmade bed, drifting into sleep - he never slept lying down, now - he thought about her. Antoinette. And them. The belonging kind. Sometimes he speculated dreamily. . . Perhaps they were like house mice, the sort of small animal evolved to live only in the walls of man-made structures. — William Gibson