Provocations Quotes

“The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“The matter is quite simple. The bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“The difference between an admirer and a follower still remains, no matter where you are. The admirer never makes any true sacrifices. He always plays it safe. Though in words, phrases, songs, he is inexhaustible about how highly he prizes Christ, he renounces nothing, gives up nothing, will not reconstruct his life, will not be what he admires, and will not let his life express what it is he supposedly admires.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“The greatest danger to Christianity is, I contend, not heresies, heterodoxies, not atheists, not profane secularism – no, but the kind of orthodoxy which is cordial drivel, mediocrity served up sweet.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“There is something frightful in the fact that the most dangerous thing of all, playing at Christianity, is never included in the list of heresies and schisms.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“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'.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“Therefore, truth is not a matter of knowing this or that but of being in the truth.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“Metaphorically speaking, a person's ideas must be the building he lives in - otherwise there is something terribly wrong.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“The speculative thinker makes Christianity into theology, instead of recognizing that a living relationship to Christ involves passion, struggle, decision, personal appropriation, and inner transformation.' (Moore's summary of Kierkegaard)”
― Charles E. Moore, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“The task is not to find the lovable object, but to find the object before you lovable – whether given or chosen – and to be able to continue finding this one lovable, no matter how that person changes. To love is to love the person one sees.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“Besides, Christianity is not a doctrine to be taught, but rather a life to be lived.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“A “no” does not hide anything, but a yes can very easily become a deception, a self-deception; which of all difficulties is the most difficult to conquer. Ah, it is all too
true that, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“It is unbelievable what a person of prayer can achieve if he would but close the doors behind him.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“The person who lives in the ethical sphere lives intentionally, intensively. Such a person possesses character and conviction, and is thus willing to sacrifice himself for something greater than oneself.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“Truth is not a sum of statements, not a definition, not a system of concepts, but a life.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“The Good is one thing; the reward is something else. To will the Good for the sake of reward is not to will one thing but two. If a man loves a woman for the sake of her wealth, who will call him a lover? To will the Good for the sake of reward is hypocrisy – sheer duplicity!”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“We make our happiness dependent on situations outside ourselves and blame others in the process if things don’t turn out well. “In all our ‘freedom,’ we seek one thing: to be able to live without responsibility.” Kierkegaard is convinced that Christendom is nothing but a lifeless outer shell of mediocrity. “Think of a very long railway train – but long ago the locomotive ran away from it. Christendom is like this…Christendom is tranquillity – how charming, the tranquillity of not moving from the spot.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“Although in this life one may find solace in the crowd from God’s radical demands, “In eternity you will look in vain for the crowd. You will listen in vain to find where the noise and the gathering is, so that you can run to it.” In actual fact, “For the Infinite One, there is no place, the individual is himself the place.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“It is terrifying when God takes out the instruments for the surgery for which no human being has the strength: to take away a person’s human zest for life, to slay him – in order that he can live as one who has died to the world and to the flesh.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“Numbers are the most dangerous of all illusions”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“The truth is introduced – and with that it enters into the process of history. But unfortunately this does not (as so many ludicrously assume) result in the purification of the idea, which never is purer than in its primitive form. No, it results, with steadily increasing momentum, in garbling the truth, in making it dull, trite, in wearing it out, in introducing impure ingredients that originally were not present. What happens is the very opposite of filtering, until at last, by the enthusiastic cooperation and mutual consent of a number of successive generations, the point is reached where the truth is entirely extinguished and its opposite embraced”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“True, fear deceptively offers to help us. It too offers to keep us on the right track. Yet the one who strives in fear never becomes God’s friend. Fear is a deceitful aid. It can sour your delight, make life arduous and miserable, make you old and decrepit; but it is never able to help you toward the Good. The Good will not tolerate any alien helper.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“The way of objective reflection turns the individual into something accidental, and thus turns existence into an indifferent, vanishing something.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“If anything is to be done, one must try to introduce Christianity into Christendom.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“How then did Abraham exist? He believed. This is the paradox which keeps him upon the sheer edge and which he cannot make clear to any other person, for the paradox is that he as the individual puts himself in an absolute relation to the Absolute.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“Kierkegaard says: “An ethic which ignores sin is an absolutely idle science.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“Kierkegaard stands against every form of thinking that bypasses the individual or enables the individual to escape his responsibility before God. He also made an absolute demand that “idea” should be translated into existence (being and doing), which is exactly what his contemporaries, in his opinion, failed to do: “Most systematizers stand in the same relation to their systems as the man who builds a great castle and lives in an adjoining shack; they do not live in their great systematic structure. But in spiritual matters this will always be a crucial objection. Metaphorically speaking, a person’s ideas must be the building he lives in – otherwise there is something terribly wrong.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“order that you shall act according to it, not that you gain expertise in interpreting it.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“Nobody knows more of the truth than what he is of the truth. To properly know the truth is to be in the truth; it is to have the truth for one’s life. This always costs a struggle. Any other kind of knowledge is a falsification. In short, the truth, if it is really there, is a being, a life.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“As the Good itself is only one thing, so it alone wishes to be what helps us along. But the Good is not something external to us, like a slave who comes against his will when the master uses the whip. The place and the path are within each of us. And just as the place is the blessed state of the striving soul, so the path is the striving soul's continual transformation.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard