some favourites

Works of Love, Kierkegaard 

“The self-lover is busy; he shouts and complains and insists on his rights in order to make sure he is not forgotten—yet he is forgotten. But the lover, who forgets himself, is remembered by love. There is One who thinks of him, and in this way it comes about that the lover gets what he gives.”

“Like is known only by like. Only he who abides in love can recognise love, and in the same way his love is to be known.”

“But what can take love out of its element? As soon as love concentrates upon itself it is out of its element. What does that mean, to concentrate on itself? It means to become an object for itself.”

“Frivolity, inexperience, simplicity believe everything that is said; vanity, conceit, self-satisfaction believe everything flattering that is said; envy, spite, corruption believe everything evil that is said; mistrust believes nothing at all. Since mistrust believes nothing at all, it does just the opposite of what love does… Love knows better than anyone else everything that mistrust knows, yet without being mistrustful.”

“The work of love in remembering one dead is thus a work of the most disinterested, the freest, the most faithful love. Therefore go out and practice it; remember one dead and learn in just this way to love disinterestedly, freely, faithfully.”

“But he who loves his neighbor is tranquil. He is made tranquil by being content with the earthly distinction allotted to him, whether it be important or unimportant; moreover, he lets every earthly distinction retain its significance and be taken for what it is and ought to be worth in this life… thus he who loves his neighbour is made tranquil.”

The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard 

“When the primitivity [originality] in earnestness is acquired and kept, then there is succession and repetition, but as soon as primitivity [originality] is lacking in the repetition, there is habit. The earnest person is earnest precisely through the primitivity [originality] with which he returns in repetition.”

“Earnestness alone is capable of returning to the same thing regularly every Sunday with the same primitivity. But this same thing to which earnestness is to return with the same earnestness can only be earnestness itself; otherwise it becomes pedantry. Earnestness, in this sense, means the personality itself, and only an earnest personality is an actual personality, and only an earnest personality can do something in earnest, for to do anything in earnest requires, first and foremost, knowledge of what the object of earnestness is.”

“Pride is a deep-seated cowardice, for it is cowardly enough not to be willing to understand what pride truly is. Once this understanding is forced upon it, it is cowardly, disintegrates with a bang and bursts like a bubble.”

Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, Kierkegaard 

“Is not despair simply double-mindedness, for what is despairing other than to have two wills?”

“Like a poisonous breath over the fields, like a mass of locusts over Egypt, so the swarm of excuses is a general plague, a ruinous infection among men, that eats of the sports of the Eternal.”

“The temporal order and the press of busyness believe, that eternity is so far away.”

“For he who is not himself a unity is never really anything wholly and decisively; he only exists in an external sense—as long as he lives as a numeral within the crowd , a fraction within the earthly conglomeration.” 

“The impotent double-minded one has removed the boundary limit, because he only wills the Good out of fear of earth’s punishment. If the world is not really the land of perfection, then by his double-mindedness he has surrendered himself to the power of mediocrity or pledged himself to the evil.”

Repetition, Kierkegaard 

“He who will only hope is cowardly. He who wants only to recollect is a voluptuary. But he who wills repetition, he is a man, and the more emphatically he has endeavoured to understand what this means, the deeper he is as a human being. But he who does not grasp that life is repetition and that this is the beauty of life, has condemned himself and deserves nothing better than what will happen to him—death. Hope is an enticing fruit that fails to satisfy, recollection sorrowful sustenance that fails to satisfy. But repetition is the daily bread that satisfies through blessing. When one has circumnavigated existence, then it will become apparent whether one has the courage to understand that life is repetition and the desire to look forward to this. He who has not circumnavigated life before he has begun to live will never really live. He who circumnavigated life but became sated has a poor constitution. He who chooses repetition, he lives. He does not chase after butterflies like a child, or stand on tiptoe in order to glimpse the wonders of the world. He knows them. Neither does he sit like an old woman and spin on the spinning wheel of recollection. He goes calmly about his life, happy in repetition… If God Himself had not willed repetition, there would never have been a world. He would either have followed the easy plans of hope, or recalled everything and preserved it in recollection. He did not do this. This is the reason there is a world. The world consists of repetition. Repetition is actuality and the earnestness of existence.”

“Deep emotions always disarm the observer in a person. The desire to observe comes only when there is an emptiness in the place of emotion, or when emotions are coquettishly concealed.”

Philosophical Crumbs, Kierkegaard 

“What is my opinion?… Let no one ask me about it, and next to having an opinion, nothing can be less important to another than what my opinion is. To have an opinion is both too much and too little for me. It assumes a sense of well-being and security with one’s existence… This is my situation in the world of the spirit, because I have cultivated and continue to cultivate in myself the ability to dance nimbly in the service of thought, as much as possible to the honour of God and for my own amusement, renouncing domestic happiness and civic esteem, the commnio bonorum [the common good, the good of the community,] and unanimous happiness, which is to have an opinion…”

“Offence remains outside the paradox, and the reason is quia absurdum. It is not the understanding, however, that has discovered this; on the contrary, the paradox has discovered it and now testifies against offence. The understanding says that the paradox is the absurd, but this is only a distorted imitation because the paradox is the paradox quia absurdum.”

“The past has come to be; becoming is the change in actuality brought about by freedom. If the past had become necessary, then it would no longer belong to freedom–i.e. belong to that through which it came to be.”

The Symbolism of Evil, Paul Ricœur

“All symbols give rise to thought, but the symbols of evil show in an exemplary way that there is always more in myths and symbols than in all our philosophy, and that a philosophical interpretation of symbols will never become absolute knowledge.”

“All the symbols of guilt-deviation, wandering, captivity,—all the myths—chaos, blinding, mixture, fall,—speak of the situation of the being of man in the being of the world. The task, then, is, starting from the symbols, to elaborate existential concepts—that is to say, not only structures of reflection but structures of existence, insofar as existence is the being of man.”

“It is a great illusion to think that one could make himself a pure spectator, without weight, without memory, without perspective, and regard everything with equal sympathy.”

A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, Roland Barthes

“In the amorous realm, the most painful wounds are inflicted more often by what one sees than by what one knows. The image is presented, pure and distinct as a letter: it is the letter of what pains me.

The image is presented, pure and distinct as a letter: it is a letter of what pains me. Precise, complete, definitive, it leaves no room for me, down to the last finicky detail: I am excluded from it as from the primal scene, which may exist only insofar as it is framed by the contours of the keyhole. Here then, at last, is the definition of the image, of any image: that from which I am excluded. Contrary to those puzzle drawings in which the hunter is secretly figured in the confusion of the foliage, I am not in the scene: the image is without a riddle.”

“So I shall suffer with the other, but without pressure, without losing myself. Such behaviour, at once very affective and very controlled, very amorous and very civilised, can be given a name: delicacy; in a sense it is the “healthy” (artistic) form of compassion. (Ate is the goddess of madness, but Plato speaks of Ate’s delicacy: her foot is winged, it touches lightly.)”

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”

“about it I shall never know anything; my language will always fumble, stammer in order to attempt to express it, but I can never produce anything but a blank word, an empty vocable”

“Ruysbroeck has been buried for five years; he is exhumed; his body is intact and pure (of course-otherwise, there would be no story); but ‘there was only the tip of the nose which bore a faint but certain trace of corruption.’ In the other’s perfect and ’embalmed’ figure (for that is the degree to which it fascinates me) I perceive suddenly a speck of corruption: something unexpected which appears from a region I had never even suspected, and suddenly attaches the loved object to a commonplace world. Could the other be vulgar, whose elegance and originality I had so religiously hymned? Here is a gesture by which is revealed a being of another race. I am flabbergasted. I hear a counter-rhythm: something like a syncope in the lovely phrase of the loved being, the noise of a rip in the smooth envelop of the Image. (Like the Jesuit Kircher’s hen, released from hypnosis by a light tap, I am temporarily de-fasicnated, not without pain.)”

“It is in this garment (blue coat and yellow vest) that Werther wants to be buried, and which he is wearing when he is found dying in his room. Each time he wears this garment (in which he will die), Werther disguises himself. As what?”

Exclusion and Embrace, Miroslav Volf

“Exclusion takes place when the violence of expulsion, assimilation, or subjugation and the indifference of abandonment replace the dynamics of taking in and keeping out as well as the mutuality of giving and receiving.”

“The human self is formed not through a simple rejection of the other—through a binary logic of opposition and negation—but through a complex process of ‘taking in’ and ‘keeping out’. We are who we are not because we separate from the others who are next to us, but because we are both separate and connected, both distinct and related … Identity is a result of the distinction from the other and the internalization of the relationships to the other; it arises out of the complex history of ‘differentiation’ in which both the self and the other take part by negotiating their identities in interaction with the other.”

“Since no final redemption is possible without the redemption of the past, and since every attempt to redeem the past through reflection must fail because no theodicy can succeed, the final redemption is unthinkable without a certain kind of forgetting.”

Tao Te Ching, Laozi

是以聖人處無為之事, 行不言之教;萬物作焉而不辭, 生而不有。為而不恃, 功成而弗居。夫唯弗居, 是以不去。

善有果而已, 不敢以取強。果而勿矜, 果而勿伐, 果而勿驕。果而不得已, 果而勿強。

太上, 下知有之；其次, 親而譽之；其次, 畏之；其次, 侮之。信不足焉, 有不信焉。悠兮其貴言。功成事遂, 百姓皆謂我自然。

不自見, 故明;不自是, 故彰;不自伐, 故有功;不自矜, 故長。夫唯不爭, 故天下莫能與之爭。