Søren Kierkegaard on Knowledge

"He lived year after year. He attended only to himself and to God and this picture-but he did not understand himself."

"To become sober is: to come to oneself in self-knowledge and before God as nothing before him, yet infinitely, unconditionally engaged. P. 104"

"The question is asked in ignorance, by one who does not even know what can have led him to ask it."

"The next thing you can learn from the woman who was a sinner, something she herself understood, is that with regard to finding forgiveness she is able to do nothing at all. P. 155"

"b. The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle. by H.H."

"I do not know, my listener, what your crime, your guilt, your sins are, but surely we are all more or less of the guilt of loving only little. Take comfort, then, in these words just as I take comfort in them. P. 173-174"

"How close men, despite all their knowledge, usually live to madness? What is truth but to live for an idea? When all is said and done, everything is based on a postulate; but not until it no longer stands on the outside, not until one lives in it, does it cease to be a postulate."

"I know of no other great writer in the whole nineteenth century, perhaps even in the whole of world literature, to whom I respond with less happiness and with a more profound sense that I am on trial and found wanting, unless it were Søren Kierkegaard."

"When it is stated in Genesis that God said to Adam, “Only from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you must not eat,” it follows as a matter of course that Adam really has not understood this word, for how could he understand the difference between good and evil when this distinction would follow as a consequence of the enjoyment of the fruit. When it is assumed that the prohibition awakens the desire one acquires knowledge instead of ignorance, and in that case Adam must have had knowledge of freedom, because the desire was to use it. The explanation is therefore subsequent. The prohibition induces in him anxiety, for the prohibition awakens in him freedom’s possibility. What passed by innocence as the nothing of anxiety has now entered into Adam, and here again it is a nothing-the anxious possibility of being able. He has no conception of what he is able to do; otherwise-and this it what usually happens-that which comes later, the difference between good and evil, would have to be presupposed. Only the possibility of being able is present as a higher form of ignorance, as a higher expression of anxiety, because in a higher sense it both is and is not, because in a higher sense he both loves it and flees from it."

"Knowledge can in part be set aside, and one can then go further in order to collect new; the natural scientist can set aside insects and flowers and then go further, but if the existing person sets aside the decision in existence, it is eo ipso lost, and he is changed."

"If self-knowledge does not lead to knowing oneself before God - well, then there is something to what purely human self-observation says, namely, this self-knowledge leads to a certain emptiness that produces dizziness. Only by being before God can one totally come to oneself in the transparency of soberness. p. 106"

"That a woman is presented as a teacher, as a prototype of piety, cannot amaze anyone who knows that piety or godliness is fundamentally womanliness. … from a woman you learn concern for the one thing needful, from Mary, sister of Lazarus, who sat silent at Christ’s feet with her heart’s choice: the one thing needful. P. 149"

"What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die."

"As a thorough Christian — or, as he would have put it, infinitely interested in becoming one — Søren Kierkegaard addressed himself neither to Jews nor to Judaism. But they have overheard him. In part because they could not help it... Jews are well advised to be on the alert for what they can learn not only about him but about themselves also."

"A line by Thomas à Kempis which perhaps could be used as a motto sometime. He says of Paul: Therefore he turned everything over to God, who knows all, and defended himself solely by means of patience and humility . . . . He did defend himself now and then so that the weak would not be offended by his silence. Book III, chapter 36, para. 2, or in my little edition, p. 131."

"Oh, can I really believe the poet's tales, that when one first sees the object of one's love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love like all knowledge is remembrance, that love too has its prophecies in the individual. … it seems to me that I should have to possess the beauty of all girls in order to draw out a beauty equal to yours; that I should have to circumnavigate the world in order to find the place I lack and which the deepest mystery of my whole being points towards, and at the next moment you are so near to me, filling my spirit so powerfully that I am transfigured for myself, and feel that it's good to be here."

"Editor’s Preface In this book, originating in the year 1848, the requirement for being a Christian is forced up by the pseudonymous author to the supreme ideality. Yet the requirement should indeed be stated, presented, and heard. From the Christian point of view, there ought to be no scaling down of the requirement, nor suppression of it-instead of a personal admission and confession. The requirement should be heard-and I understand what is said as spoken to me alone—so that I might learn not only to resort to grace but to resort to it in relation to the use of grace. S.K."

"This is the truth of the matter. In every human being there is a capacity, the capacity for knowledge. And every person - the most knowing and the most limited - is in his knowledge far beyond what he is in his life or what his life expresses. Yet this misrelation is of little concern to us. On the contrary, we set a high price on knowledge, and everyone strives for this knowledge more and more. "But," says the sensible person, "one must be careful about the direction one's knowing takes. If my knowing turns inward, against me, if I do not take care to prevent this, then knowing is the most intoxicating thing there is, the way to become completely intoxicated, since there then occurs an intoxicating confusion between the knowledge and the knower, so that the knower himself will resemble, will be, that which is known. If your knowing takes such a turn and you yield to it, it will soon end with your tumbling like a drunk man into actuality, plunging yourself recklessly into drunken action without giving the understanding and sagacity the time to take into proper consideration what is prudent, what is advantageous, what will pay. This is why we, the sober ones, warn you, not against knowing or against expanding your knowledge, but against letting your knowledge take an inward direction, for then it is intoxicating." This is thieves' jargon. It says that it is one's knowledge that, by taking the inward direction in this way, intoxicates, rather than that in precisely this way it makes manifest that one is intoxicated, intoxicated in one's attachment to this earthly life, the temporal, the secular, and the selfish. And this is what one fears, fears that one's knowing, turned inward, toward oneself, will expose the intoxication there, will expose that one prefers to remain in this state, will wrench one out of this state and as a result of such a step will make it impossible for one to slip back into that adored state, into intoxication. p. 118"