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| �Father in Heaven! When the thought of you awakens in our soul, let it not awaken like a startled bird which then flaps about in confusion, but like the child from sleep with its heavenly smile.� (6 January 1839)
�Fixed ideas are like a cramp, for instance in the foot--yet the best remedy is to step on them.� (6 July 1838) �For a man knows he cannot seek, since he knows it; and what he does not know he cannot seek, since he does not even know for what to seek.� (Philosophical Fragments, or a Fragment of Philosophy) �For a thinker there cannot exist any anguish more horrible than having to live on in tension while detail upon detail is being accumulated, and all the time it looks as if the idea, the conclusion, would come the next time. If the physicist does not feel this anguish he cannot be a thinker. That is the terrible tantalus-torment of the intellectual! A thinker feels as if he is in Hell as long as he has not reached that certainty of spirit: hic Rhodus, hic salta, the sphere of faith in which all that matters is that, even if the whole world explodes and the elements dissolve, you must believe! Here we don�t wait for official news by mail nor for shipping communications. This certainty of spirit, the most humble of all, the most offensive to the vain mind (for it is so very distinguished to peer through a microscope) is the only true certainty.� [1846] �For although it is said that God allows the sun to shine upon the good and the wicked, and sends down rain upon the just and the unjust, it is not so in the spiritual world. And so the die is cast--I cross the Rubicon! This road certainly leads me to strife; but I shall not give up. I will not grieve over the past--for why grieve? I wil work on with energy and not waste time grieving, like the man caught in the quicksands who began by calculating how far down he had already sunk, forgetting that all the while he was sinking still deeper. I will hurry along the path I have discovered, greeting those whom I meet on my way, not looking back as did Lot's wife, but remembering it is a hill up which we have to struggle.� ("Gilleleie", August 1, 1835) �For faith is this paradox, that the particular is higher than the universal.� (Fear and Trembling) �For God's wisdom is incomparable with respect to your own, and God's providence is not obliged to be responsible for your cleverness. You have only to obey in love.� (Works of Love) �For if the ethical (i.e. the moral) is the highest thing, and if nothing incommensurable remains in man in any other way but as the evil (i.e. the particular which has to be expressed in the universal), then one needs no other categories than those which the Greeks possessed or which by consistent thinking can be derived from them.� (Fear and Trembling) �For it is indeed infinite love that he cares for a sparrow, but that he let himself be born and die for the sake of sinners (and a sinner is even less than a sparrow)--oh, what infinite love!� (1848) |
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