KIERKEGAARDfear

By my own strength I am able to give up the princess, and I shall not become a grumbler, but shall find joy and repose in my pain.

Faith is a miracle, and yet no man is excluded from it; for that in which all human life is unified is passion, and faith is a passion.

Faith therefore is not an aesthetic emotion but is something far higher, precisely because it has resignation as its presupposition; it is not an immediate instinct of the heart, but is the paradox of life and existence.

For faith is this paradox, that the particular is higher than the universal.

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.

He feels a blissful rapture in letting love tingle through every never, and yet his soul is as solemn as that of the man who has drained the poisoned goblet and feels how the juice permeates every drop of blood--for this instant is life and death.

...he preserves his love just as young as it was in its first moment, he never lets it go from him, precisely because he makes the movements infinitely.

I am able by my own strength to renounce everything, and then to find peace and repose in pain. I can stand everything--even though that horrible demon, more dreadful than death, the king of terrors, even though madness were to hold up before my eyes the motley of the fool, and I understood by its look that it was I who must put it on, I still am able to save my soul, if only it is more to me than my earthly happiness that my love to God should triumph in me. A man may still be able at the last instant to concentrate his whole soul in a single glance toward that heaven from which cometh every good gift, and his glance will be intelligible to himself and also to Him whom it seeks, as a sign that he nevertheless remained true to his love. Then he will calmly put on the motley garb. He whose soul has not this romantic enthusiasm has sold his soul, whether he got a kingdom for it or a paltry piece of silver.

In resignation I make renunciation of everything; this movement I make by myself, and if I do not make it, it is because I am cowardly and effeminate and without enthusiasm and do not feel the significance of the lofty dignity which is assigned to every man, that of being his own censor, which is a far prouder title than that of Censor General to the whole Roman Republic. This movement I make by myself, and what I gain is myself in my eternal consciousness, in blissful agreement with my love for the Eternal Being. By faith I make renunciation of nothing; on the contrary, by faith I acquire everything, precisely in the sense in which it is said that he who has faith like a grain of mustard can remove mountains. A purely human courage is required to renounce the whole of the temporal to gain the eternal.