200 Words For a 200th Birthday

Yesterday was the 200th Birthday of Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard
Worldwide, there were more than two hundred celebrations  for the man
considered THE FATHER OF EXISTENTIALIST PHILOSOPHY.


I hereby honor Soren Kierkegaard by quoting exactly
two hundred of his very own words.

With the help of his pen, he conversed not only with the times
but with himself.

The bourgeois’ love of God begins when...
the hands are comfortably folded on the stomach,
and the head sinks back into into the cushion of the chair,
while the eyes, drunk with sleep, gaze heavily for a moment
towards the ceiling.

No moment must be permitted a greater significance than that
it cannot be forgotten when convenient.

Each moment ought, however, to have so much significance that
it can be recollected at will.

Remembering poetically is really another expression for forgetting.
In a poetic memory, the experience has undergone
a transformation, by which it has lost all of its painful aspects.

One who has perfected the twin arts
of remembering and forgetting
is in a position to play shuttlecock
with the whole of existence.

My either/or does not denote the choice between good and evil.
It denotes the choices whereby one chooses good and evil
or excludes them.

All humanity’s shrewdness is directed toward one thing:
toward being able to live without responsibility.

Do I love Cordelia? Yes. Sincerely? Yes. Faithfully?
Yes--in an aesthetic sense.

I have spoken and freed my spirit.

from

ON KIERKEGAARD
Susan Leigh Anderson (Wadsworth Philosopher Series)

A KIERKEGAARD ANTHOLOGY
edited by Robert Bretall (Modern Library)