Quote for the Weekend

Posted on 3.12.2011

"Someone dies at the very moment that he has proven that Hell's punishment is eternal."
--Søren Kierkegaard
(from Joakin Garff's Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, p. 96)

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3 thoughts on “Quote for the Weekend”

  1. "I sat at my favorite table near the twenty-foot windows that overlooked a grove of dark, sprawling oaks. I had my burger, my Coke, and my Sun Chips. I opened the book, flipped past the introductions and the preface until I found the first page and then the first line.

    Kierkegaard: “A human being is spirit.”

    Me: That is so true.

    Kierkegaard: “But what is spirit?”

    Me: Well, among other things, it’s invisible.

    Kierkegaard: “Spirit is the self.”

    Me: [Pause. Chew. Look out at the old dark trees.] I used to believe that.

    Kierkegaard: “But what is the self?”

    Me: Great question.

    Kierkegaard: “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.”

    Me: Whaaaa? [Eat a chip. Look out window. Drink from straw. Wonder if I feel dumber or smarter for having read that. Muster courage to read the passage again more slowly, more systematically.]

    Kierkegaard: “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.”

    Me: [Close book. Get the overwhelming sense that Kierkegaard was either messing with me, or had thought so much about what it meant to be human that his writing had become as incomprehensible as humanity itself.]

    That was the first time in my life – not at that table with that burger and those chips and that Coke, but at university in general – that I had understood humanity as something complicated. Prior to that, my religion had shaped my understanding. And my religion had explained everything in desperate and defensive terms too final, too simple, too ethno-, socio- and ego-centric to be true."

    Taken from Andrew Hood's essay "Writing Before God: The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard" (https://dgvcfaspring10.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/writing-before-god-the-journals-of-sren-kierkegaard-an-essay-by-andrew-hood/)

  2. a quote from "buckaroo bonsai"
    NO MATTER, WHERE YA GO, THERE YOU ARE...
    AS A COMPARED TO WHAT?
    THE DRIVER.... SELF.
    OR THE
    SELF ALONG SIDE SPIRIT OF CHRIST'S FAITHFULNESS TO GOD THE ALMIGHTY OBSERVER...(THE INVENTOR OF PARTICLE PHYSICS)
    RE WORKING THE REALITY OF THE NOW....

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