The Concept of Anxiety Quotes

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
― Søren Kierkegaard , The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin

“Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin

“I can compel no man to agree with my opinions, but at least I can compel him to have an opinion.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin

“He who is educated by anxiety is educated by possibility… When such a person, therefore, goes out from the school of possibility, and knows more thoroughly than a child knows the alphabet that he demands of life absolutely nothing, and that terror, perdition, annihilation, dwell next door to every man, and has learned the profitable lesson that every dread which alarms may the next instant become a fact, he will then interpret reality differently…”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin

“Anxiety can be replaced only by the freedom whose harsh requirements are its cause. Being free requires us to release the brakes that anxiety represents in order to accept and appropriate our proper spiritual fulfillment or perhaps even to recognize, if that is what we in the end believe, that no such prospect is in store.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin

“Anyone not wanting to sink in the wretchedness of the finite is obliged in the most profound sense to struggle with the infinite.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin

“Anxiety is freedom’s possibility; this anxiety alone is, through faith, absolutely formative, since it consumes all finite ends, discovers all their deceptions.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin

“an adventure that every human being has to live through, learning to be anxious so as not to be ruined either by never having been in anxiety or by sinking into it. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin

“In spiritlessness there is no anxiety. It is too happy for that, too content, and too spiritless. But this is a very pitiable reason, and paganism differs from spiritlessness in the former being definable as directed toward spirit and the latter as directed from spirit. Paganism is, if you will, the absence of spirit and thus differs far from spiritlessness. Paganism is in this respect much to be preferred. Spiritlessness is spirit’s stagnation and ideality’s caricature. Spiritlessness is accordingly not literally dumb when it comes to repetition by rote, but it is dumb [has lost its sense] in the way in which it is said of salt that it has lost its flavor† and when one asks then how it can be salted.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin

“Freedom is always in communication (even taking the religious meaning of the word into consideration does no harm); unfreedom withdraws ever more in its reserve and will not communicate.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin

“When the discoveries of possibility are honestly administered, possibility will discover all finitudes but idealize them in the shape of infinity, in anxiety overwhelm the individual, until the individual again overcomes them in the anticipation of faith.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin

“Repentance is the highest ethical contradiction, partly because by demanding ideality it has to content itself with accepting repentance, partly because repentance is dialectically ambiguous regarding what it is to cancel, an ambiguity that dogmatics cancels only in the Atonement, in which the category of hereditary sin becomes clear. Moreover repentance delays action, and action is precisely what ethics demands. Finally, repentance must become an object to itself, seeing that the moment of repentance becomes a deficit of action.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin

“Der Freiheit Inhalt, intellektuell gesehen, ist Wahrheit, und die Wahrheit macht den Menschen frei. Eben darum aber ist die Wahrheit ein Werk der Freiheit dergestalt, dass sie fort und fort die Wahrheit erzeugt.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Der Begriff Angst, Werke I. In neuer Übertragung und mit Kommentar von Liselotte Richter, Rowohlt Klassiker/ RK 71

“metaphysics, the mood becomes that of dialectical uniformity and disinterestedness, which ponder sin as something that cannot withstand the scrutiny of thought. The concept of sin is also altered, for sin is indeed to be overcome, yet”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin

“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 a 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 ”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin

“life has always in store analogous phenomena which perhaps one will not escape. Sympathy one must have; but this sympathy is genuine only when one knows oneself deeply and knows that what has happened to one man may happen to all. Only thus can one be of some utility to oneself and to others.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread

“Even if the words were terrible, even though it were a Shakespeare, a Byron, or a Shelley who broke the silence,20 the word always retains its redeeming power, because all despair and all the horror of evil expressed in one word are not as awful as silence.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin