Soren KierkegaardAbraham is caught up in a contradiction where, ethically, he meant to murder Isaac, but religiously he meant to sacrifice him.
The Absurd is (as paradox) composed in such a way that it is a symbol, a riddle, over which reason has no power at all to dissolve it in nonsense and prove that it is nonsense.
The Absurd is a concept whereby it is precisely grasping the fact that it cannot and must not be grasped.
The Absurd is not to be found within the understanding. It is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen.
The Absurd is that the eternal truth has come into existence in time, that God has come into existence, has been born, has grown up, etc., has come into existence exactly as an individual human being, indistinguishable from any other human being.
Actuality is nothing other than possibility when approached from the domain of knowledge.
Adversity not only draws people together, but it brings forth that beautiful inward friendship.
The Aesthetic is that in a person by which he spontaneously and immediately is what he is while the ethical is that by which he becomes what he becomes.
The Aesthetic is the temporal (and thus fleeting) life of the senses expressed generally through artistic creativity.
Aesthetics is contrasted with ethics in that the person who lives ethically sees tasks everywhere while the man who lives aesthetically sees possibilities everywhere.
The Anguish of Abraham is the notion that abraham had to determine how he might know that the angel was real and that he was really being addressed and not that he was like a crazy woman who hears voices from God.
Anxiety is a fear, but a fear of nothing. Its object, as nothing, imparts to nothing some measure of content.
Anxiety is a qualification of dreaming spirit. Awake, the difference between myself and my other is posited... sleeping, it is suspended... dreaming, it is an intimated nothing.
Anxiety is a sympathetic antipathy and antipathetic sympathy. That is, it is not a bodily sensation, rather it is phenomenal.
Anxiety is an emotion that is in itself contradictory in that it represents an orientation that is both attractive and frightening.
Anxiety is an existential emotion insofar as it is always related to the individual subject. It is the event for the development of subjectivity, it is 'the instant in the individual life.
