Source: On the Jellicoe Road
“But God who creates out of nothing, who almightily takes from nothing and says, ‘Be’, lovingly adjoins, ‘Be something even in apposition to me.’”
—
Sören Kierkegaard
,
book
Christian Discourses
Søren Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, 1848 Lowrie 1940, 1961 p. 132
1840s, Christian Discourses (1848)
Context: A man who but rarely, and then only cursorily, concerns himself with his relationship to God, hardly thinks or dreams that he has so closely to do with God, or that God is so close to him, that there exists a reciprocal relationship between him and God, the stronger a man is, the weaker God is, the weaker a man is, the stronger God is in him. Every one who assumes that a God exists naturally thinks of Him as the strongest, as He eternally is, being the Almighty who creates out of nothing, and for whom all the creation is as nothing; but such a man hardly thinks of the possibility of a reciprocal relationship. And yet for God, the infinitely strongest, there is an obstacle; He has posited it Himself, yea, He has lovingly, with incomprehensible love posited it Himself; for He posited it and posits it every time a man comes into existence, when He in His love makes to be something directly in apposition https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apposite to Himself. Oh, marvelous omnipotence of love! A man cannot bear that his ‘creations’ should be directly in apposition to Himself, and so he speaks of them in a tone of disparagement as his ‘creations’. But God who creates out of nothing, who almightily takes from nothing and says, ‘Be’, lovingly adjoins, ‘Be something even in apposition to me.’ Marvellous love, even His omnipotence is under the sway of love!
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Do you have more details about the quote "But God who creates out of nothing, who almightily takes from nothing and says, ‘Be’, lovingly adjoins, ‘Be something e…" by Sören Kierkegaard?
Sören Kierkegaard 309
Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism 1813–1855Related quotes
Robert Frost
(1874–1963) American poet
Variant: Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.
Meher Baba
(1894–1969) Indian mystic
"How to Love God" (12 September 1954).
General sources
Context: When I say I am the Avatar, there are a few who feel happy, some who feel shocked, and many who hearing me claim this, would take me for a hypocrite, a fraud, a supreme egoist, or just mad. If I were to say every one of you is an Avatar, a few would be tickled, and many would consider it a blasphemy or a joke. The fact that God being One, Indivisible and equally in us all, we can be nought else but one, is too much for the duality-conscious mind to accept. Yet each of us is what the other is. I know I am the Avatar in every sense of the word, and that each one of you is an Avatar in one sense or the other.
It is an unalterable and universally recognized fact since time immemorial that God knows everything, God does everything, and that nothing happens but by the Will of God. Therefore it is God who makes me say I am the Avatar, and that each one of you is an Avatar. Again, it is He Who is tickled through some, and through others is shocked. It is God Who acts, and God Who reacts. It is He Who scoffs, and He Who responds. He is the Creator, the Producer, the Actor and the Audience in His own Divine Play.
Sören Kierkegaard
(1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism
7 July 1838
1830s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1830s
Source: The Journals of Kierkegaard
Benito Mussolini
(1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…
1900s, God Does Not Exist (1904)
Fernando Pessoa
(1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher
Não sou nada.
Nunca serei nada.
Não posso querer ser nada.
À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.
Álvaro de Campos (heteronym), Tabacaria ["The Tobacconist's" or "The Tobacco Shop"] (15 January 1928)
Variant translations:
I am nothing.
Never shall be anything.
Cannot will to be anything.
This apart, I have in me all the dreams of the world.
trans. Jonathan Griffin, in Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1974), p. 111
I am not nothing.
I will never be nothing.
I cannot ever want to be nothing.
Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams of the world.
In Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations (2005), p. 649
I am nothing.
I shall never be anything.
I cannot even wish to be anything.
Apart from this, I have within me all the dreams of the world.
Variant: I am nothing.
I will never be anything.
I cannot wish to be anything.
Bar that, I have in me all the dreams of the world.
Source: The Republic of Wine (1992), Chapter Four, Section V
“Blessed are they who have nothing to say, and who cannot be persuaded to say it.”
James Russell Lowell
(1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat
Speech at the banquet for Grand Duke Alexis, 11 November 1871 at the Revere House Hotel in Boston, p. 102 books.google https://books.google.de/books?id=YRmn-_vXZ58C&pg=PA102&dq=persuaded
Cf. George Eliot 1879: Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact