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If it is really so that there is something in life that has or can have such power over a person that it little by little makes him forget everything that is noble and sacred and makes him a slave in the service of the world, of the moment; if it is really so that time has or can gain such power over a person that while it adds days to his life it also every passing day measures the greater distance of his life from the divine, until he, trapped in everydayness and habit, becomes alienated from the eternal and the original; if experience has taught us that this has also happened to someone who once had a strong sense of the presence of the eternal-then it certainly would be beneficial to recommend every means against this and desirable that the recommending be done in an earnest but also winsome way. God be praised, there are many means, just as the dangers are many, and every one of these means is trustworthy and tested. One such means is resolution or coming to a resolution, because resolution joins a person with the eternal, brings the eternal into time for him, jars him out of the drowsiness of uniformity, breaks the spell of habit, cuts off the tedious bickering of troublesome thoughts, and pronounces a benediction upon even the weakest beginning, when it is indeed a beginning. Resolution is a waking up to the eternal …
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p. 347

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

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If one person makes comprehensible to another something that is to his advantage in the temporal sense and the latter acts accordingly, then the former may be said to have brought it about. If, however, a person tries to make comprehensible to another his eternal well-being, this does not help straightaway in the same manner, inasmuch as the second still has not grasped the eternal on the basis of what the first said. If, however, he makes the eternal resolution and in it grasps the eternal, then he owes no one anything, not the speaker either.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

In the life of the individual when love awakens it is older than everything else, because when it exists it seems as if it has existed for a long time; it presupposes itself back into the distant past until all searching ends in the inexplicable origin. Whereas all beginnings are ordinarily said to be difficult, this does not hold true of love’s beginning. Its happy awakening is unacquainted with work, and there is no advance preparation. Even if love can give birth to pain, it is not brought forth in pain; lightly, jubilantly, it bursts forth in its enigmatic coming into existence. What a wonderful beginning. But the life of freedom requires a beginning, and here a beginning is a resolution, and the resolution has its work and its pain-thus the beginning has its difficulty. The one making the resolution has, of course, not finished, because in that case he would have experienced that of which the resolution is the beginning. But if no resolution is made, the same thing can happen to such a person as sometimes happens to a speaker who only when he has finished speaking knows how he should have spoken: only when he has lived, only then does he know how he should have lived (what a sorry yield from life!) and how he should have made the beginning with the good resolution-what a bitter wisdom now that a whole life lies between the beginning and the one who is dying.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

The state really does not need to penalize bachelors; life itself punishes the person who deserves to be punished, for the person who does not make a resolution is a poor wretch of whom it must be said in the sad sense: He does not come under judgment. I do not speak this way because I am envious of those who do not will to marry; I am too happy to envy anyone, but I am zealous for life. I return to what I said before, that resolution is a person’s highest ideality. I shall now attempt to develop how the resolution most formative of the individuality must be constituted, and I rejoice in thinking that marriage is precisely so constituted, which, as stated, I assume for the time being to be a synthesis of falling in love and resolution.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

If the resolution is not the beginning and the beginning the resolution, then the final account can never be rendered, because in a certain sense there is none. If there is no resolution there will be no tower, however imaginary or however really splendid the estimate was! The good resolution is to will to do everything in one’s power, so serve it to the utmost of one’s capability.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

… the true eternity does not lie behind either/or, but before it … to bring forth this true eternity requires a determination of will … A religiously developed person makes a practice of referring everything to God, of permeating and saturating every finite relation with the thought of God, and thereby consecrating and ennobling it. … When around one everything has become silent, solemn as a clear, starlit night, when the soul comes to be alone in the whole world, then before one there appears, not an extraordinary human being, but the eternal power itself, then the heavens open, and the I chooses itself or, more correctly, receives itself. Then the personality receives the accolade of knighthood that ennobles it for an eternity. … It is an earnest and significant moment when a person links himself to an eternal power for an eternity, when he accepts himself as the one whose remembrance time will never erase, when in an eternal and unerring sense he becomes conscious of himself as the person he is. And yet one can refrain from doing it! … The crux of the matter, then, is the energy by which I become ethically conscious, or, more correctly, I cannot become ethically conscious without energy. Therefore, I cannot become ethically conscious without becoming conscious of my eternal being. This is the true demonstration of the immortality of the soul. It is fully developed, of course, only when the task is congruent with the duty, but that to which I am duty-bound for an eternity is an eternal task. ... The knight will have the power to concentrate the conclusion of all his thinking into one act of consciousness. If he lacks this focus, his soul is dissipated in multiplicity from the beginning, and he will never find the time to make the movement; he will continually be running errands in life and will never enter into eternity, for in the very moment he approaches it, he will suddenly discover something and therefore must go back. In the next moment he thinks, it will be possible, and this is quite true, but with such observations one will never come to make the movement but with their help will sink deeper and deeper into the mire. … wishing to be in the wrong is an expression of an infinite relationship, and wanting to be in the right, or finding it painful to be in the wrong, is an expression of a finite relationship! Hence, it is upbuilding always to be in the wrong-because only the infinite builds up; the finite does not!

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard