Is it not a good deed to restrain the arm of someone who wants to commit a misdeed, and is it not also a good deed to restrain the judgment of someone who wants to misjudge and cannot judge otherwise if acknowledgment of the good does not prevent it? Much wrong can be done to a person, but perhaps the worst is to come with belated repentance over a rash, unjust judgment that one nevertheless has oneself helped to occasion. As you can see, if this happens, if a person goes astray in this way by doing the good, he can thank himself and cowardliness, because God gives a spirit of power of love, and of self-control. […] Do not do the good ashamedly and with downcast eyes, as if you were walking a forbidden road, acknowledge it even though you are ashamed because you always feel your own imperfection and lower your eyes before God. Venture it in trust in God. Let each one acknowledge the good, renewed in his resolution, never led astray by any jugglery that it is more difficult to serve the good when one is misjudged. How would it help for it to be more difficult if it was also less true or for it to be more difficult for many if it was easier for him?
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p. 374-375Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
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God does not give a spirit of cowardliness but a spirit of power and of love and of self-control, such as is necessary in order to know what is the good, what is truly great and noble, what significance it has for him and in relation to him; in order to love the good with the unselfish love that desires only to be an unworthy servant, which is always love’s delight, and the opposite of it is a violation that pollutes love for him by making it profitable; and in order to maintain constancy, lest everything become unfruitful without the self-control that tempers the effort and the decision of resolution. This acknowledgment, this assent of resolution, is the first dedication. Alas, how rarely a person experiences this in such a way that even merely in the moment of dedication he renounces all dreams and fancies, every mirage that wants to inflate him and cause him to be amazed at himself, and instead receives the power to envision it as it is, the power to embrace it with self-denying love, the power to make the pact of self-control with it! How rarely a person experiences this in such a way that even merely in the hour of dedication he has the power to hold to the good, which seemingly wants to destroy him, the love not to shrink from it, the self-control not to falsify himself.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
Every human being should not just learn by rote but learn very particularly, that he is nothing-which some learn by recognizing that what they are capable of is as good as nothing, others by recognizing that what they are not capable of is as good as nothing but is sufficient to make all their capability essentially nothing. The extensive enterprise can often be dazzling enough, especially when it is not only glorious and lauded by men but beneficial for many, and yet it is only a mirage; the resolution is not the good resolution until the person gives himself and everything up to the good, all his weaknesses, and leaves it up to God. The mirage is due to a person’s becoming a worthy servant in his own eyes, an important instrument, but this is not the good resolution. The good resolution is satisfied with being the unworthy servant. Therefore every person is to test himself.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
Gauguin, that curious artist, that alien whose mien and the look in whose eyes vaguely remind one of Rembrandt's "Portrait of a Man" in the Galerie Lacaze — this friend of mine likes to make one feel that a good picture is equivalent to a good deed; not that he says so, but it is difficult to be on intimate terms with him without being aware of a certain moral responsibility.
Vincent van Gogh
Gauguin, that curious artist, that alien whose mien and the look in whose eyes vaguely remind one of Rembrandt's "Portrait of a Man" in the Galerie Lacaze — this friend of mine likes to make one feel that a good picture is equivalent to a good deed; not that he says so, but it is difficult to be on intimate terms with him without being aware of a certain moral responsibility.
Vincent Van Gogh
It is often better for a person to recognize a sin than to do a good deed. Recognizing a sin makes a person humble. Doing a good deed often can feed a person’s pride.
Leo Tolstoy
Kierkegaard, Soren Aabye
Kiernan, Caitlin R.
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