# Quote — Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

> The ethical as such is the universal, and as the universal it applies to everyone, which from another angle means that it applies at all times. It rests immanent in itself, has nothing outside itself that is its τέλος but is itself the τέλος for everything outside itself, and when the ethical has absorbed this into itself, it goes not further. The single individual, sensately and psychically qualified in immediacy, is the individual who has his τέλος in the universal, and it is his ethical task continually to express himself in this, to annul his singularity in order to become the universal. As soon as the single individual asserts himself in his singularity before the universal, he sins, and only by acknowledging this can he be reconciled again with the universal. ... Faith [in contrast to the ethical] is namely this paradox that the single individual is higher than the universal ... so that after having been in the universal he as the single individual isolates himself as higher than the universal.

- Author: [Søren Kierkegaard](https://www.leafyquotes.com/soren-kierkegaard.md)
- Book: [Fear and Trembling](https://www.leafyquotes.com/soren-kierkegaard/fear-and-trembling.md)
- Page: 54
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fear_and_Trembling#Problema_I) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/soren-kierkegaard/fear-and-trembling/the-ethical-as-such

## More from this book

> Once when the price of spices in Holland fell, the merchants had a few cargoes sunk in the sea in order to jack up the price. Do we need something similar in the world of the spirit? Are we so sure that we have achieved the highest, so that there is nothing left for us to do except piously to delude ourselves into thinking that we have not come that far, simply in order to have something to occupy one’s time> is this the kind of self-deception the present age needs? Should it be trained in the virtuosity along that line, or is it not, instead adequately perfected in the art of deceiving itself?

p. 121 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/soren-kierkegaard/fear-and-trembling/once-when-the.md)

> A man rouges his face and wears a periwig. The same man is eager to try his fortune with the fair sex, he is perfectly sure of conquering by the aid of the rouge and the periwig which make him absolutely irresistible. He captures a girl and is at the acme of happiness. Now comes the gist of the matter: if he is able to admit this embellishment, he does not lose all of his infatuating power; when he reveals himself as a plain ordinary man, and bald at that, he does not thereby lose the loved one.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/soren-kierkegaard/fear-and-trembling/a-man-rouges.md)

> Faust fulfills this idea. Anyone who has a notion of what it means for a person to live on spirit also knows what the hunger of doubt means and knows that the doubter hungers just as much for the daily bread of life as for the nourishment of spirit.

p. 109 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/soren-kierkegaard/fear-and-trembling/faust-fulfills-this.md)