Top 100 Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
#1. The highest of all is not to understand the highest but to act upon it.
Soren Kierkegaard
#2. Reflection is not the evil; but a reflective condition and the deadlock which it involves, by transforming the capacity for action into a means of escape from action, is both corrupt and dangerous, and leads in the end to a retrograde movement.
Soren Kierkegaard
#3. A crowd in its very concept is the untruth, by reason of the fact that it renders the individual completely impenitent and irresponsible, or at least weakens his sense of responsibility by reducing it to a fraction.
Soren Kierkegaard
#4. The deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than himself.
Soren Kierkegaard
#5. The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.
Soren Kierkegaard
#6. To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
Soren Kierkegaard
#8. I am alone, as I have always been; abandoned not by men, that would not pain me, but by the happy spirits of joy who in countless hosts encircled me, who met everywhere with their kind, pointed everywhere to an opportunity.
Soren Kierkegaard
#10. When you were called, did you answer or did you not? Perhaps softly and in a whisper?
Soren Kierkegaard
#11. What a misfortune to be a woman! And yet, the worst misfortune is not to understand what a misfortune it is.
Soren Kierkegaard
#12. Intelligence has got the upper hand to such an extent that it transforms the real task into an unreal trick and reality into a play.
Soren Kierkegaard
#13. To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self ... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self.
Soren Kierkegaard
#14. No one ever comes back from the dead., no one ever enters the world without weeping; no one is ever asked when he wishes to enter life, no one is ever asked when he wishes to leave.
Soren Kierkegaard
#15. How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.
Soren Kierkegaard
#16. In order than everything should be reduced to the same level, it is first of all necessary to procure a phantom, its spirit, a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage
and that phantom is the public.
Soren Kierkegaard
#17. For he who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God.
Soren Kierkegaard
#18. The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.
Soren Kierkegaard
#19. When the child must be weaned, the mother too is not without sorrow at the thought that she and the child are separated more and more, that the child which first lay under her heart and later reposed upon her breast will be so near to her no more.
Soren Kierkegaard
#21. The more one needs God the more perfect he is. To need God is nothing to be ashamed of but is perfection itself. It is the saddest thing in the world if a human being goes through life without discovering that he needs God!
Soren Kierkegaard
#22. I believe that there is a longing in my soul that searches the whole world.
Soren Kierkegaard
#24. Faith is namely this paradox that the single individual is higher than the universal
Soren Kierkegaard
#26. The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo; the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes.
Soren Kierkegaard
#27. Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic if it is pulled out I shall die.
Soren Kierkegaard
#28. Therefore do not deceive yourself! Of all deceivers fear most yourself!
Soren Kierkegaard
#29. What is it to be God's elect ? It is to be denied in youth the wishes of youth, so as with great pains to get them fulfilled in old age.
Soren Kierkegaard
#31. Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
Soren Kierkegaard
#32. But now how can an Apostle prove that he has authority? If he could prove it physically, then he would not be an Apostle. He has no other proof than his own statement. That has to be so; for otherwise the believer's relationship to him would be direct instead of being paradoxical.
Soren Kierkegaard
#33. The human race in the course of time has taken the liberty of softening and softening Christianity until at last we have contrived to make it exactly the opposite of what it is in the New Testament ...
Soren Kierkegaard
#34. The absurd ... the fact that with God all things are possible. The absurd is not one of the factors which can be discriminated within the proper compass of the understanding: it is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen.
Soren Kierkegaard
#35. What the philosophers have to say about reality is often as disappointing as a sign you see in a shop window, which reads Pressing Done Here. If you brought your clothes in to be pressed, you would be fooled: for the sign is only for sale.
Soren Kierkegaard
#37. Certainty ... lurks at the door of faith and threatens to devour it.
Soren Kierkegaard
#38. I need the enchantment of creative work to help me forget life's mean pettinesses.
Soren Kierkegaard
#39. So it isn't I who am master of my life, I am just one of the threads to be woven into life's calico! Well then, even if I cannot spin, I can at least cut the thread in two.
Soren Kierkegaard
#40. However much one generation learns from another, it can never learn from its predecessor the genuinely human factor. In this respect every generation begins afresh. Thus no generation has learned from another how to love, no generation can begin other than at the beginning.
Soren Kierkegaard
#41. Had I to carve an inscription on my tombstone I would ask for none other than "The Individual."
Soren Kierkegaard
#42. The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
Soren Kierkegaard
#43. The person who surrenders absolutely to God, with no reservations, is absolutely safe. From this safe hiding-place he can see the devil , but the devil cannot see him.
Soren Kierkegaard
#45. It is in your power to review your life, to look at things you saw before, but from another point of view
Soren Kierkegaard
#46. As my prayer became more attentive and inward, I had less and less to say. I finally became completely silent ... This is how it is. To pray does not mean to listen to oneself speaking. Prayer involves becoming silent, and being silent, and waiting until God is heard.
Soren Kierkegaard
#48. This fact, that the opposite of sin is by no means virtue, has been overlooked. The latter is partly a pagan view, which is content with a merely human standard, and which for that very
reason does not know what sin is, that all sin is before God. No, the opposite of sin is faith.
Soren Kierkegaard
#49. The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.
Soren Kierkegaard
#50. On principle' one can do anything and what one does is, fundamentally, a matter of indifference, just as a man's life remains insignificant even though 'on principle' he gives his support to all the 'needs of the times.
Soren Kierkegaard
#51. Take a chance and you may lose. Take not a chance and you have lost already.
Soren Kierkegaard
#52. The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
Soren Kierkegaard
#53. For the universal will constantly torture him and say, 'You ought to have talked. Where will you find the certainty that it was not after all a hidden pride which governed your resolution?
Soren Kierkegaard
#55. What distinguishes all love from lust is the fact that it bears an impress of eternity.
Soren Kierkegaard
#56. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.
Soren Kierkegaard
#58. Truth has always had many loud proclaimers, but the question is whether a person will in the deepest sense acknowledge the truth, allow it to permeate his whole being, accept all its consequences, and not have an emergency hiding place for himself and a Judas kiss for the consequence.
Soren Kierkegaard
#59. The question of immortality is of its nature not a scholarly question. It is a question welling up from the interior which the subject must put to itself as it becomes conscious of itself.
Soren Kierkegaard
#60. Most people believe that the Christian commandments are intentionally a little too severe
Soren Kierkegaard
#62. Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally and happily secured against despair.
Soren Kierkegaard
#64. Man has made a discovery ... the way to make life easy is to make it meaningless.
Soren Kierkegaard
#65. Let us speak of this in purely human terms. Oh! how pitiable a person who has never felt the loving urge to sacrifice everything for love, who has therefore been unable to do so!
Soren Kierkegaard
#66. Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.
Soren Kierkegaard
#67. Unless you grasp that it requires all the strength of spirit to die, that the hero always dies before his death, you will not come particularly far in your observations on life.
Soren Kierkegaard
#68. The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. is bound to be noticed.
Soren Kierkegaard
#69. Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer.
Soren Kierkegaard
#70. The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have.
Soren Kierkegaard
#72. People hardly ever make use of the freedom which they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as compensation.
Soren Kierkegaard
#73. The profundity of Christianity is that Christ is both our redeemer and our judge, not that one is our redeemer and another is our judge, for then we certainly come under judgement, but that the redeemer and the judge are the same.
Soren Kierkegaard
#74. What shall it profit the sick man to imagine himself, as all men do, to be well, if the physician says he is sick!
Soren Kierkegaard
#75. Job endured everything - until his friends came to comfort him, then he grew impatient.
Soren Kierkegaard
#76. For love is exultant when it unites equals, but it is triumphant when it makes that which was unequal equal in love.
Soren Kierkegaard
#77. The less support an idea has,the more fervently it must be believed in, so that a totally preposterous idea requires unflinching faith.
Soren Kierkegaard
#78. If we ask what poetry is
we may say in general that it is
a victory over the world;
it is through a negation of the
imperfect actuality
that poetry opens up
a higher actuality
Soren Kierkegaard
#79. 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.
Soren Kierkegaard
#80. There is something frightful in the fact that the most dangerous thing of all, playing at Christianity, is never included in the list of heresies and schisms.
Soren Kierkegaard
#81. My soul always reverts to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There at least one feels that it's human beings talking. There people hate, people love, people murder their enemy and curse his descendants through all generations, there people sin.
Soren Kierkegaard
#82. I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it ... but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill.
Soren Kierkegaard
#83. In actuality, no one ever sank so deep that he could not sink deeper, and there may be one or many who sank deeper. So it is always possible to be happy and grateful that things are not worse!
Soren Kierkegaard
#84. Only the lower natures forget themselves and become something new. Thus the butterfly has entirely forgotten that it was a caterpillar, perhaps it may in turn so entirely forget it was a butterfly that is becomes a fish.
Soren Kierkegaard
#85. Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner; put yourself in his place so that you may understand ... what he learns and the way he understands it.
Soren Kierkegaard
#87. Life can only be understood going backward, but must be lived going forward.
Soren Kierkegaard
#90. Adversity not only draws people together, but brings forth that beautiful inward friendship.
Soren Kierkegaard
#91. Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.
Soren Kierkegaard
#92. I divide my time as follows: half the time I sleep, the other half I dream. I never dream when I sleep, for that would be a pity, for sleeping is the highest accomplishment of genius.
Soren Kierkegaard
#93. Spiritually, a man's thoughts must be the building in which he lives, otherwise it's wrong.
Soren Kierkegaard
#94. Dread is a womanish debility in which freedom swoons. Psychologically speaking, the fall into sin always occurs in impotence. But dread is at the same time the most egotistic thing.
Soren Kierkegaard
#95. Seek first God's Kingdom, that is, become like the lilies and the birds, become perfectly silent - then shall the rest be added unto you.
Soren Kierkegaard
#96. If he is not supposed to be that, then he is a hypocrite, and the higher he climbs on this path, the more dreadful a hypocrite he is.
Soren Kierkegaard
#97. People do not know what they ought to say but only that they must say something.
Soren Kierkegaard
#98. The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing. But because he wants to do it in his own strength, he is fighting not with man, but with God.
Soren Kierkegaard
#99. Christians remind me of schoolboys who want to look up the answers to their math problems in the back of the book rather than work them through.
Soren Kierkegaard
#100. When indeed does the temporal suffering oppress a man most terribly? Is it not when it seems to him that it has no significance, that it neither secures nor gains anything for him? Is it not when the suffering, as the impatient man expresses it, is without meaning or purpose?
Soren Kierkegaard
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