Top 100 Kierkegaard's Quotes
#1. Do you know that line of Kierkegaard's, Canon Chambers? "There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves."
James Runcie
#2. as in Heinrich Heine's (a contemporary of Kierkegaard's) well-known saying that one should value above everything else 'freedom, equality and crab soup'. 'Crab soup' stands here for all the small pleasures in the absence of which we become (mental, if not real) terrorists,
Slavoj Zizek
#3. During the first period of a man's life the greatest danger is not to take the risk.
Soren Kierkegaard
#4. Oh Thou that givest both the beginning and the completion, give Thou victory in the day of need so that what neither a man's burning wish nor his determined resolution may attain to, may be granted unto him in the sorrowing of repentance: to will only one thing.
Soren Kierkegaard
#5. The only intelligent tactical response to life's horror is to laugh defiantly at it
Soren Kierkegaard
#6. I like to quote the words of Kierkegaard, that 'life ia a poem that we are able to write ourselves; but a Christian lets God write his life's poem.
Nathan Soderblom
#7. In the Christianity of Christendom the Cross has become something like the child's hobby-horse and trumpet.
Soren Kierkegaard
#8. Ulysses was not comely, but he was eloquent,
Yet he fired two goddesses of the sea with love
Soren Kierkegaard
#9. There is something almost cruel about the Christian's being placed in a world which in every way wants to pressure him to do the opposite of what God bids him to do.
Soren Kierkegaard
#10. Christ did not appoint professors, but followers. If Christianity ... is not reduplicated in the life of the person expounding it, then he does not expound Christianity, for Christianity is a message about living and can only be expounded by being realized in men's lives.
Soren Kierkegaard
#11. The speculative thinker makes Christianity into theology, instead of recognizing that a living relationship to Christ involves passion, struggle, decision, personal appropriation, and inner transformation.' (Moore's summary of Kierkegaard)
Charles E. Moore
#12. To have faith is precisely to lose one's mind so as to win God.
Soren Kierkegaard
#13. The great trick with a woman is to get rid of her while she think's she's rid of you.
Soren Kierkegaard
#14. Silence is the demon's trap, and the more one is silenced, the more terrible the demon; but silence is also the divinity's mutual understanding with the single individual.
Soren Kierkegaard
#15. The stone that was rolled before Christ's tomb might appropriately be called the philosopher's stone because its removal gave not only the pharisees but, now for 1800 years, the philosophers so much to think about.
Soren Kierkegaard
#16. Love has many mysteries, and this first infatuation is also a mystery, even if a minor one - most people who rush into it get engaged or indulge in other foolish pranks, and then it's all over with the twinkling of an eye and they don't know what they have conquered or what they have lost.
Soren Kierkegaard
#17. Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth - look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.
Soren Kierkegaard
#18. If a pastor's activity in the church is merely a once-a-week attempt to tow the congregation's cargo ship a little closer to eternity, the whole thing comes to nothing. A human life, unlike a cargo ship, cannot lie in the same place until the next Sunday.
Soren Kierkegaard
#19. 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
#20. Riches and abundance come hypocritically clad in sheep's clothing, pretending to be security against anxieties, and they become then the object of anxiety. They secure a man against anxieties just about as well as the wolf that is put to tending the sheep.
Soren Kierkegaard
#21. Philosophy is life's dry-nurse, who can take care of us - but not suckle us.
Soren Kierkegaard
#22. You wanted God's ideas about what was best for you to coincide with your ideas, but you also wanted him to be the almighty Creator of heaven and earth so that he could properly fulfill your
wish. And yet, if he were to share your ideas, he would cease to be the almighty Father.
Soren Kierkegaard
#23. The slaves of paltriness, the frogs in life's swamp, will naturally cry out, "Such a love is foolishness. The rich brewer's widow is a match fully as good and respectable." Let them croak.
Soren Kierkegaard
#24. A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.
Soren Kierkegaard
#25. One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical ... for the paradox is the source of the thinker's passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.
Soren Kierkegaard
#26. It is tragic-comic to see that all this knowledge and understanding exercises no power at all over men's lives, that their lives do not express in the remotest way what they have understood, but rather the opposite.
Soren Kierkegaard
#27. Theology sits rouged at the window and courts philosophy's favor, offering to sell her charms to it.
Soren Kierkegaard
#28. Death induces the sensual person to say: Let us eat and drink, because tomorrow we shall die - but this is sensuality's cowardly lust for life, that contemptible order of things where one lives in order to eat and drink instead of eating and drinking in order to live.
Soren Kierkegaard
#29. To dare is to momentarily lose one's footing.
But not to dare is to lose one's self.
Soren Kierkegaard
#30. To have distinctiveness is to believe in the distinctiveness of everyone else, because distinctiveness is not mine but is God's gift by which he gives being to me, and he indeed gives to all, gives being to all. (p. 271)
Soren Kierkegaard
#31. Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.
Soren Kierkegaard
#33. 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
#34. Spiritually, a man's thoughts must be the building in which he lives, otherwise it's wrong.
Soren Kierkegaard
#35. What a difference! Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient! when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular and infinitely boring
Soren Kierkegaard
#36. If I had a humble spirit in my service who, when I asked for a glass of water, brought me the world's costliest wines blended in a chalice, I should dismiss him, in order to teach him that my pleasure consists, not in what I enjoy, but in having my own way.
Soren Kierkegaard
#37. Human justice is very prolix, and yet at times quite mediocre; divine justice is more concise and needs no information from the prosecution, no legal papers, no interrogation of witnesses, but makes the guilty one his own informer and helps him with eternity's memory.
Soren Kierkegaard
#38. Only one human being recognized as one's neighbour is necessary in order to cure a man of self-love
Soren Kierkegaard
#39. Freedom's possibility is not the ability to choose the good or the evil. The possibility is to be able.
Soren Kierkegaard
#40. Knowing God is the condition for the sanctification of a human being by God's assistance and according to His intention. Wherever God is, there He is always creating ... He wants to create a new human being. To need God is to become new. And to know God is the crucial thing.
Soren Kierkegaard
#41. My tactics were, by God's aid, to employ every means to make it clear what the requirement of Christianity truly is.
Soren Kierkegaard
#42. Kierkegaard also said that truth is 'subjective'. By this he did not mean it doesn't matter what we think or believe. He meant that the really important truths are personal. Only these truths are 'true for me'.
Jostein Gaarder
#43. 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
#44. When I get up in the morning I go straight back to bed again. I feel best in the evening, the moment I dowse the candle, pull the eiderdown over my head. I raise myself up once more, look about the room with an indescribable peace of mind, and then it's goodnight, down under the eiderdown.
Soren Kierkegaard
#45. The more people who believe something, the more apt it is to be wrong. The person who's right often has to stand alone.
Soren Kierkegaard
#46. Why then did Abraham do it ? For God's sake, and (in complete identity with this) for his own sake. He did it for God's sake because God required this proof of his faith ; for his own sake he did it in order that he might furnish the proof.
Soren Kierkegaard
#47. There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life's highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.
Soren Kierkegaard
#48. I have two favorites: Reading Kierkegaard while listening to Mozart's Piano Concerto 9 in E Flat Major, and reading early Bazooka Joe comics in Hebrew.
Gene Weingarten
#49. God is present in the moment of choice, not in order to watch but in order to be chosen. Therefore, each person must choose. Terrible is the battle, in a person's innermost being, between God and the world. The crowning risk involved lies in the possession of choice.
Soren Kierkegaard
#50. Worship isn't God's show. God is the audience. God's watching. The congregation, they are the actors in this drama. Worship is their show. And the minister is just reminding the people of their forgotten lines.
Soren Kierkegaard
#51. A man's life is wasted when he lives on, so deceived by the joys of life or by its sorrows, that he never becomes decisively conscious of himself as spirit, as self, that is, he never is aware in the deepest sense that there is a God.
Soren Kierkegaard
#53. To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
Soren Kierkegaard
#54. According to Kierkegaard, rather than searching for the Truth with a capital T, it is more important to find the kind of truths that are meaningful to the individual's life. It is important to find 'the truth for me'.
Jostein Gaarder
#55. 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
#57. What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?
Soren Kierkegaard
#58. As a genius St. Paul cannot be compared with either Plato or Shakespeare, as a coiner of beautiful similes he comes pretty low down in the scale, as a stylist his name is quite obscure--and as an upholsterer: well, I frankly admit I have no idea how to place him.
Soren Kierkegaard
#59. He who does not know how to encircle a girl so that she loses sight of everything he does not want her to see, he who does not know how to poetize himself into a girl so that it is from her that everything proceeds as he wants it-he is and remains a bungler
Soren Kierkegaard
#60. It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.
Soren Kierkegaard
#61. The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.
Soren Kierkegaard
#62. People generally think that it is the world, the environment, external relationships, which stand in one's way, in the way of ones' good fortune ... and at bottom it is always man himself that stands in his own way.
Soren Kierkegaard
#63. Because of the a priori element in intention, good intentions are so tempting - compared with a successive unfolding in time - and have so often in them some narcotic which develops an inner gaze instead of a resilience that begets energy.
Soren Kierkegaard
#64. When all combine in every way to make everything easier, people will want difficulty. I conceived it as my task to make difficulties everywhere.
Soren Kierkegaard
#65. Doubt is thought's despair; despair is personality's doubt ... Doubt and despair ... belong to completely different spheres; different sides of the soul are set in motion ... Despair is an expression of the total personality, doubt only of thought.
Soren Kierkegaard
#66. 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
#67. Chronocanine Envy:
Sadness experienced when one realized that, unlike one's dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, Life must be lived forward.
Douglas Coupland
#68. 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
#69. It goes against the grain for me to do what so often happens, to speak inhumanly about the great as if a few millennia were an immense distance. I prefer to speak humanly about it, as if it happened yesterday, and let only the greatness itself be the distance.
Soren Kierkegaard
#70. It is the normal state of the human heart to try to build its identity around something besides God.
Soren Kierkegaard
#71. Even the richest personality is nothing before he has chosen himself, and on the other hand even what one might call the poorest personality is everything when he has chosen himself; for the great thing is not to be this or that but to be oneself, and this everyone can be if he wills it.
Soren Kierkegaard
#72. As the ironist does not have the new within his power, it might be asked how he destroys the old, and to this it must be answered: he destroys the given actuality by the given actuality itself.
Soren Kierkegaard
#73. The highest of all is not to understand the highest but to act upon it.
Soren Kierkegaard
#74. What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?
Soren Kierkegaard
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. In order to swim one takes off all one's clothes
in order to aspire to the truth one must undress in a far more inward sense, divest oneself of all one's inward clothes, of thoughts, conceptions, selfishness etc., before one is sufficiently naked.
Soren Kierkegaard
#80. I need the enchantment of creative work to help me forget life's mean pettinesses.
Soren Kierkegaard
#81. The measure of a person's disposition is this: how far is he from what he understands to what he does, how great is the distance between his understanding and his actions.
Soren Kierkegaard
#82. It's better to get lost in the passion than to lose the passion
Soren Kierkegaard
#83. It doesn't matter what you read. What matters is you read. Whether it's Tolstoy or Twilight, Kierkegaard or Betty and Veronica, keep reading, and don't ever let somebody else - anybody - have a say about, or try to control, what you choose to learn from and/or escape into.
Trent Zelazny
#84. Whoever has the world's treasures has them no matter how he got them. In the world of the spirit it is otherwise.
Soren Kierkegaard
#85. The majority of men are curtailed "I's"; what was planned by nature as a possibility capable of being sharpened into an I is soon dulled into a third person.
Soren Kierkegaard
#86. When you read God's Word, you must constantly be saying to yourself, "It is talking to me, and about me".
Soren Kierkegaard
#87. 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
#88. To grumble about the world and its unhappiness is always easier than to beat one's breast and groan over oneself.
Soren Kierkegaard
#89. There is one thing that all Satan's cunning and all the snares of temptation cannot take by surprise - an undivided will.
Soren Kierkegaard
#90. Oh, can I really believe the poet's tales, that when one first sees the object of one's love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love like all knowledge is remembrance, that
love too has its prophecies in the individual.
Soren Kierkegaard
#91. Satan's despair is absolute because Satan, as pure spirit, is pure consciousness, and for Satan (and all men in his predicament) every increase in consciousness is an increase in despair.
Soren Kierkegaard
#93. I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away - yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit - - - - - - - - - - - and wanted to shoot myself.
Soren Kierkegaard
#94. To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking Him.
Soren Kierkegaard
#95. A man's personality is matured only when he appropriates the truth, whether it is spoken by Balaam's ass or a sniggering wag or an apostle or an angel.
Soren Kierkegaard
#96. A human being is a spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation.
Soren Kierkegaard
#97. 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
#98. In eternity it will be asked whether you may not have damaged a good thing, in order that you also might judge with them that did not know how to judge, but who possessed the crowd's strength, which in the temporal sense is significant, but to which eternity is wholly indifferent.
Soren Kierkegaard
#99. Metaphorically speaking, a person's ideas must be the building he lives in - otherwise there is something terribly wrong.
Soren Kierkegaard
#100. You should therefore say: alone in one's boat, alone with one's care, alone with one's despair, which one is craven enough to want rather to keep than submit to the pain of being healed.
Soren Kierkegaard
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