Top 100 Quotes About Kierkegaard
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. But my doubt would not be overcome. Kierkegaard had declared that it was only to the consciousness of sin that Christianity was not horror or madness. For me it was sometimes both.
Georg Brandes
#5. Kierkegaard so shrewdly observes, one is condemned to live it forward and review it backward.
Christopher Hitchens
#6. Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards. - Kierkegaard
Oliver Sacks
#7. What Kierkegaard said about love is also true of creativity: every person must start at the beginning.
Rollo May
#8. 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
#9. Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#10. I suspect Kierkegaard had just that in mind when he proposed that people had to be wary of feeling too saintly, since they could not be certain of the source of such feelings.
Norman Mailer
#11. If I have a system it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called 'the infinite qualitative distinction' between time and eternity
Karl Barth
#12. I decided that, as a stand-up, I'd position myself as a cerebral, observational comic, making references to Camus and Kierkegaard. I wasn't so much concerned with getting laughs as I was with seeing audience members turn to each other at any given moment and say, "Exactly!
Martin Short
#13. The existent individual, as Kierkegaard defines him, is first of all he who is in an infinite relationship with himself and has an infinite interest in himself and his destiny. Secondly, the existent individual always feels himself to be in Becoming, with a task before him;
Jean-Paul Sartre
#14. Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche are for us like guideposts to a past which has lost its significance.
Hannah Arendt
#15. Kierkegaard was a Christian, though he hated the Danish Church and couldn't accept the way complacent Christians around him behaved. For him, religion was a heart-wrenching option, not a cosy excuse for a song in church.
Nigel Warburton
#16. Aloneness is a wise teacher. Kierkegaard remarked that one sign of spiritual maturity was the ability to be comfortable when alone.
Vernon Howard
#17. As Kierkegaard said, "To win a crowd is no art; for that only untruth is needed, nonsense, and a little knowledge of human passions.
Brian Zahnd
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. I wrote 'My Name is Red' just to remember painting, where the hand does it before the intellect. When I'm captive to it, I'm a happier person. Kierkegaard tells us that a happy person is someone who lives in the present; the unhappy person, someone who lives either in the past or the future.
Orhan Pamuk
#22. 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
#23. It was not surprising that after the war Dostoevsky was linked to Kierkegaard as a prophet of social resignation.
Martin Jay
#24. 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
#25. Kierkegaard was once asked, 'What is a poet?' He answered that a poet was an unhappy man whose moans and cries of anguish were transformed into ravishing music.
Langdon Brown Gilkey
#26. Anxiety, says Kierkegaard, is the dizziness of freedom.
Neel Burton
#27. Can you imagine going to bed with Kierkegaard? He'd never stop asking, 'Can I do this to you? Is this okay?
Jonathan Franzen
#28. 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
#29. But, inevitably, as he [Kierkegaard] approaches what wemight call his Christocentric climax many readers drop off. Many scholars just leave that part of his authorship alone.
George Pattison
#31. What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?
Soren Kierkegaard
#32. The highest of all is not to understand the highest but to act upon it.
Soren Kierkegaard
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. It is the normal state of the human heart to try to build its identity around something besides God.
Soren Kierkegaard
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?
Soren Kierkegaard
#49. The deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than himself.
Soren Kierkegaard
#50. This is all that I've known for certain, that God is love. Even if I have been mistaken on this or that point: God is nevertheless love.
Soren Kierkegaard
#51. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.
Soren Kierkegaard
#52. Doubt is conquered by faith, just as it is faith which has brought doubt into the world.
Soren Kierkegaard
#53. The idea of demonstrating that this unknown something [God] exists, could scarcely suggest itself to Reason. For if God does not exist it would of course be impossible to prove it, and if he does exist it would be folly to attempt it.
Soren Kierkegaard
#54. On the whole, the longing for solitude is a sign that there still is spirit in a person and is a measure of what spirit there is.
Soren Kierkegaard
#55. I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.
Soren Kierkegaard
#56. Love is the expression of the one who loves, not of the one who is loved. Those who think they can love only the people they prefer do not love at all. Love discovers truths about individuals that others cannot see
Soren Kierkegaard
#57. 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
#58. For when an old man relives his life, he lives it only by dwelling upon his memories; and when wisdom in an old man has outgrown the immediate impressions of life, the past viewed from the quiet of memory is something different from the present in all its bustle. The
Soren Kierkegaard
#59. A good decision is our will to do everything we can within our power. It means to serve God with all we've got, be it little or much. Every person can do that.
Soren Kierkegaard
#60. To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
Soren Kierkegaard
#61. 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
#62. I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?
Soren Kierkegaard
#64. Boredom is the root of all evil. It is very curious that boredom, which itself has such a calm and sedate nature, can have such a capacity to initiate motion. The effect that boredom brings about is absolutely magical, but this effect is one not of attraction but of repulsion.
Soren Kierkegaard
#65. On the secretly blushing cheek is reflected the glow of the heart
Soren Kierkegaard
#66. Father in Heaven! When the thought of thee wakes in our hearts let it not awaken like a frightened bird that flies about in dismay, but like a child waking from its sleep with a heavenly smile.
Soren Kierkegaard
#67. Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
Soren Kierkegaard
#68. In the deepest sense, the being in a state of sin is the sin, the particular sins are not the continuation of sin, they are expressions of its continuation.
Soren Kierkegaard
#69. [T]he content of the discourse should be about loving the un-lovable object ... The beloved and the friend are the immediate and direct objects of immediate love, the choice of passion and of inclination. And what is the ugly? It is the neighbor, whom one shall love (373).
Soren Kierkegaard
#70. She was a riddle, who mysteriously possessed her own solution, a secret, and what are all diplomats' secrets compared with this, an enigma, and what in all the world is so beautiful as the word that solves it?
Soren Kierkegaard
#71. The more he needs God, the more deeply he comprehends he is in need of God, and then the more he in his need presses forward to God, the more perfect he is ... To need God is nothing to be ashamed of but is perfection itself.
Soren Kierkegaard
#72. 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
#73. Only the one who descends into the underworld rescues the beloved.
Soren Kierkegaard
#74. Above all, do not loose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.
Soren Kierkegaard
#75. Even though it be true that the conception of God is absolute help, it is also the only help which is absolutely capable of revealing to man his own helplessness.
Soren Kierkegaard
#76. The melancholy have the best sense of the comic, the opulent often the best sense of the rustic, the dissolute often the best sense of the moral, and the doubter often the best sense of the religious.
Soren Kierkegaard
#77. When you open the door which you shut in order to pray to God, the first person you meet as you go out is your neighbour whom you shall love. Wonderful!
Soren Kierkegaard
#78. Metaphorically speaking, a person's ideas must be the building he lives in - otherwise there is something terribly wrong.
Soren Kierkegaard
#79. Imagination is what providence uses to take men captive in actuality, in existence, in order to get them far enough out, or within, or down into existence. And when imagination has helped them get as far out as they should be - then actuality genuinely begins.
Soren Kierkegaard
#80. 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
#82. To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good is to hope. To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of evil is to fear. By the decision to choose hope one decides infinitely more than it seems, because it is an eternal decision
Soren Kierkegaard
#83. The specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.
Soren Kierkegaard
#84. Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.
Soren Kierkegaard
#85. When you were called, did you answer or did you not? Perhaps softly and in a whisper?
Soren Kierkegaard
#86. What a misfortune to be a woman! And yet, the worst misfortune is not to understand what a misfortune it is.
Soren Kierkegaard
#87. 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
#88. I have attacked no one as not being a Christian, I have condemned no one.
Soren Kierkegaard
#89. Knowledge is an attitude, a passion, actually an illicit attitude. For the compulsion to know is like dipsomania, erotomania, and homicidal mania, in producing a character that is out of balance. It is not at all that the scientist goes after the truth.
Soren Kierkegaard
#90. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts.
Soren Kierkegaard
#91. If Hegel had written the whole of his Logic and in the Preface disclosed the fact that it was only a thought-experiment (in which however at many points he had steered clear of many things), he would have been the greatest thinker who ever lived. As it is, he is merely comic.
Soren Kierkegaard
#92. The paradox in Christian truth is invariably due to the fact that it is the truth that exists for God. The standard of measure and the end is superhuman; and there is only one relationship possible: faith.
Soren Kierkegaard
#93. 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
#94. It takes moral courage to grieve; it requires religious courage to rejoice.
Soren Kierkegaard
#95. Teach me, 0 God, not to torture myself, not to make a martyr out of myself through stifling reflection, but rather teach me to breathe deeply in faith.
Soren Kierkegaard
#96. 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
#97. What philosophers say about actuality [Virkelighed] is often just as disappointing as it is when one reads on a sign in a secondhand shop: Pressing Done Here. If a person were to bring his clothes to be pressed, he would be duped, for the sign is merely for sale.
Soren Kierkegaard
#100. This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.
Soren Kierkegaard
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