Top 100 Quotes About Soren Kierkegaard
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Out of love, God becomes man. He says: See, here is what it is to be a human being.
Soren Kierkegaard
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.
Soren Kierkegaard
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. It takes moral courage to grieve; it requires religious courage to rejoice.
Soren Kierkegaard
#13. 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
#14. Most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes
but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.
Soren Kierkegaard
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. I have attacked no one as not being a Christian, I have condemned no one.
Soren Kierkegaard
#19. 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
#20. What a misfortune to be a woman! And yet, the worst misfortune is not to understand what a misfortune it is.
Soren Kierkegaard
#21. When you were called, did you answer or did you not? Perhaps softly and in a whisper?
Soren Kierkegaard
#22. Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.
Soren Kierkegaard
#23. The specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.
Soren Kierkegaard
#24. 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
#26. A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized prayer is listening.
Soren Kierkegaard
#27. So soon as I talk I express the universal, and if I do not do so, no one can understand me.
Soren Kierkegaard
#28. God does not think; he creates. He does not exist; he is eternal.
Soren Kierkegaard
#29. The object of (Christian) faith is not the teaching but the Teacher.
Soren Kierkegaard
#31. Deep within every man there lies the dread of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the tremendous household of millions and millions.
Soren Kierkegaard
#33. Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?
Soren Kierkegaard
#34. Faith is holding onto uncertainties with passionate conviction.
Soren Kierkegaard
#38. But doubt is wily and cunning and never, as it is sometimes said to be, loud or defiant. It is unassuming and sly, not bold or assertive - and the more unassuming, the more dangerous.
Soren Kierkegaard
#39. 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
#40. I would rather be a swineherd, understood by the swine, than a poet misunderstood by men.
Soren Kierkegaard
#41. And if something should be found, particularly in the first part of the dissertation, that one is generally not accustomed to come across in scholarly writings, the reader must forgive my jocundity, just as I, in order to lighten the burden, sometimes sing at my work.
Soren Kierkegaard
#42. The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.
Soren Kierkegaard
#43. For without risk there is no faith, and the greater the risk, the greater the faith.
Soren Kierkegaard
#44. Why bother remembering a past that cannot be made into a present?
Soren Kierkegaard
#45. My time I divide as follows: the one half I sleep; the other half I dream. I never dream when I sleep; that would be a shame, because to sleep is the height of genius.
Soren Kierkegaard
#46. Pain reconciles one to existence. Infinite resignation is that shirt in the old fable. The thread is spun with tears, bleached by tears, the shirt sewn in tears, but then it also gives better protection than iron. The secret in life is that everyone must sew it for himself.
Soren Kierkegaard
#47. 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
#48. The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.
Soren Kierkegaard
#49. 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
#50. For he who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God.
Soren Kierkegaard
#51. 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
#52. 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
#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. Doubt is conquered by faith, just as it is faith which has brought doubt into the world.
Soren Kierkegaard
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. The deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than himself.
Soren Kierkegaard
#59. What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?
Soren Kierkegaard
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. It is the normal state of the human heart to try to build its identity around something besides God.
Soren Kierkegaard
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. The highest of all is not to understand the highest but to act upon it.
Soren Kierkegaard
#75. What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?
Soren Kierkegaard
#76. Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
Soren Kierkegaard
#77. 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
#78. Metaphorically speaking, a person's ideas must be the building he lives in - otherwise there is something terribly wrong.
Soren Kierkegaard
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. Only the one who descends into the underworld rescues the beloved.
Soren Kierkegaard
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. [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
#88. 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
#90. 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
#91. On the secretly blushing cheek is reflected the glow of the heart
Soren Kierkegaard
#92. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
Soren Kierkegaard
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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