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Quotes by Soren Kierkegaard


Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
– Soren Kierkegaard
At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Don't forget to love yourself.
– Soren Kierkegaard
During the first period of a man's life the greatest danger is not to take the risk.
– Soren Kierkegaard
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
God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.
– Soren Kierkegaard
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
I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.
– Soren Kierkegaard
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
I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations - one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it - you will regret both.
– Soren Kierkegaard
It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.
– Soren Kierkegaard
It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important.
– Soren Kierkegaard
It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God.
– Soren Kierkegaard
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
Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Once you label me you negate me.
– Soren Kierkegaard
One can advise comfortably from a safe port.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.
– Soren Kierkegaard
People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.
– Soren Kierkegaard
The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
– Soren Kierkegaard
The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.
– Soren Kierkegaard
The present generation, wearied by its chimerical efforts, relapses into complete indolence. Its condition is that of a man who has only fallen asleep towards morning: first of all come great dreams, then a feeling of laziness, and finally a witty or clever excuse for remaining in bed.
– Soren Kierkegaard
The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
– Soren Kierkegaard
There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.
– Soren Kierkegaard
To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer.
– Soren Kierkegaard
When you read God's Word, you must constantly be saying to yourself, It is talking to me, and about me.
– Soren Kierkegaard
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.
– Soren Kierkegaard
What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.
– Soren Kierkegaard
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
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
The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.
– Soren Kierkegaard
If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Because of its tremendous solemnity death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearences.
– Soren Kierkegaard
A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.
– Soren Kierkegaard