227 Inspiring Quotes by Soren Kierkegaard

The thing that cowardice fears most is decision.

Jurists say that a capital crime submerges all lesser crimes; and so it is with faith. Its absurdity makes all petty difficultiesvanish.

Christ has not only spoken to us by his life, but has also spoken for us by his death.

The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity.

The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.

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.

Take a chance and you may lose. Take not a chance and you have lost already.

Beware false prophets come to you in wolf's clothing but inwardly are sheep.

I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night.

Do it or don't do it -- you will regret both.

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!

One should engage in all sorts of breadless arts.

The deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than himself.

Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do.

Dread is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.

Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm and shrewdly relapsing into repose.

It takes moral courage to grieve; it requires religious courage to rejoice.

You train yourself in the art of being mysterious to everyone. My dear friend! What if there were no one, who cared about guessing your riddle, what pleasure would you then take in it?

If the ethical -- that is, social morality- is the highest ... then no categories are needed other than the Greek philosophical categories.

The conclusions of passion are the only reliable ones.

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.

My scholarly expectation is then that I may succeed in becoming clever in philosophy in spite of my stupidity.

It is the normal state of the human heart to try to build its identity around something besides God.

What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?

What looks like politics, and imagines itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious movement.

For like a poisonous breath over the fields, like a mass of locusts over Egypt, so the swarm of excuses is a general plaque, a ruinous infection among men, that eats off the sprouts of the Eternal.

I am so stupid that I cannot understand philosophy; the antithesis of this is that philosophy is so clever that it cannot comprehend my stupidity. These antitheses are mediated in a higher unity; in our common stupidity.

Ulysses was not comely, but he was eloquent,
Yet he fired two goddesses of the sea with love.

Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.

Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.

A 'no' does not hide anything, but a 'yes' very easily becomes a deception.

During the first period of a man's life the greatest danger is not to take the risk.

In a mathematical proposition, for example, the objectivity is given, but therefore its truth is also an indifferent truth.

Pleasure disappoints; possibility never.

Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

It occurs to me that artists go forward by going backward, something which I have nothing against intrinsically when it is a reproduced retreat -- as is the case with the better artists.

Your own tactic is to train yourself in the art of becoming enigmatic to everybody. My young friend, suppose there was no one who troubld himself to guess your riddle -- what joy, then, would you have in it?

Irony is the cultivation of the spirit and therefore follows next after immediacy; then comes the ethicist, then the humourist, then the religious person.

The meaning lies in the appropriation.

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.

There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.

The unhappy person is never present to themself because they always live in the past or the future.

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.

All the shrewdness of 'man' seeks one thing: to be able to live without responsibility.

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.

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.

The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.

Repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life.

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.

One could construe the life of man as a great discourse in which the various people represent different parts of speech (the same might apply to states).

Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?

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.

There is peace and rest and comfort in sorrow.

The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.

Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.

Take it and return it: the kiss of love.

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.

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.

The question is not "To be or not to be," it is what we should be until we are not.

Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.

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.

Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.

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.

There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.

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.

I found I had less and less to say, until finally, I became silent, and began to listen. I discovered in the silence, the voice of God.

Most people live dejectedly in worldly joys or sorrows. They sit on the sidelines and do not join the dance.

May new sufferings torment your soul.

I am so fed up and joyless that not only have I nothing to fill my soul, I cannot even conceive of anything that could possibly satisfy it -- alas, not even the bliss of heaven.

It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.

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.

Philosophy always requires something more, requires the eternal, the true, in contrast to which even the fullest existence as such is but a happy moment.

I go fishing for a thousand monsters in the depths of my own self.

It is intelligent to ask two questions: (1) Is it possible? (2) Can I do it?. But it is unintelligent to ask these questions: (1) Is it real? (2) Has my neighbor done it?

A possibility is a hint from God. One must follow it.

On the secretly blushing cheek is reflected the glow of the heart.

What our age lacks is not reflection, but passion.

One can advise comfortably from a safe port.

My tactics were, by God's aid, to employ every means to make it clear what the requirement of Christianity truly is.

Only one deception is possible in the infinite sense, self-deception.

To venture causes anxiety.  Not to venture is to lose oneself.

Just as in the great moment of resignation one does not mediate but chooses, now the task is to gain proficiency in repeating the impassioned choice and, existing, to express it in existence.

Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all verbs are irregular.

Hope is passion for what is possible.

There is a view of life which conceives that where the crowd is, there is also truth. There is another view of life which conceives that wherever there is a crowd, there is untruth.

Most people believe that the Christian commandments are intentionally a little too severe.

How ironical that it is by means of speech that man can degrade himself below the level of dumb creation -- for a chatterbox is truly of a lower category than a dumb creature.

It seems to be my destiny to discourse on truth, insofar as I discover it, in such a way that all possible authority is simultaneously demolished.

The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever.

The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.

A genius may perhaps be a century ahead of his age and hence stands there as a paradox, but in the end, the race will assimilate what was once a paradox, so it is no longer paradoxical.

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.

In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant. ... My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known -- no wonder, then, that I return the love.

It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.

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.

With the daguerreotype, everyone will be able to have their portrait taken ... and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same.

. .the larger the crowd, the more probable that that which it praises is folly, and the more improbable that it is truth; and the most improbable of all that it is any eternal truth.

Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.

At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.

God has given each of us our "marching order." Our purpose here on Earth is to find those orders and carry them out. Those orders acknowledge our special gifts.

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.

Purity of heart is to will one thing.

All moral elevation consists first and foremost of being weaned from the momentary.

My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have had.

To be a woman is something so strange, so confusing and so complicated that only a woman could put up with it.

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.

There is one thing that all Satan's cunning and all the snares of temptation cannot take by surprise -- an undivided will.

Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content; it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

That is the road we all have to take -- over the Bridge of Sight into eternity.

No time of life is so beautiful as the early days of love, when with every meeting, every glance, one fetches something new home to rejoice over.

Geniuses are like thunderstorms: they go against the wind, terrify people, clear the air.

Freedom's possibility is not the ability to choose the good or the evil. The possibility is to be able.

Why I so much prefer autumn to spring is that in the autumn one looks at heaven -- in the spring at the earth.

When you read God's Word, you must constantly be saying to yourself, "It is talking to me, and about me".

Boredom rests upon the nothingness that winds its way through existence; its giddiness, like that which comes from gazing down into an infinite abyss, is infinite.

Irony is a qualification of subjectivity.

It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.

The minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion.

Had I to carve an inscription on my tombstone I would ask for none other than "The Individual.

In my great melancholy, I loved life, for I love my melancholy.

Where unclarity resides, there is temptation, and there it proves only too easily the stronger. Wherever there is ambiguity, wherever there is wavering, there is disobedience down at the bottom.

I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.

Adversity not only draws people together, but brings forth that beautiful inward friendship.

Without risk, faith is an impossibility.

Because of its tremendous solemnity death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearances.

Boredom is the root of all evil -- the despairing refusal to be oneself.

The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.

It is modest of the nightingale not to require anyone to listen to it; but it is also proud of the nightingale not to care whether any one listens to it or not.

About as genuine as tea made from a bit of paper which once lay in a drawer beside another piece of paper which had been used to wrap up a few tea leaves from which tea had already been made three times.

Genius, like a thunderstorm, comes up against the wind.

The more men believe an idea to be true the greater the likelihood that the idea is mistaken. Those who are right usually stand alone.

This is the miracle of life: that each person who heeds him or herself knows what no scientist can ever know: who he or she is.

Once you label me you negate me.

It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important.

Are you not aware that there comes a midnight hour when everyone must unmask.

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.

Comparison is the most dangerous acquaintance love can make.