Quotes by Soren Kierkegaard

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

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

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

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.

Hope is passion for what is possible.

To be lost in spiritlessness is the most terrible thing of all.

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

Hope is a passion for the possible.

Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.

The crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

What, then, is depression? It is hysteria of the spirit.

The dread of sin can sometimes in effect drive a person into sin through dread.

Many of us pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that we hurry past it.

He cannot become old, for he has never been young; he cannot become young, for he has already become old; in a way he cannot die, for he has never lived; in a way he cannot live, for he is already dead.

With every increase in the degree of consciousness, and in proportion to that increase, the intensity of despair increases: the more consciousness the more intense the despair.

Faith is a marvel, and yet no human being is excluded from it; for that in which all human life is united is passion, and faith is a passion.

That there may be some who need coercion, who if given free rein would riot in selfish pleasure like unbridled beasts, is no doubt true, but one should show precisely by the fact that one knows how to speak with fear and trembling that one is not of their number.

My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known; what wonder, then, that I love her in return.

Men think that it is impossible for a human being to love his enemies, for enemies are hardly able to endure the sight of one another. Well, then, shut your eyes -- and your enemy looks just like your neighbor.

When the discoveries of possibility are honestly administered, possibility will discover all finitudes but idealize them in the shape of infinity, in anxiety overwhelm the individual, until the individual again overcomes them in the anticipation of faith.

The reward of the good man is to be allowed to worship in truth.

The profundity of Christianity is that Christ is both our redeemer and our judge, not that one is our redeemer and another is our judge, for then we certainly come under judgement, but that the redeemer and the judge are the same.

To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking Him.

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.

I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it...but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill.

The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard, nor read about, nor seen, but, if one will, are to be lived.

When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world -- no matter how imperfect -- becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for love.

When indeed does the temporal suffering oppress a man most terribly? Is it not when it seems to him that it has no significance, that it neither secures nor gains anything for him? Is it not when the suffering, as the impatient man expresses it, is without meaning or purpose?

Therefore do not deceive yourself! Of all deceivers fear most yourself!

What we call worldliness simply consists of such people who, if one may so express it, pawn themselves to the world.

Don't you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this?

For as the Good is only a single thing, so all ways lead to the Good, even the false ones: when the repentant one follows the same way back.

An adventure that every human being has to live through, learning to be anxious so as not to be ruined either by never having been in anxiety or by sinking into it. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.

In infinite resignation there is peace and repose; anyone who wants it, who has not debased himself by--what is still worse than being too proud--belittling himself, can discipline himself into making this movement, which in its pain reconciles one to existence.

Every mental act is composed of doubt and belief,
but it is belief that is the positive, it is belief
that sustains thought and holds the world together.

My opinion is, of course, completely my own. I would not impose it on anyone else and decline any pressure to change it.

For he who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God.

The moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity. It is the first reflection of eternity in time, its first attempt, as it were, at stopping time.

The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have.

Leap of faith -- yes, but only after reflection.

The task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted.

Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.

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.

It has often been said that a reformation should begin with each man reforming himself.

No one may pride himself at being more than an individual, and no one despondently think that he is not an individual.

The truth is a trap: you cannot get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.

I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing.

What labels me, negates me.

It is very important in life to know when your cue comes.

It is not the path which is the difficulty; rather, it is the difficulty which is the path.

There is a love, that blazes up and is forgotten; there is a love until death.

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

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

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

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.

The crowd, in fact, is composed of individuals; it must therefore be in every man's power to become what he is, an individual. From becoming an individual no one, no one at all, is excluded, except he who excludes himself by becoming a crowd.

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

The conclusions of passion are the only reliable ones.

Dread is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.

What our age lacks is not reflection, but passion.

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

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

Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.

The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.

There is peace and rest and comfort in sorrow.

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

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

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.

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

In the life of the individual when love awakens it is older than everything else, because when it exists it seems as if it has existed for a long time; it presupposes itself back into the distant past until all searching ends in the inexplicable origin.

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

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

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

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

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.

It is a very curious thing about superstition. One would expect that the man who had once seen his morbid dreams were not fulfilled would abandon them for the future; but on the contrary they grow even stronger just as the love of gambling increases in a man who has once lost in a lottery.

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.

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.

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.

Pleasure disappoints; possibility never.

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.

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

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

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

Irony is a qualification of subjectivity.

My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have had.

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

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?

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

Talent warms-up the given (as they say in cookery) and makes it apparent; genius brings something new. But our time lets talent pass for genius. They want to abolish the genius, deify the genius, and let talent forge ahead.

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

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 the general applause of wits who believe it's a joke.

The meaning lies in the appropriation.

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?

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.

Thus our own age is essentially one of understanding, and on the average, perhaps, more knowledgeable than any former generation, but it is without passion. Every one knows a great deal, we all know which way we ought to go and all the different ways we can go, but nobody is willing to move.

Comparison is the most dangerous acquaintance love can make.

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.

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

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

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

As the arrow, loosed from the bow by the hand of the practiced archer, does not rest till it has reached the mark, so men pass from God to God. He is the mark for which they have been created, and they do not rest till they find their rest in him.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am convinced that God is love, this thought has for me a primitive lyrical validity. When it is present to me, I am unspeakably blissful, when it is absent, I long for it more vehemently than does the lover for his object.

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!

Truth has always had many loud proclaimers, but the question is whether a person will in the deepest sense acknowledge the truth, allow it to permeate his whole being, accept all its consequences, and not have an emergency hiding place for himself and a Judas kiss for the consequence.

Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.

One should be an enigma not just to others but to oneself too. I study myself. When I'm tired of that I light a cigar to pass the time, and think: God only knows what the good Lord really meant with me, or what He meant to make of me.

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

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

The commandment is that you shall love, but when you understand life and yourself, then it is as if you should not need to be commanded, because to love human beings is still the only thing worth living for; without this life you really do not live.

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

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.

The more one needs God the more perfect he is. To need God is nothing to be ashamed of but is perfection itself. It is the saddest thing in the world if a human being goes through life without discovering that he needs God!

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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?

Destroy your primitivity, and you will most probably get along well in the world, maybe achieve great success -- but Eternity will reject you. Follow up your primitivity, and you will be shipwrecked in temporality, but accepted by Eternity.

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.

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

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.

. .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.

If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?

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.

I have only one friend, and that is echo. Why is it my friend? Because I love my sorrow, and echo does not take it away from me. I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night. Why is it my confidant? Because it remains silent.

Learning to know anxiety is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known anxiety or by sinking under it. He therefore who has leaned rightly to be in anxiety has learned the most important thing.

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.

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

However much one generation learns from another, it can never learn from its predecessor the genuinely human factor. In this respect every generation begins afresh. Thus no generation has learned from another how to love, no generation can begin other than at the beginning.

If I were a physician, and if I were allowed to prescribe just one remedy for all the ills of the modern world, I would prescribe silence. For even if the Word of God were proclaimed in the modern world, how could one hear it with so much noise? Therefore, create silence.

People have an idea that the preacher is an actor on a stage and they are the critics, blaming or praising him. What they don't know is that they are the actors on the stage; he (the preacher) is merely the prompter standing in the wings, reminding them of their lost lines.

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.

Repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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