Kierkegaard Quotes

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.

A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.

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.

Everyone looks the same to me in a photograph: stupid.

Faith is holding onto uncertainties with passionate conviction.

Genius never desires what does not exist.

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?

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

When you were called, did you answer or did you not? Perhaps softly and in a whisper?

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

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

The thing is to understand myself: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. That is what I now recognize as the most important thing.

What a misfortune to be a woman! And yet, the worst misfortune is not to understand what a misfortune it is.

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.

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.

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.

Affliction is able to drown out every earthly voice. . . but the voice of eternity within a person it cannot drown.

It is perhaps the misfortune of my life that I am interested in far too much but not decisively in any one thing; all my interests are not subordinated in one but stand on an equal footing.

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

...he who always hopes for the best becomes old, deceived by life, and he who is always prepared for the worst becomes old prematurely; but he who has faith, retains eternal youth.

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

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

What our age lacks is not reflection, but passion.

Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.

Who is also aware of the tremendous risk involved in faith - when he nevertheless makes the leap of faith - this [is] subjectivity ... at its height.

Pleasure disappoints; possibility never.

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

Spirit is the third, yet in such a way that one can speak of a synthesis only when the spirit is posited.

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.

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

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

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.

If a man cannot forget, he will never amount to much.

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

To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. I am not a teacher, only a fellow student.

The reign of the tyrant ends with his death, and the reign of the martyr starts with it.

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.

The person who praises God is on the tracks of justice.

Sin is in itself separation from the good, but despair over sin is separation a second time.

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

All essential knowledge relates to existence, or only such knowledge as has an essential relationship to existence is essential knowledge.

Men who not religious or artists are fools.

Dread is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.

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.

But the life of freedom requires a beginning, and here a beginning is a resolution, and the resolution has its work and its pain-thus the beginning has its difficulty.

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).

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.

Leap of faith – yes, but only after reflection

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.

... all comparisons injure.