Kierkegaard Quotes

The question is asked in ignorance, by one who does not even know what can have led him to ask it.

Those who dream must be awakened, and the deeper the people are who slumber, or the deeper they slumber, the more important it is that they be awakened, and the more powerfully must they be awakened.

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

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

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

Where there are two people, there is untruth.

To Dare is to risk losing your foothold for a moment, Not to Dare is to risk losing yourself.

Seek first God's Kingdom, that is, become like the lilies and the birds, become perfectly silent - then shall the rest be added unto you.

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

To pace about, looking to obtain status, looking to attain 'importance' - I can think of nothing more ridiculous.

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.

I would have perished had I not perished.

Christians remind me of schoolboys who want to look up the answers to their math problems in the back of the book rather than work them through.

It is impossible to exist without passion

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

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.

The great trick with a woman is to get rid of her while she think's she's rid of you.

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

Men are not on such intimate terms with the sublime that they really can believe in it

My sorrow is my castle.

Sleeping is the height of genius

Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world?

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?

The question of immortality is of its nature not a scholarly question. It is a question welling up from the interior which the subject must put to itself as it becomes conscious of itself.

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

To the frivolous Christianity is certainly not glad tidings, for it wishes first of all to make them serious.

To be a saint is to will the one thing.

Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element.

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.

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.

Humor (is) intrinsitc to Christianity.

I have attacked no one as not being a Christian, I have condemned no one.

Certainty... lurks at the door of faith and threatens to devour it.

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

Nothing is as heady as the wine of possibility

The conclusions of passion are the only reliable ones.

Shows itself in the notion that what may be objectively true may in the mouth of certain people become false.

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.

Theology sits rouged at the window and courts philosophy's favor, offering to sell her charms to it.

This age will die not as a result of some evil, but from a lack of passion.

Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally and happily secured against despair.

May new sufferings torment your soul.

The most common despair is...not choosing, or willing, to be oneself...[but] the deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than oneself.

This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.

...why bother remembering a past that cannot be made into a present?

There can be no faith without risk.

Now, with God's help, I shall become myself.

What I really need is to get clear out about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge precedes every act.

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.

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!