Soren Kierkegaard Quotes

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.

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!

I have never fought in such a way as to say: I am the true Christian, others are not Christians.

Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.

When you open the door which you shut in order to pray to God, the first person you meet as you go out is your neighbour whom you shall love. Wonderful!

The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply, 'Create silence'.

For the sadness in legitimate humour consists in the fact that honestly and without deceit it reflects in a purely human way upon what it is to be a child.

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

There are men who are wanting in the comparative, they as a rule are the most interesting.

Backwards understood be only can but, forwards lived be must life.

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

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

The meaning lies in the appropriation.

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

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

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

In the Christianity of Christendom the Cross has become something like the child’s hobby-horse and trumpet.

To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc.

I do not lack the courage to think a thought whole.

It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.

Preparation for becoming attentive to Christianity does not consist in reading many books ... but in fuller immersion in existence.

Choose to be who you are. . . The individual who would become a person must at some point take over his entire being - must, that is, choose herself.

But doubt is wily and cunning and never, as it is sometimes said to be, loud or defiant. It is unassuming and sly, not bold or assertive - and the more unassuming, the more dangerous.

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

I would rather be a swineherd, understood by the swine, than a poet misunderstood by men.

Irony is a qualification of subjectivity.

Most people believe that the Christian commandments are intentionally a little too severe - like setting a clock half an hour ahead to make sure of not being late in the morning.

Truth is not introduced into the individual from without but was within him all the time.

Without risk faith is an impossibility.

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

People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have for example freedom of thought instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation.

Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards.

What our age lacks is not reflection but passion.