Soren Kierkegaard Quotes

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.

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

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

A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.

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.

Faith is holding onto uncertainties with passionate conviction.

Take it and return it: the kiss of love.

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.

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

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

This fact, that the opposite of sin is by no means virtue, has been overlooked. The latter is partly a pagan view, which is content with a merely human standard, and which for that very reason does not know what sin is, that all sin is before God. No, the opposite of sin is faith.

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.

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).

God does not think; he creates. He does not exist; he is eternal.

The spiritual differs from the religious in being able to endure isolation. The rank of a spiritual person is proportionate to his strength for enduring isolation, whereas we religious people are constantly in need of 'the others,' the herd. We religious folks die, or despair, if we are not reassured by being in the assembly, of the same opinion as the congregation, and so on. But the Christianity of the New Testament is precisely related to the isolation of the spiritual man.

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

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

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

At one time my only wish was to be a police official. It seemed to me to be an occupation for my sleepless intriguing mind. I had the idea that there, among criminals, were people to fight: clever, vigorous, crafty fellows. Later I realized that it was good that I did not become one, for most police cases involve misery and wretchedness-not crimes and scandals.

The object of (Christian) faith is not the teaching but the Teacher.

The truth must essentially be regarded as in conflict with this world; the world has never been so good, and will never become so good that the majority will desire the truth.

An individual in despair despairs over something. . . . In despairing over something, he really despair[s] over himself, and now he wants to get rid of himself. Consequently, to despair over something is still not despair proper. . . . To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself-this is the formula for all despair.

In a theatre it happened that a fire started off stage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed-amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.

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.

It is tragic-comic to see that all this knowledge and understanding exercises no power at all over men's lives, that their lives do not express in the remotest way what they have understood, but rather the opposite.

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.

I believe that there is a longing in my soul that searches the whole world.

During the first period of our lives the greatest danger is not to take the risk. When once the risk has been taken, then the greatest danger is to risk too much. By not risking at first one turns aside and serves trivialities; in the second case, by risking too much, one turns aside to the fantastic and perhaps to presumption.

What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?

God creates everything out of nothing. And everything which God is to use, he first reduces to nothing

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

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.

If you think you understand, it isn't God.

Genius never desires what does not exist.

Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.

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?

It was not to save a nation that Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac, nor to appease angry gods... Then why does Abraham do it? For God's sake... He does it for the sake of God because God demands proof of his faith... He was not justified by being virtuous, but by being an individual submitted to God in faith.

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

Worldly wisdom thinks that love is a relationship between man and man. Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between man-God-man, that is, that God is the middle term.

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

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

Prayer is a silent surrendering of everything to God.

Love is the expression of the one who loves, not of the one who is loved. Those who think they can love only the people they prefer do not love at all. Love discovers truths about individuals that others cannot see

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!

Human justice is very prolix, and yet at times quite mediocre; divine justice is more concise and needs no information from the prosecution, no legal papers, no interrogation of witnesses, but makes the guilty one his own informer and helps him with eternity's memory.

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.

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.

If anyone proposes to believe, i.e., imagines himself to believe, because many good and upright people living here on the hill have believed, i.e., have said that they believedthen he is a fool, and it is essentially indifferent whether he believes on account of his own and perhaps a widely held opinion about what good and upright people believe, or believes a Münchhausen.