Words matter. These are the best Soren Kierkegaard Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.
Purity of heart is to will one thing.
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
People understand me so poorly that they don’t even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.
If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.
Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.
Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.
Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.
Because of its tremendous solemnity death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearences.
Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic if it is pulled out I shall die.
Once you label me you negate me.
At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.
Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.
It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important.
Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.
The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.
Be that self which one truly is.
Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth – look at the dying man’s struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.
It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.
There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.
There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life’s highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.
During the first period of a man’s life the greatest danger is not to take the risk.
One can advise comfortably from a safe port.
Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.
Love is all, it gives all, and it takes all.
Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.
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.
God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.
