Søren Kierkegaard Quotes

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.

The most common form of despair is not being who you are.

The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.

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

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.

It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.

Once you are born in this world you’re old enough to die.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

to have faith is precisely to lose one's mind so as to win God.

The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.

For love is exultant when it unites equals, but it is triumphant when it makes that which was unequal equal in love.

If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.

To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking Him.

Don't forget to love yourself.

The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing. But because he wants to do it in his own strength, he is fighting not with man, but with God.

Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.

Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.

What a difference! Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient! when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular and infinitely boring

Hope is a passion for the possible.

What looks like politics, and imagines itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious movement.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

As the ironist does not have the new within his power, it might be asked how he destroys the old, and to this it must be answered: he destroys the given actuality by the given actuality itself.

Many of us pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that we hurry past it.

Battle day and night against the guile of oblivion...

The reward of the good man is to be allowed to worship in truth.

My opinion is, of course, completely my own. I would not impose it on anyone else and decline any pressure to change it.

- a bad conscience is indeed able to make life interesting.

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.

[The writer] can easily foresee his fate ... in an age when an author who wants to have readers must take care to write in such a way that the book can easily be perused during an afternoon nap ....

Prayer is listening.

He who loved himself became great in himself, and he who loved others became great through his devotion, but he who loved God became greater than all.

Satan's despair is absolute because Satan, as pure spirit, is pure consciousness, and for Satan (and all men in his predicament) every increase in consciousness is an increase in despair.

With every increase in the degree of consciousness, and in proportion to that increase, the intensity of despair increases: the more consciousness the more intense the despair.

With every increase in the degree of consciousness, and in proportion to that increase, the intensity of despair increases: the more consciousness the more intense the despair

I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.

Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.

In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant… My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known — no wonder, then, that I return the love.

Every mental act is composed of doubt and belief, but it is belief that is the positive, it is beliefthat sustains thought and holds the world together.

It costs a man just as much or even more to go to hell than to come to heaven. Narrow, exceedingly narrow is the way to perdition!

When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world — no matter how imperfect — becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for love.