Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
Geniuses are like thunderstorms: they go against the wind, terrify people, clear the air.
Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts.
You train yourself in the art of being mysterious to everyone. My dear friend! What if there were no one, who cared about guessing your riddle, what pleasure would you then take in it?
Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.
How ironical that it is by means of speech that man can degrade himself below the level of dumb creation -- for a chatterbox is truly of a lower category than a dumb creature.
It is the normal state of the human heart to try to build its identity around something besides God.
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.
Truth is not introduced into the individual from without, but was within him all the time.
The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.
Only one human being recognized as one's neighbour is necessary in order to cure a man of self-love
Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, who so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility.
With respect to physical existence, one needs little, and to the degree that one needs less, the more perfect one is.
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.
Irony is the cultivation of the spirit and therefore follows next after immediacy; then comes the ethicist, then the humourist, then the religious person.
Most people live dejectedly in worldly joys or sorrows. They sit on the sidelines and do not join the dance.
Silence is the demon's trap, and the more one is silenced, the more terrible the demon; but silence is also the divinity's mutual understanding with the single individual.
When all combine in every way to make everything easier, people will want difficulty. I conceived it as my task to make difficulties everywhere.
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.
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?
...there is one thing that all Satan's cunning and all the snares of temptation cannot take by surprise - an undivided will.
When you were called, did you answer or did you not? Perhaps softly and in a whisper?
The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity.
The thing is to understand myself: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. That is what I now recognize as the most important thing.
What a misfortune to be a woman! And yet, the worst misfortune is not to understand what a misfortune it is.
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.
You should therefore say: alone in one's boat, alone with one's care, alone with one's despair, which one is craven enough to want rather to keep than submit to the pain of being healed.
Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner; put yourself in his place so that you may understand . . . what he learns and the way he understands it.
Affliction is able to drown out every earthly voice. . . but the voice of eternity within a person it cannot drown.
It is perhaps the misfortune of my life that I am interested in far too much but not decisively in any one thing; all my interests are not subordinated in one but stand on an equal footing.
...he who always hopes for the best becomes old, deceived by life, and he who is always prepared for the worst becomes old prematurely; but he who has faith, retains eternal youth.
My tactics were, by God's aid, to employ every means to make it clear what the requirement of Christianity truly is.
Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm and shrewdly relapsing into repose.
