“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
— Soren Kierkegaard
“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
“Don’t forget to love yourself.”
“Take a chance and you may lose. Take not a chance and you have lost already.”
“Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.”
“The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.”
“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
“It’s better to get lost in the passion than to lose the passion.”
“The crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.”
“Once you label me you negate me.”
“Do it or don’t do it – you will regret both.”
“Without risk, faith is an impossibility.”
“The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.”
“Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?”
“Leap of faith – yes, but only after reflection.”
“I’m so misunderstood that people misunderstand me even when I tell them I’m misunderstood.”
“To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”
“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.”
“For without risk there is no faith, and the greater the risk, the greater the faith.”
“God creates everything out of nothing. And everything which God is to use, he first reduces to nothing.”
“Be that self which one truly is.”
“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss – an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. – is sure to be noticed.”
“Most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes – but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.”
“Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.”
“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
“I am so stupid that I cannot understand philosophy; the antithesis of this is that philosophy is so clever that it cannot comprehend my stupidity. These antitheses are mediated in a higher unity; in our common stupidity.”
“The thing that cowardice fears most is decision.”
“Confidence is the present tense of hope.”
“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”
“To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. I am not a teacher, only a fellow student.”
“The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.”
“Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.”
“Worship isn’t God’s show. God is the audience. God’s watching. The congregation, they are the actors in this drama. Worship is their show. And the minister is just reminding the people of their forgotten lines.”
“To love another person is to help them love God.”
“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.”
“The door to happiness opens outward.”
“God does not think; he creates. He does not exist; he is eternal.”
“Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.”
“Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”
“Therefore do not deceive yourself! Of all deceivers fear most yourself!”
“Love believes all things and yet is never deceived.”
“It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.”
“Love is all, it gives all, and it takes all.”
“Prayer is a silent surrendering of everything to God.”
“It is not the path which is the difficulty; rather, it is the difficulty which is the path.”
“I am convinced that God is love, this thought has for me a primitive lyrical validity. When it is present to me, I am unspeakably blissful, when it is absent, I long for it more vehemently than does the lover for his object.”
“The highest of all is not to understand the highest but to act upon it.”
“This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.”
“If you think you understand, it isn’t God.”
“Purity of heart is to will one thing.”
“It is very dangerous to go into eternity with possibilities which one has oneself prevented from becoming realities. A possibility is a hint from God. One must follow it.”
“No time of life is so beautiful as the early days of love, when with every meeting, every glance, one fetches something new home to rejoice over.”
“A possibility is a hint from God. One must follow it.”
“I believe that there is a longing in my soul that searches the whole world.”
“As the arrow, loosed from the bow by the hand of the practiced archer, does not rest till it has reached the mark, so men pass from God to God. He is the mark for which they have been created, and they do not rest till they find their rest in him.”
“The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.”
“The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.”
“There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.”
“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.”
“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?”
“Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.”
“If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.”
“When you read God’s Word, you must constantly be saying to yourself, “It is talking to me, and about me”.”
“What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?”
“To pace about, looking to obtain status, looking to attain ‘importance’ – I can think of nothing more ridiculous.”
“I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night.”
“Had I to carve an inscription on my tombstone I would ask for none other than “The Individual.””
“In my great melancholy, I loved life, for I love my melancholy.”
“In order to swim one takes off all one’s clothes – in order to aspire to the truth one must undress in a far more inward sense, divest oneself of all one’s inward clothes, of thoughts, conceptions, selfishness etc., before one is sufficiently naked.”
“It is not where we breathe, but where we Love, that we live.”
“I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations – one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it – you will regret both.”
“On the secretly blushing cheek is reflected the glow of the heart.”
“In the eyes of God, the infinite spirit, all the millions that have lived and now live do not make a crowd. He only sees each individual.”
“It is the normal state of the human heart to try to build its identity around something besides God.”
“I have, I believe, the courage to doubt everything; I have, I believe, the courage to fight against everything; but I do not have the courage to acknowledge anything, the courage to possess, to own anything.”
“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.”
“Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.”
“Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God.”
“A human being is a spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.”
“A man who cannot seduce men cannot save them either.”
“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.”
“Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, who so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility.”
“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 only one friend, and that is echo. Why is it my friend? Because I love my sorrow, and echo does not take it away from me. I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night. Why is it my confidant? Because it remains silent.”
“My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have had.”
“People understand me so poorly that they don’t even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.”
“What looks like politics, and imagines itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious movement.”
“Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.”
“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.”
“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.”
“There is something almost cruel about the Christian’s being placed in a world which in every way wants to pressure him to do the opposite of what God bids him to do.”
“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.”
“It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.”
“It takes moral courage to grieve; it requires religious courage to rejoice.”
“The person who praises God is on the tracks of justice.”
“I would rather be a swineherd, understood by the swine, than a poet misunderstood by men.”
“Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.”
“Nothing is as heady as the wine of possibility.”
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