Top 350 Soren Kierkegaard Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

102. “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!”

— Soren Kierkegaard

103. “A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized prayer is listening.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

104. “My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have had.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

105. “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.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

106. “It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

107. “Only the noble of heart are called to difficulty.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

108. “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.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

109. “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.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

110. “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.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

111. “It is better to try something and fail than to try nothing and succeed. The result may be the same, but you won’t be. We always grow more through defeats than victories.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

112. “I would rather be a swineherd, understood by the swine, than a poet misunderstood by men.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

113. “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.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

114. “I found I had less and less to say, until finally, I became silent, and began to listen. I discovered in the silence, the voice of God.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

115. “Why I so much prefer autumn to spring is that in the autumn one looks at heaven – in the spring at the earth.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

116. “Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

117. “The task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

118. “Faith is holding onto uncertainties with passionate conviction.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

119. “The person who praises God is on the tracks of justice.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

120. “The unhappy person is never present to themself because they always live in the past or the future.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

121. “Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted? And If I am compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I want to see him.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

122. “To venture causes anxiety. Not to venture is to lose oneself.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

124. “It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

125. “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.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

126. “It is very important in life to know when your cue comes.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

127. “If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

128. “Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

129. “Take it and return it: the kiss of love.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

130. “Repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

131. “The best news the World has ever heard came from a graveyard – Christ is risen!”

— Soren Kierkegaard

132. “To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

133. “It is more blessed to give than to receive, but then it is also more blessed to be able to do without than to have to have.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

134. “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

135. “Intelligence has got the upper hand to such an extent that it transforms the real task into an unreal trick and reality into a play.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

136. “We live as if we were unaware of our impending destruction.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

137. “Prayer is listening.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

138. “I go fishing for a thousand monsters in the depths of my own self.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

139. “The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

141. “If I could prescribe only one remedy for all the ills of the modern world, I would prescribe silence.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

142. “Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world?”

— Soren Kierkegaard

143. “Don’t you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this?”

— Soren Kierkegaard

144. “Christianity demands the crucifixion of the intellect.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

145. “Dread is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy...”

— Soren Kierkegaard

146. “There can be no faith without risk.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

147. “The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

148. “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.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

149. “If you want to be loathsome to God, just run with the herd.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

150. “It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand...”

— Soren Kierkegaard