Top 350 Soren Kierkegaard Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “And this is one of the most crucial definitions for the whole of Christianity; that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

152. “Christ has not only spoken to us by his life but has also spoken for us by his death.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

153. “Adversity not only draws people together, but brings forth that beautiful inward friendship.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

154. “Boredom is the root of all evil – the despairing refusal to be oneself.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

155. “The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

156. “The more people who believe something, the more apt it is to be wrong. The person who’s right often has to stand alone.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

157. “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.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

158. “Never cease loving a person, and never give up hope for him, for even the prodigal son who had fallen most low, could still be saved; the bitterest enemy and also he who was your friend could again be your friend; love that has grown cold can kindle.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

159. “Man is the synthesis of the infinite and the finite, the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man is not yet a self.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

160. “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.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

161. “On the whole, the longing for solitude is a sign that there still is spirit in a person and is a measure of what spirit there is.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

162. “For he who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

163. “Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?”

— Soren Kierkegaard

164. “If a man cannot forget, he will never amount to much.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

165. “Oh, can I really believe the poet’s tales, that when one first sees the object of one’s love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love like all knowledge is remembrance, that love too has its prophecies in the individual.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

166. “The question is not “To be or not to be,” it is what we should be until we are not.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

167. “Teach me, 0 God, not to torture myself, not to make a martyr out of myself through stifling reflection, but rather teach me to breathe deeply in faith.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

168. “Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

169. “The God that can be named is not God.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

170. “This is all that I’ve known for certain, that God is love. Even if I have been mistaken on this or that point: God is nevertheless love.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

171. “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.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

172. “Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

173. “Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

174. “I divide my time as follows: half the time I sleep, the other half I dream. I never dream when I sleep, for that would be a pity, for sleeping is the highest accomplishment of genius.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

175. “Only one deception is possible in the infinite sense, self-deception.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

176. “It is impossible to exist without passion.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

177. “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.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

178. “To be a woman is something so strange, so confusing and so complicated that only a woman could put up with it.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

179. “The truth is a trap: you cannot get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

180. “A ‘no’ does not hide anything, but a ‘yes’ very easily becomes a deception.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

181. “The melancholy have the best sense of the comic, the opulent often the best sense of the rustic, the dissolute often the best sense of the moral, and the doubter often the best sense of the religious.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

182. “The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

183. “There is peace and rest and comfort in sorrow.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

184. “There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

185. “Destroy your primitivity, and you will most probably get along well in the world, maybe achieve great success – but Eternity will reject you. Follow up your primitivity, and you will be shipwrecked in temporality, but accepted by Eternity.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

186. “A man may perform astonishing feats and comprehend a vast amount of knowledge, and yet have no understanding of himself. But suffering directs a man to look within. If it succeeds, then there, within him, is the beginning of his learning.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

187. “Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally and happily secured against despair.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

188. “Genius, like a thunderstorm, comes up against the wind.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

189. “God has given each of us our “marching order.” Our purpose here on Earth is to find those orders and carry them out. Those orders acknowledge our special gifts.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

191. “There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

192. “The truth must essentially be regarded as in conflict with this world; the world has never been so good, and will never become so good that the majority will desire the truth.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

193. “The minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

194. “I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

195. “The question is asked in ignorance, by one who does not even know what can have led him to ask it.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

196. “Only the one who descends into the underworld rescues the beloved.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

197. “I would have perished had I not perished.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

198. “Reflection is not the evil; but a reflective condition and the deadlock which it involves, by transforming the capacity for action into a means of escape from action, is both corrupt and dangerous, and leads in the end to a retrograde movement.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

199. “At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

200. “During the first period of a man’s life the greatest danger is not to take the risk.”

— Soren Kierkegaard