Top 350 Soren Kierkegaard Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “I would have perished had I not perished.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

203. “My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known – no wonder, then, that I return the love.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

204. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

206. “A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

208. “All the shrewdness of ‘man’ seeks one thing: to be able to live without responsibility.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

209. “I do not lack the courage to think a thought whole.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

210. “It is modest of the nightingale not to require anyone to listen to it; but it is also proud of the nightingale not to care whether any one listens to it or not.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

211. “It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

212. “With respect to physical existence, one needs little, and to the degree that one needs less, the more perfect one is.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

213. “And this is the simple truth – that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

214. “Backwards understood be only can but, forwards lived be must life.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

215. “Only the Eternal is always appropriate and always present, is always true. Only the Eternal applies to each human being, whatever his age may be.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

216. “Comparison is the most dangerous acquaintance love can make.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

217. “One should be an enigma not just to others but to oneself too. I study myself. When I’m tired of that I light a cigar to pass the time, and think: God only knows what the good Lord really meant with me, or what He meant to make of me.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

218. “For the sadness in legitimate humour consists in the fact that honestly and without deceit it reflects in a purely human way upon what it is to be a child.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

219. “Most people rush after pleasure so fast that they rush right past it.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

220. “My sorrow is my castle.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

221. “Are you not aware that there comes a midnight hour when everyone must unmask...”

— Soren Kierkegaard

222. “The human race in the course of time has taken the liberty of softening and softening Christianity until at last we have contrived to make it exactly the opposite of what it is in the New Testament...”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

224. “Christians remind me of schoolboys who want to look up the answers to their math problems in the back of the book rather than work them through.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

225. “Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

226. “The commandment is that you shall love, but when you understand life and yourself, then it is as if you should not need to be commanded, because to love human beings is still the only thing worth living for; without this life you really do not live.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

227. “Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm and shrewdly relapsing into repose.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

228. “What our age lacks is not reflection, but passion.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

229. “All essential knowledge relates to existence, or only such knowledge as has an essential relationship to existence is essential knowledge.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

231. “The genius differs from us men in being able to endure isolation, his rank as a genius is proportionate to his strength for enduring isolation, whereas we men are constantly in need of “the others,” the herd; we die, or despair, if we are not reassured by being in the herd, of the same opinion as the herd.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

232. “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.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

233. “My standpoint is armed neutrality.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

234. “Most people live dejectedly in worldly joys or sorrows. They sit on the sidelines and do not join the dance.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

235. “Freedom’s possibility is not the ability to choose the good or the evil. The possibility is to be able.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

236. “What I really need is to get clear out about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge precedes every act.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

237. “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.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

238. “Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

239. “The great trick with a woman is to get rid of her while she think’s she’s rid of you.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

240. “That is the road we all have to take – over the Bridge of Sight into eternity.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

241. “People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

242. “Job endured everything – until his friends came to comfort him, then he grew impatient.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

243. “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.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

244. “Come, sleep and death; you promise nothing, you hold everything.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

245. “Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

246. “When you open the door which you shut in order to pray to God, the first person you meet as you go out is your neighbour whom you shall love. Wonderful!”

— Soren Kierkegaard

247. “Maturity consists in the discovery that there comes a critical moment where everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand more and more that there is something which cannot be understood.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

248. “Irony is a qualification of subjectivity.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

249. “The conclusions of passion are the only reliable ones.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

250. “Everyone looks the same to me in a photograph: stupid.”

— Soren Kierkegaard