Top 350 Soren Kierkegaard Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Once you are born in this world you’re old enough to die.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

202. “Boredom rests upon the nothingness that winds its way through existence; its giddiness, like that which comes from gazing down into an infinite abyss, is infinite.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

207. “My standpoint is armed neutrality.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

210. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

216. “To be lost in spiritlessness is the most terrible thing of all.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

217. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

220. “One can advise comfortably from a safe port.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

221. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

224. “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

225. “It is not what happens to me that makes me great, but what I do.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

230. “My sorrow is my castle.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

231. “Deep within every man there lies the dread of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the tremendous household of millions and millions.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

232. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

234. “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

235. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

239. “It is not a gain that guilt should be wholly forgotten. On the contrary, it is loss and perdition. But it is a gain to win an inner intensity of heart through a deeper and deeper inner sorrowing over guilt.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

244. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

246. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

250. “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