Top 350 Soren Kierkegaard Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

203. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “Faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

214. “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

215. “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

216. “Irony is a qualification of subjectivity.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

219. “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

220. “All moral elevation consists first and foremost of being weaned from the momentary.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

224. “The meaning lies in the appropriation.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

226. “Dread is a womanish debility in which freedom swoons. Psychologically speaking, the fall into sin always occurs in impotence. But dread is at the same time the most egotistic thing.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

227. “Just as in the great moment of resignation one does not mediate but chooses, now the task is to gain proficiency in repeating the impassioned choice and, existing, to express it in existence.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

228. “To grumble about the world and its unhappiness is always easier than to beat one’s breast and groan over oneself.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

229. “The most terrible fight is not when there is one opinion against another, the most terrible is when two men say the same thing – and fight about the interpretation, and this interpretation involves a difference of quality.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

230. “Irony is the cultivation of the spirit and therefore follows next after immediacy; then comes the ethicist, then the humourist, then the religious person.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

231. “Because of its tremendous solemnity death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearences.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

232. “But the life of freedom requires a beginning, and here a beginning is a resolution, and the resolution has its work and its pain-thus the beginning has its difficulty.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

233. “Absolute passion cannot be understood by a third party.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

234. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

237. “Riches and abundance come hypocritically clad in sheep’s clothing, pretending to be security against anxieties, and they become then the object of anxiety. They secure a man against anxieties just about as well as the wolf that is put to tending the sheep.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

238. “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

239. “When all combine in every way to make everything easier, people will want difficulty. I conceived it as my task to make difficulties everywhere.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

240. “I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

241. “What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?”

— Soren Kierkegaard

242. “My sorrow is my castle.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

244. “What the philosophers have to say about reality is often as disappointing as a sign you see in a shop window, which reads Pressing Done Here. If you brought your clothes in to be pressed, you would be fooled: for the sign is only for sale.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

246. “Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

247. “The paradox in Christian truth is invariably due to the fact that it is the truth that exists for God. The standard of measure and the end is superhuman; and there is only one relationship possible: faith.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

249. “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

250. “The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.”

— Soren Kierkegaard