Top 380 Soren Kierkegaard Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Job endured everything – until his friends came to comfort him, then he grew impatient.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

258. “Irony is a qualification of subjectivity.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

259. “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

260. “This is the miracle of life: that each person who heeds him or herself knows what no scientist can ever know: who he or she is.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

261. “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

262. “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

263. “Philosophy is life’s dry-nurse, who can take care of us – but not suckle us.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

264. “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

265. “Sin is in itself separation from the good, but despair over sin is separation a second time.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

266. “The meaning lies in the appropriation.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

267. “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

268. “The wisdom of the years is confusing. Only the wisdom of eternity is edifying.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

270. “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

271. “In relation to the labyrinth of her heart, every young girl is an Ariadne; she owns the thread by which one can find one’s way through it, but she owns it without herself knowing how to use it.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

272. “How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

273. “It seems to be my destiny to discourse on truth, insofar as I discover it, in such a way that all possible authority is simultaneously demolished.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

274. “The question of immortality is of its nature not a scholarly question. It is a question welling up from the interior which the subject must put to itself as it becomes conscious of itself.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

275. “Pleasure disappoints; possibility never.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

277. “In the deepest sense, the being in a state of sin is the sin, the particular sins are not the continuation of sin, they are expressions of its continuation.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

278. “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

279. “Truth is not introduced into the individual from without, but was within him all the time.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

280. “Philosophy always requires something more, requires the eternal, the true, in contrast to which even the fullest existence as such is but a happy moment.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

281. “Whoever has the world’s treasures has them no matter how he got them. In the world of the spirit it is otherwise.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

282. “No one is so terribly deceived as he who does not himself suspect it.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

283. “I am a fork, and I will stick you!”

— Soren Kierkegaard

284. “Genius never desires what does not exist.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

285. “Faith is the highest passion in a man.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

286. “The truly simple way of presenting Christianity is to do it.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

287. “The more men believe an idea to be true the greater the likelihood that the idea is mistaken. Those who are right usually stand alone.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

288. “My scholarly expectation is then that I may succeed in becoming clever in philosophy in spite of my stupidity.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

289. “If man were a beast or an angel, he would not be able to be in anxiety. Since he is both beast and angel, he can be in anxiety, and the greater the anxiety, the greater the man.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

290. “Woman is the conscience of man.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

291. “What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

292. “It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. And if one thinks over that proposition it becomes more and more evident that life can never really be understood in time because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting-place from which to understand it.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

293. “Learning to know anxiety is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known anxiety or by sinking under it.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

294. “What is the New Testament? A handbook for those who are to be sacrificed.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

295. “The good is by virtue my willing it. Otherwise it has no existence.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

296. “The great can never do harm when grasped in their greatness.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

297. “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

298. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard