Top 350 Soren Kierkegaard Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “The meaning lies in the appropriation.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

268. “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

269. “Pleasure disappoints; possibility never.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

270. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

278. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

284. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

288. “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

289. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

295. “You should therefore say: alone in one’s boat, alone with one’s care, alone with one’s despair, which one is craven enough to want rather to keep than submit to the pain of being healed.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

296. “Father in Heaven! When the thought of thee wakes in our hearts let it not awaken like a frightened bird that flies about in dismay, but like a child waking from its sleep with a heavenly smile.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

297. “If a man wants to set up as an innkeeper and he does not succeed, it is not comic. If, on the contrary, a girl asks to be allowed to set up as a prostitute and she fails, as sometimes happens, it is comic.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

298. “It occurs to me that artists go forward by going backward, something which I have nothing against intrinsically when it is a reproduced retreat – as is the case with the better artists.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

300. “What a difference! Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient! when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular and infinitely boring.”

— Soren Kierkegaard