Top 350 Soren Kierkegaard Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

254. “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

255. “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

256. “In the end, therefore, money will be the one thing people will desire, which is moreover only representative, an abstraction. Nowadays a young man hardly envies anyone his gifts, his art, the love of a beautiful girl, or his fame; he only envies him his money. Give me money, he will say, and I am saved... He would die with nothing to reproach himself with, and under the impression that if only he had had the money he might really have lived and might even have achieved something great.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

257. “Any truth is only true up to a certain point. When one oversteps the mark, it becomes a non-truth.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

259. “A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

260. “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

261. “A man’s personality is matured only when he appropriates the truth, whether it is spoken by Balaam’s ass or a sniggering wag or an apostle or an angel.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

263. “Future is everything that past has forgotten.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

265. “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

266. “My standpoint is armed neutrality.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

270. “Christendom has done away with Christianity without being quite aware of it.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

271. “With every increase in the degree of consciousness, and in proportion to that increase, the intensity of despair increases: the more consciousness the more intense the despair.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

273. “A good decision is our will to do everything we can within our power. It means to serve God with all we’ve got, be it little or much. Every person can do that.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

274. “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

275. “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

276. “Men who not religious or artists are fools.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

277. “I am so fed up and joyless that not only have I nothing to fill my soul, I cannot even conceive of anything that could possibly satisfy it – alas, not even the bliss of heaven.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

278. “Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all verbs are irregular.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

279. “A genius may perhaps be a century ahead of his age and hence stands there as a paradox, but in the end, the race will assimilate what was once a paradox, so it is no longer paradoxical.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

280. “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

281. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

284. “To stand on one leg and prove God’s existence is a very different thing from going down on one’s knees and thanking him.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

285. “This age will die not as a result of some evil, but from a lack of passion.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

286. “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

287. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

289. “When you were called, did you answer or did you not? Perhaps softly and in a whisper?”

— Soren Kierkegaard

290. “In the Christianity of Christendom the Cross has become something like the child’s hobby-horse and trumpet.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

291. “How ironical that it is by means of speech that man can degrade himself below the level of dumb creation – for a chatterbox is truly of a lower category than a dumb creature.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

292. “The stone that was rolled before Christ’s tomb might appropriately be called the philosopher’s stone because its removal gave not only the pharisees but, now for 1800 years, the philosophers so much to think about.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

293. “The follower aspires with all his strength to be what he admires. And then, remarkably enough, even though he lives amongst a ‘Christian people,’ he incurs the same peril as he did when it was dangerous to openly confess Christ. And because of the follower’s life, it will become evident who the admirers are, for the admirers will become agitated with him. Even these words will disturb many – but then they must likewise belong to the admirers.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

295. “It is tragic-comic to see that all this knowledge and understanding exercises no power at all over men’s lives, that their lives do not express in the remotest way what they have understood, but rather the opposite.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

296. “Theology sits rouged at the window and courts philosophy’s favor, offering to sell her charms to it.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

297. “May new sufferings torment your soul.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

299. “But one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

300. “He follows his heart’s desire, but having found what he sought he wanders round to everyone’s door with his song and speech, so that all can admire the hero as he does, be proud of the hero as he is.”

— Soren Kierkegaard