Top 350 Soren Kierkegaard Quotes (2023 Update)
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301. “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

302. “For like a poisonous breath over the fields, like a mass of locusts over Egypt, so the swarm of excuses is a general plaque, a ruinous infection among men, that eats off the sprouts of the Eternal.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

303. “That which is truly human no generation learns from the one before it. No generation learns from another how to love. No generation has a shorter task assigned to it except insofar as the previous generation shirked its task and deluded itself.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

304. “Men think that it is impossible for a human being to love his enemies, for enemies are hardly able to endure the sight of one another. Well, then, shut your eyes – and your enemy looks just like your neighbor.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

305. “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

306. “To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

307. “Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic if it is pulled out I shall die.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

308. “Only one human being recognized as one’s neighbour is necessary in order to cure a man of self-love.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

309. “Those who dream must be awakened, and the deeper the people are who slumber, or the deeper they slumber, the more important it is that they be awakened, and the more powerfully must they be awakened.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

310. “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

311. “When the child must be weaned, the mother too is not without sorrow at the thought that she and the child are separated more and more, that the child which first lay under her heart and later reposed upon her breast will be so near to her no more.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

312. “I need the enchantment of creative work to help me forget life’s mean pettinesses.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

316. “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

317. “But doubt is wily and cunning and never, as it is sometimes said to be, loud or defiant. It is unassuming and sly, not bold or assertive – and the more unassuming, the more dangerous.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

318. “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

319. “I have never fought in such a way as to say: I am the true Christian, others are not Christians.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

321. “There are men who are wanting in the comparative, they as a rule are the most interesting.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

322. “Most people believe that the Christian commandments are intentionally a little too severe.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

323. “Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content; it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

324. “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

325. “Spirit is the third, yet in such a way that one can speak of a synthesis only when the spirit is posited.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

326. “Language is partly something originally given, partly that which develops freely. And just as the individual... can never reach the point at which he becomes absolutely independent... so too with language.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

327. “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

328. “Pleasure disappoints; possibility never.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

330. “My tactics were, by God’s aid, to employ every means to make it clear what the requirement of Christianity truly is.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

331. “No one may pride himself at being more than an individual, and no one despondently think that he is not an individual...”

— Soren Kierkegaard

332. “There is a view of life which conceives that where the crowd is, there is also truth. There is another view of life which conceives that wherever there is a crowd, there is untruth.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

333. “Ulysses was not comely, but he was eloquent, Yet he fired two goddesses of the sea with love.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

334. “To the frivolous Christianity is certainly not glad tidings, for it wishes first of all to make them serious.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

336. “About as genuine as tea made from a bit of paper which once lay in a drawer beside another piece of paper which had been used to wrap up a few tea leaves from which tea had already been made three times.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

337. “The girl made an impression on me, and I forgot her; the other made no impression, and her I can remember.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

339. “I have attacked no one as not being a Christian, I have condemned no one.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

340. “In a mathematical proposition, for example, the objectivity is given, but therefore its truth is also an indifferent truth.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

342. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

344. “There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life’s highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

346. “Men are not on such intimate terms with the sublime that they really can believe in it.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

347. “Shows itself in the notion that what may be objectively true may in the mouth of certain people become false.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

348. “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

349. “He who does not know how to encircle a girl so that she loses sight of everything he does not want her to see, he who does not know how to poetize himself into a girl so that it is from her that everything proceeds as he wants it-he is and remains a bungler.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

350. “Jurists say that a capital crime submerges all lesser crimes; and so it is with faith. Its absurdity makes all petty difficultiesvanish.”

— Soren Kierkegaard