Top 350 Soren Kierkegaard Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Any truth is only true up to a certain point. When one oversteps the mark, it becomes a non-truth.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

305. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

314. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “May new sufferings torment your soul.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

323. “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

324. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

326. “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

327. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

330. “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

331. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

333. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

340. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

347. “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

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard

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

— Soren Kierkegaard