Quotes By Soren Kierkegaard

Love is all, it gives all, and it takes all.

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.

God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.

At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.

Once you label me you negate me.

Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth - look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.

I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.

Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.

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.

Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.

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.

Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.

The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.

Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.

Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.

People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.

Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.

Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer.

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.

One can advise comfortably from a safe port.

Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.

Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God.