Quotes By Soren Kierkegaard

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.

I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.

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.

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.

If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.

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.

There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.

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

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.

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.

It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.

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.

The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.

People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.

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.

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

During the first period of a man's life the greatest danger is not to take the risk.

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.

Purity of heart is to will one thing.

Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.

Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.

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.

Be that self which one truly is.

Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.

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

At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.

What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.

Once you label me you negate me.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.