Soren Kierkegaard Quotes

“In order to swim one takes off all one's clothes--in order to aspire to the truth one must undress in a far more inward sense, divest oneself of all one's inward clothes, of thoughts, conceptions, selfishness etc., before one is sufficiently naked.”

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

“Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. Therefore, whenever I see a fly settling, in the decisive moment, on the nose of such a person of affairs; or if he is spattered with mud from a carriage which drives past him in still greater haste; or the drawbridge opens up before him; or a tile falls down and knocks him dead, then I laugh heartily.”

“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.”

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

“To venture causes anxiety. Not to venture is to lose oneself.”

“Busyness, keeping up with others, hustling hither and yon, makes it almost impossible for an individual to form a heart.”

“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.”

“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!”

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

“Take a chance and you may lose. Take not a chance and you have lost already.”

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

“No, I won't leave the world--I'll enter a lunatic asylum and see if the profundity of insanity reveals to me the riddles of life. Idiot, why didn't I do that long ago, why has it taken me so long to understand what it means when the Indians honour the insane, step aside for them? Yes, a lunatic asylum--don't you think I may end up there?”

“In my great melancholy, I loved life, for I love my melancholy.”

“But the life of freedom requires a beginning, and here a beginning is a resolution, and the resolution has its work and its pain-thus the beginning has its difficulty.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?”

“Thus our own age is essentially one of understanding, and on the average, perhaps, more knowledgeable than any former generation, but it is without passion. Every one knows a great deal, we all know which way we ought to go and all the different ways we can go, but nobody is willing to move.”

“It is not the path which is the difficulty; rather, it is the difficulty which is the path.”

“What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?”

“In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant. ... My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known - no wonder, then, that I return the love.”

“People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.”