Soren Kierkegaard Quotes

“There are two kinds of geniuses. The characteristic of the one is roaring, but the lightning is meagre and rarely strikes; the other kind is characterized by reflection by which it constrains itself or restrains the roaring. But the lightning is all the more intense; with the speed and sureness of lightning it hits the selected particular points - and is fatal.”

“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.”

“The question is asked in ignorance, by one who does not even know what can have led him to ask it.”

“It is perhaps the misfortune of my life that I am interested in far too much but not decisively in any one thing; all my interests are not subordinated in one but stand on an equal footing.”

“Everyone looks the same to me in a photograph: stupid.”

“Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”

“Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted? And If I am compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I want to see him.”

“I divide my time as follows: half the time I sleep, the other half I dream. I never dream when I sleep, for that would be a pity, for sleeping is the highest accomplishment of genius.”

“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.”

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

“I am so stupid that I cannot understand philosophy; the antithesis of this is that philosophy is so clever that it cannot comprehend my stupidity. These antitheses are mediated in a higher unity; in our common stupidity.”

“The meaning lies in the appropriation.”

“My sorrow is my castle.”

“Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?”

“Philosophy is life's dry-nurse, who can take care of us - but not suckle us.”

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

“The thing is to understand myself: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. That is what I now recognize as the most important thing.”

“We live as if we were unaware of our impending destruction”

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”

“Knowledge is an attitude, a passion, actually an illicit attitude. For the compulsion to know is like dipsomania, erotomania, and homicidal mania, in producing a character that is out of balance. It is not at all that the scientist goes after the truth.”

“People generally think that it is the world, the environment, external relationships, which stand in one's way, in the way of ones' good fortune... and at bottom it is always man himself that stands in his own way.”

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

“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.”

“It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward- looking position.”

“Love is the expression of the one who loves, not of the one who is loved. Those who think they can love only the people they prefer do not love at all. Love discovers truths about individuals that others cannot see”