Soren Kierkegaard Quotes

“Every human being is tried this way in the active service of expectancy. Now comes the fulfillment and relieves him, but soon he is again placed on reconnaissance for expectancy; then he is again relieved, but as long as there is any future for him, he has not yet finished his service. And while human life goes on this way in very diverse expectancy, expecting very different things according to different times and occasions and in different frames of mind, all life is again one nightwatch of expectancy.”

“I have, I believe, the courage to doubt everything; I have, I believe, the courage to fight against everything; but I do not have the courage to acknowledge anything, the courage to possess, to own anything.”

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

“I must find a truth that is true for me.”

“It is more blessed to give than to receive, but then it is also more blessed to be able to do without than to have to have.”

“It is better to try something and fail than to try nothing and succeed. The result may be the same, but you won't be. We always grow more through defeats than victories.”

“The most terrible fight is not when there is one opinion against another, the most terrible is when two men say the same thing -- and fight about the interpretation, and this interpretation involves a difference of quality.”

“You should therefore say: alone in one's boat, alone with one's care, alone with one's despair, which one is craven enough to want rather to keep than submit to the pain of being healed.”

“Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world?”

“If I could prescribe only one remedy for all the ills of the modern world, I would prescribe silence.”

“It is intelligent to ask two questions: (1) Is it possible? (2) Can I do it?. But it is unintelligent to ask these questions: (1) Is it real? (2) Has my neighbor done it?”

“Only the noble of heart are called to difficulty.”

“It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.”

“Irony is a qualification of subjectivity.”

“Had I to carve an inscription on my tombstone I would ask for none other than "The Individual."”

“Imagine hidden in a simpler exterior a secret receptacle wherein the most precious treasure is deposited - there is a spring which has to be pressed, but the spring is hidden, and the pressure must have a certain strength, so that an accidental pressure would not be sufficient. So likewise is the hope of eternity hidden in man's inmost parts, and affliction is the pressure. When it presses the hidden spring, and strongly enough, then the contents appear in all their glory.”

“Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do”

“The task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted.”

“Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.”

“It's better to get lost in the passion than to lose the passion”

“A man who cannot seduce men cannot save them either.”

“Destroy your primitivity, and you will most probably get along well in the world, maybe achieve great success--but Eternity will reject you. Follow up your primitivity, and you will be shipwrecked in temporality, but accepted by Eternity.”

“I would rather be a swineherd, understood by the swine, than a poet misunderstood by men.”

“What I really need is to get clear out about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge precedes every act.”

“To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.”