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Søren Kierkegaard
213 quotes
“The reason I cannot really say that I positively enjoy nature is that I do not quite realize what it is that I enjoy. A work of art, on the other hand, I can grasp. I can — if I may put it this way — find that Archimedian point, and as soon as I have found it, everything is readily clear for me. Then I am able to pursue this one main idea and see how all the details serve to illuminate it.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1834 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Journals of Søren Kierkegaard 1A 8, 1834
“It will be easy for us once we receive the ball of yarn from Ariadne (love) and then go through all the mazes of the labyrinth (life) and kill the monster. But how many are there who plunge into life (the labyrinth) without taking that precaution?”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1835 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Journal entry, August 1, 1835
“What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1835 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Journal entry, Gilleleie (1 August 1835) Journals 1A; this is considered to be one of the earliest statements of existentialist thought.
“How close men, despite all their knowledge, usually live to madness? What is truth but to live for an idea? When all is said and done, everything is based on a postulate; but not until it no longer stands on the outside, not until one lives in it, does it cease to be a postulate. (Dialectic - Dispute)”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1835 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Journals of Søren Kierkegaard 1A75, 1835
“I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1836 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: March 1836
“One could construe the life of man as a great discourse in which the various people represent different parts of speech (the same might apply to states). How many people are just adjectives, interjections, conjunctions, adverbs? How few are substantives, active verbs, how many are copulas? Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all verbs are irregular.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1836 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Journals A 126 (March 1836)
“There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys; they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1837 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 17 January 1837
“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.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1838 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 7 July 1838
“There must have been many who had a relationship to Jesus similar to that of Barabbas (his name was Jesus Barrabas). The Danish "Barrabas" is about the same as "N.N." [Mr. X or John Doe], filius patris, his father's son. — It is too bad, however, that we do not know anything more about Barrabas; it seems to me that in many ways he could have become a counterpart to the Wandering Jew. The rest of his life must have taken a singular turn. God knows whether or not he became a Christian. — It would be a poetic motif to have him, gripped by Christ's divine power, step forward and witness for him.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1839 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Journals IIA 346 (1 February 1839)
“If someone were to expound that godliness is to belong to childhood in the temporal sense and thus dwindle and die with the years as childhood does, is to be a happy frame of mind that cannot be preserved but only recollected; if someone were to expound that repentance as a weakness of old age accompanies the decline of one's powers, when the senses are dulled, when sleep no longer strengthens but increases lethargy-this would be ungodliness and foolishness.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Knowledge can in part be set aside, and one can then go further in order to collect new; the natural scientist can set aside insects and flowers and then go further, but if the existing person sets aside the decision in existence, it is eo ipso lost, and he is changed.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1845 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Papers VI B 66, 1845
“Above all do not forget your duty to love yourself; do not permit the fact that you have been set apart from life in a way, been prevented from participating actively in it, and that you are superflous in the obtruse eyes of a busy world, above all, do not permit this to deprive you of your idea of yourself, as if your life, if lived in inwardness, did not have just as much meaning and worth as that of any human being in the eyes of all-wise Governance, and considerably more than the busy, busiest haste of busy-ness - busy with wasting life and losing itself.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1848 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'Letter to Kierkegaard's cousin Hans Peter (1848)
“Seek first God's Kingdom, that is, become like the lilies and the birds, become perfectly silent — then shall the rest be added unto you.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1849 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air (1849)
“It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1841 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1841
“Aristotle's view that philosophy begins with wonder, not as in our day with doubt, is a positive point of departure for philosophy. Indeed, the world will no doubt learn that it does not do to begin with the negative, and the reason for success up to the present is that philosophers have never quite surrendered to the negative and thus have never earnestly done what they have said. They merely flirt with doubt.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1841 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Journals and Papers III 3284 (1841)
“To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking Him.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1841 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1841
“I may live for thirty years, or perhaps forty, or maybe just one day: therefore I have resolved to use this day, or whatever I have to say in these thirty years or whatever I have to say this one day I may have to live — I have resolved to use it in such a way that if not one day in my whole past life has been used well, this one by the help of God will be. JP VIII 1 A 533”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. Since I am incompetent and extremely undependable in men's eyes, I speak the truth and thereby place them in the contradiction from which they can be extricated only by appropriating the truth themselves. A man's personality is matured only when he appropriates the truth, whether it is spoken by Balaam's ass or a sniggering wag or an apostle or an angel.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1843 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Journals IV A 87 (1843)
“Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is asked of a man that he may be able to pray for his enemies? To pray for one's enemies is the hardest thing of all. That is why it exasperates us so much in our present day situation.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Consciousness presupposes itself, and asking about its origin is an idle and just as sophistical a question as that old one, "What came first, the fruit-tree or the stone? Wasn't there a stone out of which came the first fruit-tree? Wasn't there a fruit-tree from which came the first stone? Journals and Papers, Hannay, 1996 1843 IVA49”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So it happens at times that a person believes that he has a world-view, but that there is yet one particular phenomenon that is of such a nature that it baffles the understanding, and that he explains differently and attempts to ignore in order not to harbor the thought that this phenomenon might overthrow the whole view, or that his reflection does not possess enough courage and resolution to penetrate the phenomenon with his world-view.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1844 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Pap. V B 53:20 1844 The Concept of Anxiety, Nichol p. 188
“Det er ganske sandt, hvad Philosophien siger, at Livet maa forstaaes baglænds. Men derover glemmer man den anden Sætning, at det maa leves forlænds.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1843 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Journals IV A 164 (1843)
“Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1845 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Pap VI B 120:13 1845
“If I were to imagine a girl deeply in love and some man who wanted to use all his reasoning powers and knowledge to ridicule her passion, well, there's surely no question of the enamoured girl having to choose between keeping her wealth and being ridiculed. No, but if some extremely cool and calculating man calmly told the young girl, "I will explain to you what love is," and the girl admitted that everything he told her was quite correct, I wonder if she wouldn't choose his miserable common sense rather than her wealth?”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1846 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1846
“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.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1847 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1847
“What the age needs is not a genius — it has had geniuses enough, but a martyr, who in order to teach men to obey would himself be obedient unto death. What the age needs is awakening. And therefore someday, not only my writings but my whole life, all the intriguing mystery of the machine will be studied and studied. I never forget how God helps me and it is therefore my last wish that everything may be to his honour.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1847 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (20 November 1847)
“Father in heaven, when the thought of thee awakens in our soul, let it not waken as an agitated bird which flutters confusedly about, but as a child waking from sleep with a celestial smile.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1847 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1847
“The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1848 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1848
“Job endured everything — until his friends came to comfort him, then he grew impatient.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1849 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1849
“A line by Thomas à Kempis which perhaps could be used as a motto sometime. He says of Paul: Therefore he turned everything over to God, who knows all, and defended himself solely by means of patience and humility . . . . He did defend himself now and then so that the weak would not be offended by his silence. Book III, chapter 36, para. 2, or in my little edition, p. 131.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The similarity between Christ and Socrates consists essentially in their dissimilarity. Just as philosophy begins with doubt, so also a life that may be called human begins with irony.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Socrates did not stop with a philosophical consideration of mankind; he addressed himself to each one individually, wrested everything from him, and sent him away empty-handed.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Sophist demonstrates that everything is true and nothing is true.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world is rejuvenated, but as Heine so wittily remarked, it was rejuvenated by romanticism to such a degree that it became a baby again.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Concepts, like individuals, have their histories, and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Irony is a qualification of subjectivity.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content; it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Swenson, 1959, p. 21
“Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Swenson, 1959, p. 28
“Married people pledge love for each other throughout eternity. Well, now, that is easy enough but does not mean very much, for if one is finished with time one is probably finished with eternity. If, instead of saying "throughout eternity," the couple would say, "until Easter, until next May Day," then what they say would make some sense, for then they would be saying something and also something they perhaps could carry out.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Hong, 1987/2013. p. 296
“You wanted God's ideas about what was best for you to coincide with your ideas, but you also wanted him to be the almighty Creator of heaven and earth so that he could properly fulfill your wish. And yet, if he were to share your ideas, he would cease to be the almighty Father.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If one prefers to have little with blessing, to have truth with concern, to suffer instead of exulting over imagined victories, then one presumably will not be disposed to praise the knowledge, as if what it bestows were at all proportionate to the trouble it causes, although one would not therefore deny that through its pain it educates a person, if he is honest enough to want to be educated rather than to be deceived, out of the multiplicity to seek the one, out of abundance to seek the one thing needful, as this is plainly and simply offered precisely according to the need for it.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first seen 1844 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses: "Patience in Expectancy" (1844)
“In the external, patience is some third element that must be added, and, humanly speaking, it would be better if it were not needed; some days it is needed more, some days less, all according to fortune, whose debtor a person becomes, even though he gained ever so little, because only when he wants to gain patience does he become one's debtor.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human justice is very prolix, and yet at times quite mediocre; divine justice is more concise and needs no information from the prosecution, no legal papers, no interrogation of witnesses, but makes the guilty one his own informer and helps him with eternity's memory.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not merely in the realm of commerce but in the world of ideas as well our age is organizing a regular clearance sale. Everything is to be had at such a bargain that it is questionable whether in the end there is anybody who will want to bid. Every speculative price-fixer who conscientiously directs attention to the significant march of modern philosophy, every Privatdocent, tutor, and student, every crofter and cottar goes further. Perhaps it would be untimely and ill-timed to ask them where they are going.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After all, in the poets love has its priests, and sometimes one hears a voice which knows how to defend it; but of faith one hears never a word. Who speaks in honor of this passion? Philosophy goes further. Theology sits rouged at the window and courts its favor, offering to sell her charms to philosophy. it is supposed to be difficult to understand Hegel, but to understand Abraham is a trifle. To go beyond Hegel's is a miracle, but to get beyond Abraham is the easiest thing of all.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source