Søren Kierkegaard - People Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

View all Søren Kierkegaard Quotes
My soul always reverts to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There at least one feels that it's human beings talking. There people hate, people love, people murder their enemy and curse his descendants through all generations, there people sin.

Søren Kierkegaard
People understand me so little that they do not even understand when I complain of being misunderstood.

Søren Kierkegaard
When one merely states that one as many subscribers and keeps on saying it, then one gets many; just as when one sheep goes to water, the next one also goes, and when it is continually said of a large flock of sheep that they go hither and yon to water, then the rest must also go, so people believe that it must be the demand of the times, that for the sake of use and custom – they must also subscribe.

Søren Kierkegaard
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
If it is God who gives the spirit of power and strength, then it is also the same God who gives the spirt of self-control, and if ignoble cowardice and fear of people are just as detestable in any age, the excess of eager enthusiasm, zeal without wisdom, are no less corrupting and at times are fundamentally just as detestable, just as blasphemous.

Søren Kierkegaard
What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.

Søren Kierkegaard
Many people think. that the Christian commandments (for instance, loving your neighbor as yourself) are purposely made too strict—rather like the clock being put half an hour fast to prevent them getting up much too late in the morning.

Søren Kierkegaard
People are scarcely aware that it is a slavery they are creating; they forget this in their zeal to make people free by overthrowing dominions. They are scarcely aware that it is slavery; how could it be possible to be a slave in relation to equals?

Søren Kierkegaard
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
The gods were bored and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase in population. Adam was bored alone, then Adam and Eve were bored together; them Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the people were bored en masse.

Søren Kierkegaard
Geniuses are like thunderstorms. They go against the wind, terrify people, cleanse the air.

Søren Kierkegaard
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
When God chooses to let himself be born in lowliness, when he who holds all possibilities in his hand takes upon himself the form of a lowly servant, when he goes about defenseless and lets people do with him what they will, he surely must know well enough what he is doing and why he wills it; but for all that it is he who has people in his power and not they who have power over him-so history ought not play Mr. Malapert by this wanting to make manifest who he was.

Søren Kierkegaard