Søren Kierkegaard Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

View all Søren Kierkegaard Quotes
Take away the paradox from a thinker and you have a professor.

Søren Kierkegaard
Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.

Søren Kierkegaard
To have faith is precisely to lose one's mind so as to win God.

Søren Kierkegaard
Why bother remembering a past that cannot be made into a present?

Søren Kierkegaard
Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?

Søren Kierkegaard
The relief in speaking is that it translates me into the universal.

Søren Kierkegaard
Far from idleness being the root of evil, rather it is the true good.

Søren Kierkegaard
The Sophist demonstrates that everything is true and nothing is true.

Søren Kierkegaard
The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.

Søren Kierkegaard
Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

Søren Kierkegaard
The wisdom of the years is confusing. Only the wisdom of eternity is edifying.

Søren Kierkegaard
Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element.

Søren Kierkegaard
For without risk there is no faith, and the greater the risk, the greater the faith.

Søren Kierkegaard
Out of love, God becomes man. He says: "See, here is what it is to be a human being."

Søren Kierkegaard
When you were called, did you answer or did you not? Perhaps softly and in a whisper?

Søren Kierkegaard
All the shrewdness of 'man' seeks one thing: to be able to live without responsibility.

Søren Kierkegaard
Job endured everything — until his friends came to comfort him, then he grew impatient.

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

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

Søren Kierkegaard
What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?

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

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

Søren Kierkegaard
If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.

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

Søren Kierkegaard
I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.

Søren Kierkegaard
In the Christianity of Christendom the Cross has become something like the child's hobby-horse and trumpet.

Søren Kierkegaard
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
Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.
Variant translation: But the highest passion in a human being is faith

Søren Kierkegaard
Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.

Søren Kierkegaard
It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.

Søren Kierkegaard