Soren Kierkegaard

Find the best quotes, maxims and aphorisms of Soren Kierkegaard

Biography : Danish philosopher.
Born: 1813 - Died: 1855
Period:
19th century
Place of birth: Denmark
Denmark

Denmark

Soren Kierkegaard - Quotes

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
Soren Kierkegaard /

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
Soren Kierkegaard /

Don't forget to love yourself.
Soren Kierkegaard /

Don't forget to love yourself.

Man, too, has wings, he has imagination.
Soren Kierkegaard /

It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.
Soren Kierkegaard - Journals /

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
Soren Kierkegaard /

The infinite and the eternal are the only certainty.
Soren Kierkegaard /

The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think.
Soren Kierkegaard

thought

A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.
Soren Kierkegaard

happiness

There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life's highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.
Soren Kierkegaard

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

truth

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.
Soren Kierkegaard

What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.
Soren Kierkegaard

Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.
Soren Kierkegaard

life

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals.
Soren Kierkegaard /

Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.
Soren Kierkegaard

love

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

Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer.
Soren Kierkegaard

Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.
Soren Kierkegaard

Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.
Soren Kierkegaard

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.
Soren Kierkegaard

Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God.
Soren Kierkegaard

life

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

The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
Soren Kierkegaard

It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important.
Soren Kierkegaard

The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.
Soren Kierkegaard

truth

Because of its tremendous solemnity death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearences.
Soren Kierkegaard

Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.
Soren Kierkegaard

Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.
Soren Kierkegaard

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.
Soren Kierkegaard