Søren Kierkegaard Quotes: 31

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

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

• Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

  The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin

• There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.

• The most common form of despair is not being who you are.

• I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.

  Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

• If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!

  Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

• A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.

  Either/Or, Part I

• The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.

  The Journals of 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.

  The Journals of Kierkegaard

• The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing. But because he wants to do it in his own strength, he is fighting not with man, but with God.

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

  Fear and Trembling

• If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?

  Fear and Trembling

• Therefore do not deceive yourself! Of all deceivers fear most yourself!

• What looks like politics, and imagines itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious movement.

• Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in everygeneration may not come that far, but none comes further.

• The stone that was rolled before Christ's tomb might appropriately be called the philosopher's stone because its removal gave not only the pharisees but, now for 1800 years, the philosophers so much to think about.

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

  Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

• Out of love for mankind, and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.

• And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.

• to have faith is precisely to lose one's mind so as to win God.

  The Sickness Unto Death

• For he who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God.

  Fear and Trembling

• The paradox in Christian truth is invariably due to the fact that it is the truth that exists for God. The standard of measure and the end is superhuman; and there is only one relationship possible: faith.

• For I have trained myself and am training myself always to be able to dance lightly in the service of thought

• A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.

  Fear And Trembling / Repetition

• Faith is a marvel, and yet no human being is excluded from it; for that in which all human life is united is passion, and faith is a passion.

  Fear and Trembling

• la vida sólo puede ser entendida mirando hacia atrás; aunque deba ser vivida mirando hacia adelante

• It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward- looking position.

  The Diary Of Soren Kierkegaard

• Philosophy cannot and should not give us an account of faith, but should understand itself and know just what it has indeed to offer, without taking anything away, least of all cheating people out of something by making them think it is nothing.

• Sitting calmly on a ship in fair weather is not a metaphor for having faith; but when the ship has sprung a leak, then enthusiastically to keep the ship afloat by pumping and not to seek the harbor--that is the metaphor for having faith. (Concluding Unscientific Postscript)

• No woman in maternity confinement can have stranger and more impatient wishes than I have.