Quotes from Soren Kierkegaard

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

Now, with God's help, I shall become myself.

With respect to physical existence, one needs little, and to the degree that one needs less, the more perfect one is.

Be that self which one truly is.

What I really need is to get clear out about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge precedes every act.

Christ has not only spoken to us by his life but has also spoken for us by his death.

The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.

If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.

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

Philosophy always requires something more, requires the eternal, the true, in contrast to which even the fullest existence as such is but a happy moment.

In a mathematical proposition, for example, the objectivity is given, but therefore its truth is also an indifferent truth.

Father in Heaven! When the thought of thee wakes in our hearts let it not awaken like a frightened bird that flies about in dismay, but like a child waking from its sleep with a heavenly smile.

Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.

Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.

During the first period of a man's life the greatest danger is not to take the risk.

You live life looking forward, you understand life looking backward.

The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo; the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes.

Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.

Repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life.

Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.

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.

Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.

Where there are two people, there is untruth.

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.