Quotes from Soren Kierkegaard

This is the profound secret of innocence, that at the same time it is dread.

Now we will let the knight of faith appear in the rôle just described. He makes exactly the same movements as the other knight, infinitely renounces claim to the love which is the content of his life, he is reconciled in pain; but then occurs the prodigy, he makes still another movement more wonderful than all, for he says, "I believe nevertheless that I shall get her, in virtue, that is, of the absurd, in virtue of the fact that with God all things are possible.

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.

It costs a man just as much or even more to go to hell than to come to heaven. Narrow, exceedingly narrow is the way to perdition!

All lives end, but not all conclude.

He who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God.

It is not what happens to me that makes me great, but what I do.

The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly one you can never have.

In a theater it happened that a fire stated offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed- amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.

If man were a beast or an angel, he would not be able to be in anxiety. Since he is both beast and angel, he can be in anxiety, and the greater the anxiety, the greater the man.

Anxiety can just as well express itself by muteness as by a scream.

That in which all human life is unified is passion, and faith is a passion.

One must see it close up, the callousness with which otherwise kind people act in the capacity of the public because their participation or non-participation seems to them a trifle - a trifle that with the contributions of the many becomes the monster.

One must see how no attack is so feared as that of laughter... because more than any other this attack isolates the one attacked.

The lyrical author is only concerned with his production, enjoys the pleasure of producing, often perhaps only after pain and effort; but he has nothing to do with others, he does not write in order that: in order to enlighten men or in order to help them along the right road, in order to bring about something; in short he does not write in order that.

Only by investing and speaking your vision with passion can the truth, one way or the other, finally penetrate the reluctance of the world.

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." Another translation says:"There are two ways to be fooled: one is to believe what isn't so; the other is to refuse to believe what is so.

Woman is the conscience of man.

It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. And if one thinks over that proposition it becomes more and more evident that life can never really be understood in time because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting-place from which to understand it.

is a desire for what one dreads, a sympathetic antipathy. Anxiety is an alien power which lays hold of an individual, and yet one cannot tear oneself away, nor has a will to do so; for one fears, but what one fears one desires. Anxiety then makes the individual impotent.

The great can never do harm when grasped in their greatness.

by not venturing, it is so dreadfully easy to lose that which it would be difficult to lose in even the most venturesome venture…For if I have ventured amiss – very well, then life helps me by its punishment. But if I have not ventured at all – who then helps me?

Learning to know anxiety is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known anxiety or by sinking under it.

God creates everything out of nothing. And everything which God is to use, he first reduces to nothing.