Quotes from Soren Kierkegaard

But the life of freedom requires a beginning, and here a beginning is a resolution, and the resolution has its work and its pain-thus the beginning has its difficulty.

Christians remind me of schoolboys who want to look up the answers to their math problems in the back of the book rather than work them through.

Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.

Take a chance and you may lose. Take not a chance and you have lost already.

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.

Once you are born in this world you're old enough to die.

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

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

And this is one of the most crucial definitions for the whole of Christianity; that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.

Whoever has the world's treasures has them no matter how he got them. In the world of the spirit it is otherwise.

Leap of faith – yes, but only after reflection

There can be no faith without risk.

Jurists say that a capital crime submerges all lesser crimes; and so it is with faith. Its absurdity makes all petty difficultiesvanish.

Without risk faith is an impossibility.

People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation.

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.

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

Dread is a womanish debility in which freedom swoons. Psychologically speaking, the fall into sin always occurs in impotence. But dread is at the same time the most egotistic thing.

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.

Freedom's possibility is not the ability to choose the good or the evil. The possibility is to be able.

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

People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they seldom use

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

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