Sören Kierkegaard Quotes: 309 Quotes on Life's Complexities, Freedom, and Essence of Humanity

“I see again what I thought I saw the first time, when I sent forth the little book that was compared to and in fact could best be compared to “a humble little flower under the cover of the great forest””

Sören Kierkegaard

Preface Three Discourses at Friday Communion November 14, 1849 Hong translation 1997 P. 111 (From Without Authority)
1840s, Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (1849)

Books , Flowers , Time

“Lord Jesus Christ, our foolish minds are weak; they are more than willing to be drawn—and there is so much that wants to draw us to itself. There is pleasure with its seductive power, the multiplicity with its bewildering distractions, the moment with its infatuating importance and the conceited laboriousness of busyness and the careless time-wasting of light-mindedness and the gloomy brooding of heavy-mindedness—all this will draw us away from ourselves to itself in order to deceive us. But you, who are truth, only you, our Savior and Redeemer, can truly draw a person to yourself, which you have promised to do—that you will draw all to yourself. Then may God grant that by repenting we may come to ourselves, so that you, according to your Word, can draw us to yourself—from on high, but through lowliness and abasement.”

Sören Kierkegaard

Source: 1850s, Practice in Christianity (September 1850), p. 157

God , Pleasure , Truth , Light

“I have never worked as hard as now. I go for a brief walk in the morning. Then I come home and sit in my room without interruption until about three o’clock. My eyes can barely see. Then with my walking stick in hand I sneak off to the restaurant, but am so weak that I believe that if somebody were to call out my name, I would keel over and die. Then I go home and begin again. In my indolence during the past months I had pumped up a veritable shower bath, and now I have pulled the string and the ideas are cascading down upon me: healthy, happy, merry, gay, blessed children born with ease and yet all of them with the birthmark of my personality.”

Sören Kierkegaard

Letter from Berlin to Emil Boesen, May 25, 1843, Letter 82
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s

Children , Home , Idea , Past

“Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read-ultimately you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.”

Sören Kierkegaard book Stages on Life's Way

Stages on Life's Way, 1845 p. 363-364
1840s, Stages on Life's Way (1845)

Books , Passion , Reading

“To become sober is: to come to oneself in self-knowledge and before God as nothing before him, yet infinitely, unconditionally engaged. P. 104”

Sören Kierkegaard

1850s, Judge For Yourselves! 1851 (1876)

God , Knowledge

“Someone in despair despairs over something. So, for a moment, it seems, but only for a moment. That same instant the true despair shows itself, or despair in its true guise. In despairing over something he was really despairing over himself, and he wants now to be rid of himself.”

Sören Kierkegaard

Source: 1840s, The Sickness unto Death (July 30, 1849), p. 49

Despair

“It is of this sort of divine service I used the expression that, in comparison with the Christianity of the New Testament, it is playing Christianity. The expression is essentially true and characterizes the thing perfectly. For what does it mean to play, when one reflects how the word must be understood in this connection? It means to imitate, to counterfeit, a danger when there is no danger, and to do it in such a way that the more art is applied to it, the more delusive the pretense is that the danger is present.”

Sören Kierkegaard

Source: 1850s, Attack upon Christendom (1855), p. 121

Art , Way

“My dear reader, read aloud, if possible! If you do so, allow me to thank you for it: if you not only do it yourself, if you also influence others to do it, allow me to thank each one of them, and you again and again!”

Sören Kierkegaard

Preface
1850s, For Self-Examination (1851)

Reading

“Socrates did not stop with a philosophical consideration of mankind; he addressed himself to each one individually, wrested everything from him, and sent him away empty-handed.”

Sören Kierkegaard

Source: 1840s, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841), p. 173

“How close men, despite all their knowledge, usually live to madness? What is truth but to live for an idea? When all is said and done, everything is based on a postulate; but not until it no longer stands on the outside, not until one lives in it, does it cease to be a postulate. (Dialectic - Dispute)”

Sören Kierkegaard

Journals of Søren Kierkegaard 1A75, 1835
1830s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1830s

Men , Truth , Idea , Knowledge

“I do not know, my listener, what your crime, your guilt, your sins are, but surely we are all more or less of the guilt of loving only little. Take comfort, then, in these words just as I take comfort in them. P. 173-174”

Sören Kierkegaard

1850s, Two Discourses at Friday Communion (August 1851)

Love

“b. The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle. by H. H.”

Sören Kierkegaard

1840s, Two Ethical-Religious Minor Essays (1849)

“Human justice is very prolix, and yet at times quite mediocre; divine justice is more concise and needs no information from the prosecution, no legal papers, no interrogation of witnesses, but makes the guilty one his own informer and helps him with eternity’s memory.”

Sören Kierkegaard book Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Against Cowardliness p. 351
1840s, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

Justice , Memory , Time , Help

“Man is a synthesis of psyche and body, but he is also a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal. In the former, the two factors are psyche and body, and spirit is the third, yet in such a way that one can speak of a synthesis only when the spirit is posited. The latter synthesis has only two factors, the temporal and the eternal. Where is the third factor? And if there is no third factor, there really is no synthesis, for a synthesis that is a contradiction cannot be completed as a synthesis without a third factor, because the fact that the synthesis is a contradiction asserts that it is not. What, then, is the temporal?”

Sören Kierkegaard

Source: 1840s, The Concept of Anxiety (1844), p. 85

Way

“In the external, patience is some third element that must be added, and, humanly speaking, it would be better if it were not needed; some days it is needed more, some days less, all according to fortune, whose debtor a person becomes, even though he gained ever so little, because only when he wants to gain patience does he become one’s debtor.”

Sören Kierkegaard book Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses p. 168
1840s, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

Personality , Patience

“I will not by suppression, or by performing tricks, try to produce the impression that the ordinary Christianity in the land and the Christianity of the New Testament are alike.”

Sören Kierkegaard

"What Do I Want?"
1850s, Attack upon Christendom (1855)

“There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys; they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves.”

Sören Kierkegaard

17 January 1837 http://books.google.com/books?id=2iwmAQAAMAAJ&q=%22There+are+many+people+who+reach+their+conclusions+about+life+like+schoolboys+they+cheat+their+master+by+copying+the+answer+out+of+a+book+without+having+worked+out+the+sum+for+themselves%22&pg=PA53#v=onepage
1830s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1830s

Life , People , Books , Cheating

“Dogmatics must be designed in this way. Above all, every science must vigorously lay hold of its own beginning and not live in complicated relations with other sciences. If dogmatics begins by wanting to explain sinfulness or by wanting to prove its actuality, no dogmatics will come out of it, but the entire existence of dogmatics will become problematic and vague.”

Sören Kierkegaard

Note, p. 58
1840s, The Concept of Anxiety (1844)

Way , Science

“Everyone who knows something about the dangers of reflection and the dangerous walk along the road of reflection also knows that it is dubious when a person, instead of getting out of the tension through resolution and action, becomes productive about his state in tension. Then there is no effort to get out of the state, but reflection fixes the situation for reflection and thereby fixes the man. The more richly thoughts and expressions offer themselves, the more briskly the productivity advances-in the wrong direction-the more dangerous it becomes and the more it hides from the person, concerned that his work, his extremely strenuous work, his very interesting (perhaps also for a third party who has a total view) work, is a work of bogging himself down deeper and deeper. That is, he does not work himself loose but works himself fast and becomes interesting to himself by reflecting on the tension and diverts himself with an utterly piecemeal productivity about detached details, with isolated short articles.”

Sören Kierkegaard

The Book of Adler, by Søren Kierkegaard, Hong 1998 p. 127
1840s, The Book on Adler (1846-1847)

Effort , Personality

“After all, in the poets love has its priests, and sometimes one hears a voice which knows how to defend it; but of faith one hears never a word. Who speaks in honor of this passion? Philosophy goes further. Theology sits rouged at the window and courts its favor, offering to sell her charms to philosophy. it is supposed to be difficult to understand Hegel, but to understand Abraham is a trifle. To go beyond Hegel's is a miracle, but to get beyond Abraham is the easiest thing of all.”

Sören Kierkegaard

Problemata: Preliminary Expectoration
1840s, Fear and Trembling (1843)

Love , Faith , Understanding , Passion

“Even Plato assumes that the genuinely perfect condition of man means no sex distinction (and how strange this is for people like Feuerbach who are so occupied with affirming sex-differentiation, regarding which they would do best to appeal to paganism). He assumes that originally there was only the masculine (and when there is no thought of femininity, sex-distinction is undifferentiated), but through degeneration and corruption the feminine appeared. He assumes that base and cowardly men became women in death, but he still gives them hope of being elevated again to masculinity. He thinks that in the perfect life the masculine, as originally, will be the only sex, that is, that sex-distinction is a matter of indifference. So it is in Plato, and this, the idea of the state notwithstanding, was the culmination of his philosophy. How much more so, then, the Christian view.”

Sören Kierkegaard

Journals VA 14
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s

Life , Death , Women , Men

“Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.”

Sören Kierkegaard

Pap VI B 120:13 1845
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s

Death

“You complain that no one can put himself in your place. I can imagine that it may never have occurred to you, preoccupied day and night with that thought, that you should comfort others: and he, the Comforter, he is the only one of whom it truly holds that no one could put himself in his place-how true if he had complained in that way! He, the Comforter, in whose place no one could put himself, he can put himself completely in your place and in every sufferer’s place. …. There is still one who is able to put himself completely in your place, the Lord Jesus Christ, who ”because he has suffered and himself been tempted is able to help those who are tempted” (Hebrews 2:18).”

Sören Kierkegaard

Three Discourses at Friday Communion November 14, 1849 Hong translation 1997 P. 119-120
1840s, Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (1849)

Way , Imagination , Suffering , Help

“Above all do not forget your duty to love yourself; do not permit the fact that you have been set apart from life in a way, been prevented from participating actively in it, and that you are superflous in the obtruse eyes of a busy world, above all, do not permit this to deprive you of your idea of yourself, as if your life, if lived in inwardness, did not have just as much meaning and worth as that of any human being in the eyes of all-wise Governance, and considerably more than the busy, busiest haste of busy-ness - busy with wasting life and losing itself.”

Sören Kierkegaard

' Letter to Kierkegaard's cousin Hans Peter http://books.google.de/books?id=CUfkNXWLyboC&pg=PR21 (1848)
1840s

Love , Life , World , Way

“Seek first God's Kingdom, that is, become like the lilies and the birds, become perfectly silent — then shall the rest be added unto you.”

Sören Kierkegaard

The Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air (1849)
Alluding to words spoken by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount
1840s

God , Bird

“She has forgotten speech and language and the restlessness of thoughts, has forgotten what is even greater restlessness, this self, has forgotten herself-she, the lost woman, who is now lost in her Savior, who, lost in him, rests at his feet-like a picture. He speaks about her; he says: Her many sins are forgiven her, because she loved much. Although she is present, it is almost as if she were absent; it is almost as if he changed her into a picture, a parable.”

Sören Kierkegaard

Three Discourses at Friday Communion November 14, 1849 Hong translation 1997 P. 141
1840s, Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (1849)

Love , Change

“I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.”

Sören Kierkegaard

March 1836
1830s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1830s

Life , Soul

“When it is stated in Genesis that God said to Adam, “Only from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you must not eat,” it follows as a matter of course that Adam really has not understood this word, for how could he understand the difference between good and evil when this distinction would follow as a consequence of the enjoyment of the fruit. When it is assumed that the prohibition awakens the desire one acquires knowledge instead of ignorance, and in that case Adam must have had knowledge of freedom, because the desire was to use it. The explanation is therefore subsequent. The prohibition induces in him anxiety, for the prohibition awakens in him freedom’s possibility. What passed by innocence as the nothing of anxiety has now entered into Adam, and here again it is a nothing-the anxious possibility of being able. He has no conception of what he is able to do; otherwise-and this it what usually happens-that which comes later, the difference between good and evil, would have to be presupposed. Only the possibility of being able is present as a higher form of ignorance, as a higher expression of anxiety, because in a higher sense it both is and is not, because in a higher sense he both loves it and flees from it.”

Sören Kierkegaard

Source: 1840s, The Concept of Anxiety (1844), p. 44-45

Love , God , Understanding , Knowledge

“Magister Adler was deeply moved by something higher, but now when he wants to express his thoughts in words, wants to communicate, he confuses the subjective with the objective, his altered subjective state with an external event, the dawning of a light upon him with the coming into existence of something new outside him, the falling of the veil from his eyes with his having had a revelation. Subjectively his emotion is carried to the extreme; he wants to select the most powerful expression to describe it and by means of a mental deception grasps the objective qualification: having had a revelation.”

Sören Kierkegaard

The Book of Adler, by Søren Kierkegaard, Hong 1998 p. 117
1840s, The Book on Adler (1846-1847)

Communication , Light

“I have worked for this restlessness oriented toward inward deepening. But “without authority.” Instead of conceitedly making myself out to be a witness for the truth and causing others rashly to want to be the same, I am an unauthorized poet who influences by means of the ideas.”

Sören Kierkegaard book For Self-Examination

Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, Hong p. 21
1850s, For Self-Examination (1851), What is Required in Order to Look at Oneself with True Blessing in the Mirror of the Word?

Truth , Idea

“The truth is a trap: you can not get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.”

Sören Kierkegaard

1854
1850s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1850s

Truth

“When one merely states that one has many subscribers and keeps on saying it, then one gets many; just as when one sheep goes to water, the next one also goes, and when it is continually said of a large flock of sheep that they go hither and yon to water, then the rest must also go, so people believe that it must be the demand of the times, that for the sake of use and custom – they must also subscribe.”

Sören Kierkegaard book Writing Sampler

Søren Kierkegaard, Writing Sampler, Nichol P. 89-90
1840s, Writing Sampler (1844)

People , Water , Time

“I felt a real Christian satisfaction in the fact that, if there were no other, there was one man who (several years before existence set the race another lesson to learn) made a practical effort on a small scale to learn the lesson of loving one’s neighbor and alas! Got at the same time a frightful insight into what an illusion Christendom is, and (a little later, to be sure) an insight also into what a situation the simpler classes suffered themselves to be seduced by paltry-newspaper writers, whose struggle or fight for equality (since it is in the service of a lie) cannot lead to any other result but to prompt the privileged classes in self-defence to stand proudly aloof from the common man, and to make the common man insolent in his forwardness.”

Sören Kierkegaard

Source: 1840s, The Point of View for My Work as an Author (1848), p. 49

Love , Lie , Effort , Suffering

“A line by Thomas à Kempis which perhaps could be used as a motto sometime. He says of Paul: Therefore he turned everything over to God, who knows all, and defended himself solely by means of patience and humility.... He did defend himself now and then so that the weak would not be offended by his silence. Book III, chapter 36, para. 2, or in my little edition, p. 131.”

Sören Kierkegaard

JP X2A 167
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s

Patience , Silence , Books , God

“Zealousness to learn from life is seldom found, but all the more frequently a desire, inclination, and reciprocal haste to be deceived by life. Undaunted, people do not seem to have a Socratic fear of being deceived, for the voice of God is always a whisper, while the demand of the age is a thousand-tongued rumor, not an all-powerful call that creates great men but a stirring in the offal that creates confused pates, an abracadabra that produces after its kind as is the case with all production. Even less do people seem to have above all a Socratic fear of being deceived by themselves, do not seem to be the least aware that if the self-deceived are the most miserable of all, then among these, again, the most miserable are those who are presumptuously deceived by themselves in contrast to those who are piously deceived.”

Sören Kierkegaard

Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review. By Soren Kierkegaard, 1846 edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong 1978 Princeton University Press P. 10
1840s, Two Ages: A Literary Review (1846)

Life , God , People , Learning

“A Roman emperor sitting at the table surrounded by his bodyguard is a magnificent sight, but when the reason is fear, the magnificence pales. So also when the individual does not dare stand taciturnly by his word, does not stand freely and confidently on the pedestal of a conscious act, but is surrounded by a host of deliberations before and after that render him incapable of getting his eye on the action.”

Sören Kierkegaard

Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review. By Soren Kierkegaard, 1846 edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong 1978 Princeton University Press P. 68
1840s, Two Ages: A Literary Review (1846)

Self-confidence , Fear , Confidence

“Is there anything we cannot contrive to call the demands of the times, and is there anything that does not acquire a certain prestige by being the demand of the times? But for decisive religious categories to become the demand for the times is eo ipso a contradiction. “The times” is too abstract a category to be able as claimant to demand the decisive religious categories that belong specifically to individuality and particularity; loud collective demands en mass for what can be shared only by the single individual in particularity, in solitariness, in silence, cannot be made.”

Sören Kierkegaard

Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review. By Soren Kierkegaard, 1846 edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong 1978 Princeton University Press P. 21
1840s, Two Ages: A Literary Review (1846)

Silence , Time , Decision

“Surrounded by hordes of people, busy with all sorts of secular matters, more and more shrewd about the ways of the world - such a person forgets himself, forgets his name divinely understood, does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too risky to be himself, far easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, part of the crowd.”

Sören Kierkegaard book The Sickness unto Death

Source: The Sickness unto Death