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Søren Kierkegaard citations
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Søren Kierkegaard, selon l'état civil Søren Aabye Kierkegaard , né le 5 mai 1813 et mort le 11 novembre 1855 à Copenhague, est un écrivain, théologien protestant et philosophe danois, dont l’œuvre est considérée comme une première forme de l'existentialisme.

✵ 5. mai 1813 – 11. novembre 1855   •   Autres noms Sören Aabye Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard photo
Søren Kierkegaard: 319   citations 0   J'aime

Søren Kierkegaard citations célèbres

“J'ai grandi dans un milieu orthodoxe. Mais dès que j'ai commencé à réfléchir par moi-même, peu à peu l'immense colosse s'est mis à chanceler. Je dis intentionnellement : un immense colosse, car son ensemble vraiment regorge de logique, et ses éléments à force de siècles se sont si bien fondus entre eux qu'il est difficile de l'approcher de près.”

Søren Kierkegaard

Journal

“La foi est justement ce paradoxe : l'individu, en tant qu'individu, est plus grand que le général, il est justifié devant le général, il ne lui est point subordonné, mais lui est supérieur, et il l'est de telle manière, observez-le bien, que c'est l'individu qui, après avoir été subordonné en tant qu'individu au général, devient, à travers le général, l'individu dont l'individualité est supérieure au général, parce que l'individu, en tant qu'individu, est en rapport absolu avec l'absolu. Cette position ne souffre aucune médiation, puisque toute médiation survient justement en vertu du général.”

Søren Kierkegaard

, 1843

“Le feu prit un jour dans les coulisses d'un théâtre. Le bouffon vint en avertir le public. On crut à un mot plaisant et l'on applaudit; il répéta, les applaudissements redoublèrent. C'est ainsi, je pense, que le monde périra dans l’allégresse générale des gens spirituels persuadés qu’il s’agit d’une plaisanterie.”

Søren Kierkegaard livre Ou bien... ou bien

Ou bien... ou bien, 1843

“Que la vie est insignifiante et vide!”

Søren Kierkegaard livre Ou bien... ou bien

Ou bien... ou bien, 1843

“L'angoisse est le vertige de la liberté.”

Søren Kierkegaard

Le Concept de l'angoisse, 1844

“La jouissance proprement dite ne réside pas dans la chose dont on jouit, mais dans l’idée qu’on s’en fait.”

Søren Kierkegaard

, 1843

Citations sur les hommes et les garçons de Søren Kierkegaard

“Tout homme a une vocation.”

Søren Kierkegaard

, 1843

“Quant à l'autorité humaine, étant fétichiste, j'adore n'importe qui avec une égale ferveur, pourvu qu'avec assez de tambour on annonce que c'est un tel qu'il faut que j'adore, et que cette année c'est lui l'autorité et l'imprimatur. Le choix passe toujours ma raison, qu'on le tire au sort ou qu'on vote, ou que la dignité alterne par roulement, et que son détenteur siège alors comme un membre de municipalité au conseil des prud'hommes.”

Søren Kierkegaard

Le Concept de l'angoisse, 1844

“Les hommes sont vraiment absurdes. Ils n'usent jamais des libertés dont ils jouissent, mais ils réclament celles qu'ils n'ont pas; ils ont la liberté de pensée, ils demandent la liberté de parole.”

Søren Kierkegaard livre Ou bien... ou bien

Ou bien... ou bien, 1843

Søren Kierkegaard: Citations en anglais

“As soon as the discourse is about a holy spirit, about believing in the holy spirit, how many do you think believe in that? Or when the discourse is about an evil spirit that should be renounced: how many do you think believe in such a thing? How can this be? Is it perhaps because the subject becomes too earnest when it is the holy spirit? For I can talk about, believe in, the spirit of the age, the spirit of the world, and the like and do not thereby need to think of anything specific. It is a kind of spirit, but I am not absolutely bound by what I say. And not being bound by what one says is highly prized.”

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Sören Kierkegaard livre For Self-Examination

Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, Hong p. 74
1850s, For Self-Examination (1851), It Is the Spirit Who Gives Life

“Aristotle’s view that philosophy begins with wonder, not as in our day with doubt, is a positive point of departure for philosophy. Indeed, the world will no doubt learn that it does not do to begin with the negative, and the reason for success up to the present is that philosophers have never quite surrendered to the negative and thus have never earnestly done what they have said. They merely flirt with doubt.”

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Sören Kierkegaard

Journals and Papers III 3284 (1841)
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s

“Lord Jesus Christ, the birds had nests, the foxes had dens, and you had no place where you could lay your head. You were homeless in the world-yet you yourself were a hiding place, the only place where the sinner could flee. And so even this very day you are a hiding place. When the sinner flees to you, hides himself with you, is hidden in you, he is eternally kept safe, since love hides a multitude of sins. P. 182”

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Sören Kierkegaard

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

“Sin is man’s destruction. Only the rust of sin can consume the soul-or eternally destroy it. For here indeed is the remarkable thing from which already that simple wise man of olden time derived a proof of the immortality of the soul, that the sickness of the soul (sin) is not like bodily sickness which kills the body. Sin is not a passage-way which a man has to pass through once, for from it one shall flee; sin is not (like suffering) the instant, but an eternal fall from the eternal, hence it is not ‘once’, and it cannot possibly be that its ‘once’ is no time. No, just as between the rich man in hell and Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom there was a yawning gulf fixed, so is there also a yawning distinction between suffering and sin. Let us not confuse it, lest talk about suffering might become less frank-hearted, because it had also sin in mind, and this less frank-hearted talk might be boldly impudent inasmuch as it is talking this way about sin. This precisely is the Christian position, that there is this infinite distinction between evil and evil, as they are confusedly named; this precisely is the Christian characteristic, to talk of temporal sufferings ever more and more frank-heartedly, more triumphantly, more joyfully, because Christianity regarded, sin, and sin only, is destructive.”

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Sören Kierkegaard livre Christian Discourses

Søren Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, The Joy of it – That We Suffer Only Once But Triumph Eternally. P. 108 Lowrie Translation 1961 Oxford University Press
1840s, Christian Discourses (1848)

“Imagine a lover who has received a letter from his beloved – I assume that God’s Word is just as precious to you as this letter is to the lover. I assume that you read and think you ought to read God’s Word in the same way the lover reads this letter.”

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Sören Kierkegaard livre For Self-Examination

Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, Hong p. 26
1850s, For Self-Examination (1851), What is Required in Order to Look at Oneself with True Blessing in the Mirror of the Word?

“Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.”

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Sören Kierkegaard

Swenson, 1959, p. 21
1840s, Either/Or (1843)

“Concepts, like individuals, have their histories, and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals.”

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Sören Kierkegaard

1840s, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841)

“The world is rejuvenated, but as Heine so wittily remarked, it was rejuvenated by romanticism to such a degree that it became a baby again.”

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Sören Kierkegaard

Source: 1840s, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841), p. 304

“There is a comfort that had not yet come into existence while Christ lived, which he therefore could not offer to anyone: the comfort of his death as the Atonement, as the pledge that the sins are forgiven. In this lifetime Christ is for his contemporaries primarily the prototype, even though he is the Savior and even though his life is suffering, so that even in his lifetime he can be said to bear the sins of the world; but the salient point is that he is the prototype. P. 159”

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Sören Kierkegaard

1850s, An Upbuilding Discourse December 20, 1850

“To understand oneself in existence is the Christian principle, except that this self has received much richer and much more profound qualifications that are even more difficult to understand together with existing. The believer is a subjective thinker, and the difference, is only between the simple person and the simple wise person. Here again the oneself is not humanity in general, subjectivity in general, and other such things, whereas everything becomes easy inasmuch as the difficulty is removed and the whole matter is shifted over into the shadow play of abstraction.”

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Sören Kierkegaard livre Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments

Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Vol. I, Hong p. 353
1840s, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846)

“It will be easy for us once we receive the ball of yarn from Ariadne (love) and then go through all the mazes of the labyrinth (life) and kill the monster. But how many are there who plunge into life (the labyrinth) without taking that precaution?”

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Sören Kierkegaard

Journal entry, August 1, 1835
1830s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1830s

“Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, Hong p. 76-77”

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Sören Kierkegaard

1850s, For Self-Examination (1851), It Is the Spirit Who Gives Life

“The life-giving Spirit is the very one who slays you; the first thing the life-giving Spirit says is that you must enter into death, that you must die to – it is this way in order that you many not take Christianity in vain. A life-giving Spirit – that is the invitation; who would not willingly take hold of it! But die first – that is the halt!”

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Sören Kierkegaard

1850s, For Self-Examination (1851), It Is the Spirit Who Gives Life

“If you listen carefully, in what most definitely must be called Gospel you yourself will hear also rigorousness. For example, what Jesus says to the centurion from Capernaum, “If we will apply these words to ourselves, we are obliged to say, “Be it done for you as you believe; if you have faith unto salvation, then you will be saved.” (Matthew 8:13) How lenient, how merciful! But is it also certain, then, that I have faith-I surely cannot summarily transfer to myself the fact that the centurion believed, as if I had faith because the centurion had it. Let us suppose that someone asked Christianity, “Is it also certain, then, that I have faith?” Christianity would answer, “Be it done for you as you believe.””

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Sören Kierkegaard

Source: 1840s, Works of Love (1847), p. 378

“Then he rises from the table and goes out into the Garden of Gethsemane; there he sinks down – oh, that it had happened already! He sinks down, doomed (dodsens) – indeed, was he really any more a dying man (Doende) on the cross than in Gethsemane! If the suffering on the cross was a death agony – ah, this agony in prayer was also a mortal combat; nor was it bloodless, for his sweat fell like drops of blood to the earth.”

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Sören Kierkegaard livre For Self-Examination

Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, Hong p. 63
1850s, For Self-Examination (1851), Christ is the Way

“I have never definitely broken with Christianity nor renounced it. To attack it has never been my thought. No, from the time when there could be any question of the employment of my powers, I was firmly determined to employ them all to defend Christianity, or in any case to present it in its true form.”

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Sören Kierkegaard

The Point of View for My Work as An Author, Soren Kierkegaard, translated by Walter Lowrie 1939, 1962 P. 77
1840s, The Point of View for My Work as an Author (1848)

“Imagine a person who has been and is addicted to a passion. There comes a moment (as it does to everyone, perhaps many times – alas, perhaps many times in vain!), a moment he seems to be brought to a halt: a good resolution is awakening. Imagine that one morning he said to himself (let us suppose him to be a gambler), “I solemnly vow that I will nevermore have anything to do with gambling, never – tonight will be the last time” – ah, my friend, he s lost! I would rather bet on the opposite, however strange that may seem. If there was a gambler who said to himself, “Well, now, you may gamble every blessed day all the rest of your life – but tonight you are going to leave it alone,” and he did – ah, my friend, he is saved for sure! The first gambler’s resolution is a trick by the craving, and the second gambler’s is to fool the craving.”

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Sören Kierkegaard livre For Self-Examination

Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, Hong p. 45
1850s, For Self-Examination (1851), What is Required in Order to Look at Oneself with True Blessing in the Mirror of the Word?

“The two guides call out to a man early and late. And yet, no, for when remorse calls to a man it is always late. The call to find the way again by seeking out God in the confession of sins is always at the eleventh hour. Whether you are young or old, whether you have sinned much or little, whether you have offended much or neglected much, the guilt makes this call come at the eleventh hour. The inner agitation of the heart understands what remorse insists upon, that the eleventh hour has come. For in the sense of time, the old man’s age is the eleventh hour; and the instant of death, the final moment in the eleventh hour. The indolent youth speaks of a long life that lies before him. The indolent old man hopes that his death is still a long way off. But repentance and remorse belong to the eternal in a man.”

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Sören Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, 1847 p. 40-41
1840s, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847), Purity of Heart (1847)

“On the whole, there is one thing that is very common; you can find it in each and in everyone, in yourself just as I find it in myself: sin and sins. There is one thing that is very rare: true sorrow over one’s sin, which no doubt is why it is made necessary every holy day to pray in the opening prayer in the church service “that we might learn to sorrow over our sins.””

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Source: 1850s, An Upbuilding Discourse December 20, 1850, P. 152

“If it is God who gives the spirit of power and strength, then it is also the same God who gives “the spirt of self-control,” and if ignoble cowardice and fear of people are just as detestable in any age, the excess of eager enthusiasm, “zeal without wisdom,” are no less corrupting and at times are fundamentally just as detestable, just as blasphemous.”

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Sören Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Hong p. 323
1840s, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847)

“But this I thought was the meaning of life, that the individual shook off the habit of accepting the favors of difference, should that be tempting, steeled himself against its humiliation, should that weigh down on him, in order to find the universal, what is common to all human beings, to concern oneself only with that. Oh! How beautiful to lose oneself in this way. But then I thought again that in the having of this concern the meaning of life was to be concerned for oneself as if the particular individual were all there was. Oh! How beautiful thus to find oneself in the universal! If the universal is the rule then the individual is the paradigm [corrected from demand]; if the universal is the demand then the universal is the fulfillment; if the universal is everything, if the universal says everything, then the particular individual believes that the everything is said about him-him alone. So if the place and context here did not require signature, none would be needed, for again it is infinitely inconsequential who has said it (as though the favored one said it, the one who was wronged being in no position to say it, since after all they all have it in them to do it).”

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Sören Kierkegaard

S. Kierkegaard 1846 Journals, Hannay 1996, VII IB200, p. 252
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s

“It is as useless for a person to want first of all to decide the externals and after that the fundamentals as it is for a cosmic body, thinking to form itself, first of all to decide the nature of its surface, to what bodies it should turn its light, which its dark side, without first letting the harmony of centrifugal and centripetal forces realize its existence and letting the rest come of itself. One must learn to know oneself before knowing anything else (gnothi seauton). Not until a person has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does his life gain peace and meaning.”

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Sören Kierkegaard

Journal entry, August 1, 1835
1830s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1830s

“It is true that in the confessional it is the pastor who preaches; but the true preacher is still the secret-sharer in your inner being. The pastor can preach only in vague generalities; the preacher in your inner being is just the opposite; he speaks simply and solely about you, to you, and within you. P. 183”

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

“Every human being is tried this way in the active service of expectancy. Now comes the fulfillment and relieves him, but soon he is again placed on reconnaissance for expectancy; then he is again relieved, but as long as there is any future for him, he has not yet finished his service. And while human life goes on this way in very diverse expectancy, expecting very different things according to different times and occasions and in different frames of mind, all life is again one nightwatch of expectancy.”

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Sören Kierkegaard livre Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses: "Patience in Expectancy" (1844)
1840s, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

“Self-accusation is the possibility of justification. The tax collector accused himself. There was no one else who accused him. It was not civic justice that seized him by the chest and said, “You are a criminal”: it was not the people whom he perhaps cheated who beat him on the breast and said, “You are a cheater” – but he beat his own breast and said, “God be merciful to me, a sinner. He accused himself, that he was a sinner before God.”

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Three Discourses at Friday Communion November 14, 1849 Hong translation 1997 P. 132
1840s, Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (1849)

“Forgetting when God does it in relation to sin, is the opposite of creating, since to create is to bring forth from nothing and to forget is to take back into nothing. What is hidden from my eyes, that I have never seen; but what is hidden behind my back, that I have seen. The one who loves forgives in this way; he forgives, he forgets, he blots out the sin, in love he turns toward the one he forgives; but when he turns toward him, he of course, cannot see what is lying behind his back.”

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Source: 1840s, Works of Love (1847), p. 296

“His life from the very beginning is a story of temptation; it is not only one particular period in his life, the forty days, that is the story of temptation – no his whole life is a story of temptation (just as it is also of suffering). Every moment of his life he is tempted – that is, he has this possibility in his power, to take his calling, his task, in vain.”

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Sören Kierkegaard livre For Self-Examination

Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, Hong p. 58-59
1850s, For Self-Examination (1851), Christ is the Way

“Is not “Christendom” the most colossal attempt at serving God, not by following Christ, as He required, and suffering for the doctrine, but instead of that, by “building the sepulchers of the prophets and garnishing the tombs of the righteous.””

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

“A man who for a long time has gone around hiding a secret becomes mentally deranged. At this point one would imagine that his secret would have to come out, but despite his derangement his soul still sticks to its hideout, and those around him become even more convinced that the false story he told to deceive them is the truth. He is healed of his insanity, knows everything that has gone on, and thereby perceives that nothing has been betrayed. Was this gratifying to him or not; he might wish to have disposed of his secret in his madness; it seems as if there were a fate which forced him to remain in his secret and would not let him go away from it. Or was it for the best, was there a guardian spirit who helped him keep his secret.”

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Sören Kierkegaard

(JP IV A81) 1843
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s

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