Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.
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To pace about, looking to obtain status, looking to attain 'importance' - I can think of nothing more ridiculous.
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In the life of the individual when love awakens it is older than everything else, because when it exists it seems as if it has existed for a long time; it presupposes itself back into the distant past until all searching ends in the inexplicable origin.
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The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.
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The object of Christian faith is not the teaching but the Teacher.
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Your own tactic is to train yourself in the art of becoming enigmatic to everybody. My young friend, suppose there was no one who troubld himself to guess your riddle--what joy, then, would you have in it?
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What a misfortune to be a woman! And yet, the worst misfortune is not to understand what a misfortune it is.
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What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.
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... the more one needs God the more perfect he is. To need God is nothing to be ashamed of but is perfection itself. It is the saddest thing in the world if a human being goes through life without discovering that he needs God!
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Only one deception is possible in the infinite sense, self-deception.
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Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. Therefore, whenever I see a fly settling, in the decisive moment, on the nose of such a person of affairs; or if he is spattered with mud from a carriage which drives past him in still greater haste; or the drawbridge opens up before him; or a tile falls down and knocks him dead, then I laugh heartily.
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The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.
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If a man wants to set up as an innkeeper and he does not succeed, it is not comic. If, on the contrary, a girl asks to be allowed to set up as a prostitute and she fails, as sometimes happens, it is comic.
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Leap of faith – yes, but only after reflection.
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The most common form of despair is not being who you are.
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Choose to be who you are. . . The individual who would become a person must at some point take over his entire being - must, that is, choose herself.
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With the daguerreotype, everyone will be able to have their portrait taken . . . and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same.
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I divide my time as follows: half the time I sleep, the other half I dream. I never dream when I sleep, for that would be a pity, for sleeping is the highest accomplishment of genius.
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Freedom's possibility is not the ability to choose the good or the evil. The possibility is to be able.
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Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
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Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.
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Do it or don't do it - you will regret both.
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Imagine hidden in a simpler exterior a secret receptacle wherein the most precious treasure is deposited - there is a spring which has to be pressed, but the spring is hidden, and the pressure must have a certain strength, so that an accidental pressure would not be sufficient. So likewise is the hope of eternity hidden in man's inmost parts, and affliction is the pressure. When it presses the hidden spring, and strongly enough, then the contents appear in all their glory.
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I'm so misunderstood that people misunderstand me even when I tell them I'm misunderstood.