Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic, and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. These Soren Kierkegaard quotes will motivate you.
Best Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
- “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.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
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“I found I had less and less to say, until finally, I became silent, and began to listen. I discovered in the silence, the voice of God” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “It is better to try something and fail than to try nothing and succeed. The result may be the same, but you won’t be. We always grow more through defeats than victories.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
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“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “Take a chance and you may lose. Take not a chance and you have lost already.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “Christ was crucified because he would have nothing to do with the crowd (even though he addressed himself to all). He did not want to form a party, an interest group, a mass movement, but wanted to be what he was, the truth, which is related to the single individual. Therefore everyone who will genuinely serve the truth is by that very fact a martyr. To win a crowd is no art; for that only untruth is needed, nonsense, and a little knowledge of human passions. But no witness to the truth dares to get involved with the crowd.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
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“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “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.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “Once you label me you negate me.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
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“Confidence is the present tense of hope.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “The unhappy person is never present to themself because they always live in the past or the future.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “Do it or don’t do it – you will regret both.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
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“Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “The daily press is the evil principle of the modern world, and time will only serve to disclose this fact with greater and greater clearness. The capacity of the newspaper for degeneration is sophistically without limit, since it can always sink lower and lower in its choice of readers. At last it will stir up all those dregs of humanity which no state or government can control.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it and why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought by a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn’t it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager—I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
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“Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “And this is the simple truth – that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted? And If I am compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I want to see him.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
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“The more people who believe something, the more apt it is to be wrong. The person who’s right often has to stand alone.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “The difference between an admirer and a follower still remains, no matter where you are. The admirer never makes any true sacrifices. He always plays it safe. Though in words, phrases, songs, he is inexhaustible about how highly he prizes Christ, he renounces nothing, gives up nothing, will not reconstruct his life, will not be what he admires, and will not let his life express what it is he supposedly admires.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to the general applause of wits who believe it’s a joke.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
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“The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “If I were a physician, and if I were allowed to prescribe just one remedy for all the ills of the modern world, I would prescribe silence. For even if the Word of God were proclaimed in the modern world, how could one hear it with so much noise? Therefore, create silence.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion – and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion … while Truth again reverts to a new minority.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
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“A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized prayer is listening.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “The greatest danger to Christianity is, I contend, not heresies, not heterodoxies, not atheists, not profane secularism – no, but the kind of orthodoxy which is cordial drivel, mediocrity served up sweet. There is nothing that so insidiously displaces the majestic as cordiality.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “To be a woman is something so strange, so confusing and so complicated that only a woman could put up with it.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
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“The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “In order to help another effectively, I must understand what he understands. If I do not know that, my greater understanding will be of no help to him… instruction begins when you put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and in the way he understands it.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “The question is not “To be or not to be,” it is what we should be until we are not.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “It is not the path which is the difficulty; rather, it is the difficulty which is the path.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “The truth is a trap: you cannot get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
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“It is not where we breathe, but where we Love, that we live.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “In a theatre it happened that a fire started off stage. 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.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “For without risk there is no faith, and the greater the risk, the greater the faith.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “God creates everything out of nothing. And everything which God is to use, he first reduces to nothing” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
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“The door to happiness opens outward.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “Once you are born in this world you’re old enough to die.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “To love another person is to help them love God.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “Hope is passion for what is possible.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
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“Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “Do not interrupt the flight of your soul; do not distress what is best in you; do not enfeeble your spirit with half wishes and half thoughts. Ask yourself and keep on asking until you find the answer, for one may have known something many times, acknowledged it; one may have willed something many times, attempted it – and yet, only the deep inner motion, only the heart’s indescribable emotion, only that will convince you that what you have acknowledged belongs to you, that no power can take it from you – for only the truth that builds up is truth for you.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “If you think you understand, it isn’t God.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “I’m so misunderstood that people misunderstand me even when I tell them I’m misunderstood.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
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“Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “Most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes–but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “Love is the expression of the one who loves, not of the one who is loved. Those who think they can love only the people they prefer do not love at all. Love discovers truths about individuals that others cannot see” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
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“The deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than himself.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “A man may perform astonishing feats and comprehend a vast amount of knowledge, and yet have no understanding of himself. But suffering directs a man to look within. If it succeeds, then there, within him, is the beginning of his learning.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard quotes
- “The spiritual differs from the religious in being able to endure isolation. The rank of a spiritual person is proportionate to his strength for enduring isolation, whereas we religious people are constantly in need of ‘the others,’ the herd. We religious folks die, or despair, if we are not reassured by being in the assembly, of the same opinion as the congregation, and so on. But the Christianity of the New Testament is precisely related to the isolation of the spiritual man.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
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“Only the noble of heart are called to difficulty.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “And this is one of the most crucial definitions for the whole of Christianity; that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “The thing that cowardice fears most is decision” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “The best news the World has ever heard came from a graveyard – Christ is risen!” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
