Kierkegaard Quotes

“A 'no' does not hide anything, but a 'yes' very easily becomes a deception.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“When I was young, I forgot how to laugh in the cave of Trophonius; when I was older, I opened my eyes and beheld reality, at which I began to laugh, and since then, I have not stopped laughing. I saw that the meaning of life was to secure a livelihood, and that its goal was to attain a high position; that love’s rich dream was marriage with an heiress; that friendship’s blessing was help in financial difficulties; that wisdom was what the majority assumed it to be; that enthusiasm consisted in making a speech; that it was courage to risk the loss of ten dollars; that kindness consisted in saying, “You are welcome,” at the dinner table; that piety consisted in going to communion once a year. This I saw, and I laughed.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“When I was very young and in the cave of Trophonius I forgot to laugh. Then, when I got older, when I opened my eyes and saw the real world, I began to laugh and I haven’t stopped since. I saw that the meaning of life was to get a livelihood, that the goal of life was to be a High Court judge, that the bright joy of love was to marry a well-off girl, that the blessing of friendship was to help each other out of a financial tight spot, that wisdom was what the majority said it was, that passion was to give a speech, that courage was to risk being fined 10 rix-dollars, that cordiality was to say ‘You’re welcome’ after a meal, and that the fear of God was to go to communion once a year. That’s what I saw. And I laughed.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

“What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

“For love is exultant when it unites equals, but it is triumphant when it makes that which was unequal equal in love.”
― Soren Kierkeggard

“For I have trained myself and am training myself always to be able to dance lightly in the service of thought”
― Johannes Climacus S ren Kierkagaard

“People try to persuade us that the objections against Christianity spring from doubt. That is a complete misunderstanding. The objections against Christianity spring from insubordination, the dislike of obedience, rebellion against all authority. As a result, people have hitherto been beating the air in their struggle against objections, because they have fought intellectually with doubt instead of fighting morally with rebellion.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“You become what you understand.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“He who is educated by anxiety is educated by possibility… When such a person, therefore, goes out from the school of possibility, and knows more thoroughly than a child knows the alphabet that he demands of life absolutely nothing, and that terror, perdition, annihilation, dwell next door to every man, and has learned the profitable lesson that every dread which alarms may the next instant become a fact, he will then interpret reality differently…”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin

“That Kierkegaard was a stimulating and pioneering force precisely because of his neurosis is not surprising since he started out with a conception of God that had a peculiar Protestant bias which he shares with a great many Protestants. To such people his problems and his grizzling are entirely acceptable because to them it serves the same purpose as it served him, you can settle everything in the study and need not do it in life. Out there things are apt to get unpleasant. Neurosis does not produce art. It is uncreative and inimical to life. It is failure and bungling. But the moderns mistake morbidity for creative birth—part of the general lunacy of our time. It is, of course, an unanswerable question what an artist would have created if he had not been neurotic.”
― C.G. Jung, Letters 1: 1906-1950

“The self is essentially intangible and must be understood in terms of possibilities, dread, and decisions. When I behold my possibilities, I experience that dread which is "the dizziness of freedom," and my choice is made in fear and trembling.”
― Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre

“What am I? The modest narrator who accompanies your triumphs; the dancer who supports you when you rise in your lovely grace; the branch upon which you rest a moment when you are tired of flying; the bass that interposes itself below the soprano’s fervour to let it climb even higher—what am I? I am the earthly gravity that keeps you on the ground. What am I, then? Body, mass, earth, dust and ashes.—You, my Cordelia, you are soul and spirit.”

—Johannes the Seducer, from_Either/Or_”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“My love consumes me. Only my voice is left, a voice which has fallen in love with you whispers to you everywhere that I love you. Oh! Does it weary you to hear this voice? Everywhere it enfolds you; like an inexhaustible, shifting surround, I place my transparently reflected soul about your pure, deep being.”

—Johannes the Seducer, from_Either/Or_”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Suffering is one very long moment.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Love has many positionings. Cordelia makes good progress. She is sitting on my lap, her arm twines, soft and warm, round my neck; she leans upon my breast, light, without gravity; the soft contours scarcely touch me; like a flower her lovely figure twines about me, freely as a ribbon. Her eyes are hidden beneath her lashes, her bosom is dazzling white like snow, so smooth that my eye cannot rest, it would glance off if her bosom were not moving. What does this movement mean? Is it love? Perhaps. It is a presentiment of it, its dream. It still lacks energy. Her embrace is comprehensive, as the cloud enfolding the transfigured one, detached as a breeze, soft as the fondling of a flower; she kisses me unspecifically, as the sky kisses the sea, gently and quietly, as the dew kisses a flower, solemnly as the sea kisses the image of the moon.

I would call her passion at this moment a naive passion. When the change has been made and I begin to draw back in earnest, she will call on everything she has to captivate me. She has no other means for this purpose than the erotic itself, except that this will now appear on a quite different scale. It then becomes a weapon in her hand which she wields against me. I then have the reflected passion. She fights for her own sake because she knows I possess the erotic; she fights for her own sake so as to overcome me. She herself is in need of a higher form of the erotic. What I taught her to suspect by arousing her, my coldness now teaches her to understand but in such a way that she thinks it is she herself who discovers it. So she wants to take me by surprise; she wants to believe that she has outstripped me in audacity, and that makes me her prisoner. Her passion then becomes specific, energetic, conclusive, dialectical; her kiss total, her embrace without hesitation.—In me she seeks her freedom and finds it the better the more firmly I encompass her. The engagement bursts. When that has happened she needs a little rest, so that nothing unseemly will emerge from this wild tumult. Her passion then composes itself once more and she is mine.”

—from_Either/Or: A Fragment of Life_, (as written by his pseudonym Johannes the Seducer)”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“So, will you LEAP?!!! Once you have leapt, there’s no way back. It’s a one-time leap. It will define the rest of your life. You must absolutely commit. There can be no half-measures and no half-heartedness. It’s all or nothing. Kierkegaard certainly got that right. The leap must be a transformative event, alchemical, transmutative. Remember Neo in The Matrix. He had to master the “Jump Program” and leap from one skyscraper to another across an impossibly wide gap. If you’re going to make that leap, if you’re going to succeed, you must be SURE. Doubt is fatal. If you choke, you die. When invading armies landed on foreign soil, they often burned their fleet so that there could be no retreat. It was win or perish. That’s how it must be. To leap or not to leap – that is the question. What leap shall it be? – faith, the senses or reason. Choose!”
― Mike Hockney, The God Equation

“Love is everything. So, for one who loves, everything has ceased to have meaning in itself and only means something through the interpretation love gives it. Thus if another betrothed became convinced there was some other girl he cared for, he would presumably stand there like a criminal and his fiancée be outraged. You, however, I know would see a tribute in such a confession; for me to be able to love another you know is an impossibility; it is my love for you casting its reflections over the whole of life. So when I care about someone else, it is not to convince myself that I do not love her but only you—that would be presumptuous; but since my whole soul is filled with you, life takes on another meaning for me: it becomes a myth about you."

—Johannes the Seducer, from_Either/Or_”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“What astounds Kierkegaard is neither the obedience nor the reprieve, but the way in which Abraham and Isaac seem able to return to the way things were before. They have been forced to depart entirely from the realm of ordinary humanity and fatherly protection, yet somehow Abraham is still confident in the Love for his son. For Kierkegaard, the story shows that we must make this sort of impossible leap in order to continue in life after flaws have been revealed. As he wrote, Abraham 'resigned everything infinitely, ans then took back everything on the strength of the absurd.”
― Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café

“Wiederholung und Erinnerung sind die gleiche Bewegung, nur in entgegengesetzter Richtung; denn dasjenige, woran man sich erinnert, ist gewesen, wird rückwärts wiederholt, während die eigentliche Wiederholung eine Erinnerung in vorwärtiger Richtung ist.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Der Freiheit Inhalt, intellektuell gesehen, ist Wahrheit, und die Wahrheit macht den Menschen frei. Eben darum aber ist die Wahrheit ein Werk der Freiheit dergestalt, dass sie fort und fort die Wahrheit erzeugt.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Der Begriff Angst, Werke I. In neuer Übertragung und mit Kommentar von Liselotte Richter, Rowohlt Klassiker/ RK 71

“As Kierkegaard wrote: 'Repetition is a beloved wife of whom one never tires'. This sentence is misunderstood by almost everyone. On the basis of this misunderstanding, it is either confirmed (by those who are happily married) or criticised (by those who are happily divorced). When you read the expression, it is easy to interpret it as follows: 'The beloved wife/husband is a repetition of whom one never tires/ However, for Freud and Kierkegaard, the repetition is central, the repetition on the basis of which a partner is ascribed a particular place, and not vice versa. At the same time, repetition then had a different meaning. Nowadays, repetition has become almost synonymous with boredom. One only has to think of a children's game that is endlessly repeated and yet gives pleasure every time, in contrast with the blase adult who always wants something new, something different, something that might still rouse him from the lethargy of excess.”
― Paul Verheage

“There is literally no way to have an opinion, in public, in 2018 AD, and not be involved in the hierarchy of global evil.”
― Jarett Kobek, Do Every Thing Wrong!: XXXTentacion Against the World

“Kierkegaard said, 'Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.' If you don’t solve the problem of life, you won’t know what life to lead, and your experiences will be no more informative than those of animals. Why are so many people feeling lost? Why is there a mental health pandemic? Why can’t people find meaning and fulfilment in their lives? It’s because they spend all their time experiencing life and none at all solving the problem of life. They are blind little Kierkegaardians – clueless people making desperate leaps of faith. Kierkegaard hated Hegel. Hegelianism was exactly what Kierkegaard lacked!”
― David Sinclair, The Lost Superpowers of Ancient Humanity: In Search of the Prometheans

“What is certain is that to become of interest, for one's life to be interesting, has nothing to do with what you can turn your hand to but is a fateful privilege which, like every privilege in the world of spirit, can only be purchased in deep pain.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“I think I finally understand what it is that you experienced in our last moments together. The fear to resign yourself to a final belief greater than yourself. It is difficult to decide what cause to believe in because of the fear that it is a lesser unworthy cause, it is not the meaning but rather a symptom of looking for meaning. And in all of our attachments we long for them to have meaning no matter how long they last. It is a scary thing to create such a drastic action that changes your life. It requires more than faith, there will be a second where only the action and what Kierkegaard called the infinite movement would have to occur. The final dance.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“I never really saw the celerity of your heart
When steadily fighting off the Kierkegaardian part
I listened to Plutarch
While you threw out something of ours
As if humans are shoes you merely use in certain hours”
― Criss Jami

“You may tell the other two I've regained my sweet temper and am no longer breathing fire. And don't fret over things you can't change. 'Life must be lived forwardly.' That's from a philosopher Marcus has taken to quoting lately, I can never remember the name."
"Kierkegaard," Sebastian said "Life can be understood only by looking back, but has to be lived forwardly.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Devil in Disguise

“(With perhaps pardonable exaggeration, Auden remarked of Kierkegaard that one 'could read through the whole of his voluminous works without discovering that human beings are not ghosts but have bodies of flesh and blood.') And for Auden this deficiency is properly described as theological: Kierkegaard, and other Christian thinkers who share his disregard for embodied human nature, neglect clear and vital Christian teaching about God's redeeming love for this physical world, this whole Creation.

(The Poet's Prose)”
― Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant

“Much later in his life, Auden would borrow a musical metaphor from Dietrich Bonhoeffer and say that Kierkegaard was a 'monodist, who can hear with particular acuteness one theme in the New Testament -- in his case, the theme of suffering and sacrifice -- but is deaf to its rich polyphony.' And for the Auden who emerges in the pages of this volume [Prose, Volume III: 1949-1955], the unique power of Christian doctrine is its polyphonic character, its capacity to address every dimension of our being, to give a comprehensive account of how history and nature relate, and -- decisively in Christ's incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection -- how they may be reconciled.

(The Poet's Prose)”
― Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant

“As a spirit, a conscious person endowed with free will, every man has, through faith and grace, a unique 'existential' relation to God, and few since St. Augustine have described this relation more profoundly than Kierkegaard. But every man has a second relation to God which is neither unique nor existential: as a creature composed of matter, as a biological organism, is related by necessity to the God who created that universe and saw that it was good, for the laws of nature to which, whether he likes it or not, he must conform are of divine origin.
And it is with this body, with faith or without it, that all good works are done.

(W.H. Auden)
(The Poet's Prose)”
― Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant