Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.
Author
Soren Kierkegaard
46 quotations
About Soren Kierkegaard
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, Lutheran theologian, poet, social critic, and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christianity, morality, ethics, psychology, love, and the philosophy of religion, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony, and parables. Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues around how one lives as a "single individual", highlighting the importance of …
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by Soren KierkegaardThe truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.
People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they thin…
Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for t…
Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.
Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.
Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.
The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
Advertisement
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.
I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.
Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.
Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.
Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when i…
Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.
Don't forget to love yourself.
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.
Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.
Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards.
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.
A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.
Because of its tremendous solemnity death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearences.
The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else…
Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer.