Soren Kierkegaard > Quotes

“Do it, or don’t do it. You will regret both.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“A vida não é um problema a ser resolvido, mas uma realidade a ser vivida.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“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

“The neighbor...has never been presented as an object of admiration; Christianity has never taught that one shall admire the neighbor--one shall love him.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“What is it to be God's chosen? Is it to be denied in youth one's youthful desire in order to have it fulfilled in great travail in old age?”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling

“Through the individual's intercourse with himself the individual is made pregnant by himself and gives birth to himself”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“So then, salvation is humanly speaking the most impossible thing if all; but for God all things are possible! This is the fight of faith, which fights madly for possibility.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, (The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition of Edification and Awakening by Anti-Climacus (Classics)) [By: Kierkegaard, Soren] [Mar, 1989]

“He who loves God has no need of tears, needs no admiration, and forgets his suffering in love, indeed forgets so completely that afterwards not the least hint of his pain would remain were God himself not to remember it; for God sees in secret and knows the distress and counts the tears and forgets nothing.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Thousands of years have slipped by since those days, but you need no late-coming lover to snatch your memory from the power of oblivion; for every mother-tongue commemorates you—and still you reward your lover more gloriously than anyone.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Fear And Trembling

“What then in eternity will conscience demand of you by the consciousness that you are an individual? It will teach you that if you judge (for in very many cases it will restrain you from judging), you must bear the responsibility for your judgment. It will teach you that you should examine what you understand and what you do not understand... For many fools do not make a wise man, and the crowd is doubtful recommendation for a cause. ...But the man who, conscious of himself as an individual, judges with eternal responsibility, he is slow to pass judgment upon the unusual. For it is possible that it is falsehood and deceit and illusion and vanity. But it is also possible that it is true.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession

“La vida solo puede ser entendida mirando hacia atrás, pero tiene que ser vivida mirando hacia delante.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“The more men believe an idea to be true the greater the likelihood that the idea is mistaken. Those who are right usually stand alone.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“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.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

“یا مردی داریم که کسی برای زندگی‌اش ارزش چندانی قائل نیست ولی او با غم و اندوه گذشته‌هارا به یاد می‌آورد، اگر نه گذشته‌های دور، دست‌کم خاطرات والدین خویش را، و چنان ایشان را از صمیم جان دوست می‌دارد که آرزو می‌کند ای کاش این نام از بین نرود و در تذکار حق‌شناسِ زندگان حفظ شود. شاید او تصور گنگی دارد از زیبایی لحظه‌هایی که خواهد توانست در آینده برای فرزندانش از خاطرات پدربزرگ‌شان بگوید که دیری است به سرای باقی رفته و بدین‌سان با تصویری چنین آرمانی که فقط به قلمرو تذکار تعلق دارد حصنی حصین برای زندگی ایشان بسازد و به یاری این تصور در ایشان میل به هرچیز شریف و عظیم برانگیزد؛ شاید با خود فکر می‌کند با این کار قادر خواهد بود بخشی از دینی را که احساس می‌کند والدین خودش به گردن او دارند ادا کند.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

“Belief is the opposite of doubt. Belief and doubt are not two forms of knowledge, determinable in continuity with one another, for neither of them is a cognitive act; they are opposite passions. Belief is a sense for coming into existence, and doubt is a protest against every conclusion that transcends immediate sensation and immediate cognition.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments

“Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forwards.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“If you do not live in some out-of-the-way place in the world, if you live in a populous city, and you direct your attention outwards, sympathetically engrossing yourself in this way into the world around you, that in this relation, you relate yourself to yourself as an individual with eternal responsibility? Or do you press yourself into the crowd, where the one excuses himself with the others, where at one moment there are, so to speak, many, and where in the next moment, each time that the talk touches upon responsibility, there is no on? Do you judge like the crowd, in its capacity as a crowd? You are not obliged to have an opinion about what you do not understand. No, on the contrary, you are eternally excused from that. But you are eternally responsible as an individual to render and account for your opinion, and for your judgement. And in eternity, you will not be asked inquisitively and professionally, as though by a newspaper reporter, whether there were many that had the same--wrong opinion. You will be asked only whether have held it, whether you have spoiled your soul by joining in this frivolous and thoughtless judging, because the others, because the many judged thoughtlessly. You will be asked only whether you may not have ruined the best within you by joining the crowd in its defiance, thinking that you were many and therefore you had the prerogative, because you were many, that is, because you were many who were wrong. In eternity it will be asked whether you may not have damaged a good thing in order that you also might judge with them that did not know how to judge, but who possessed the crowd's strength, which in the temporal sense is significant but to which eternity is wholly indifferent.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession

“The function of prayer is not to influence God but rather to change the nature of the one who prays”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Spirituality is the power of a man's understanding over his own life.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Well, well, what a priceless invention statistics are, what a glorious fruit of culture....with the help of statistical tables one laughs at all of life... After all, a person can shut his door on the poor, and if someone should starve to death, then he can just look at a collection of statistical tables, [see] how many die every year of hunger -- and he is comforted.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Infinite resignation is that shirt in the old fable. The thread is spun with tears, bleached by tears, the shirt sewn in tears, but then it also gives better protection than iron and steel. A defect of the fable is that a third party is able to make the material. The secret in life is that everyone must sew it for himself.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“But that man is slow to pass judgment who bears in mind, that he is an individual, and that the final and highest responsibility for the judgement rests solely upon him.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession

“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.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Silence is divinity's communion with the individual”
― Soren Kierkegaard