Quotes by Soren Kierkegaard
People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.
Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth - look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.
Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.
Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.
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 the scenes of their childhood.
Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
Purity of heart is to will one thing.
Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.
There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.
I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.
Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.
The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo; the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes.
Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.
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.
It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important.
To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
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 than grandiose thoughts in embryo.
Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.
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.
The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.
Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.
It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.
