The thoughts of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who lived in the nineteenth century, are still highly relevant today and encourage us to consider life or the relationship we build with ourselves. Given that he is regarded as the founder of existentialism and was reportedly a highly sentimental and depressed individual, it is not surprising that these traits appear in some of his philosophical concepts.
Deeply person-centered is the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. Actually, it may be summed up in two fundamental ideas: the individual and its potential. His work focused on topics like happiness, personal freedom, and existential anxiety.
According to this philosophy, life is made up of choices we have to make every single day. We shape our lives and become the people we are or aspire to be through these choices. Those choices are unavoidable since inaction itself necessitates decision-making.
His philosophy is intriguing because it gives us power and, in a sense, serves as a compass that indicates the way forward so that we can better understand ourselves and live our lives.
Powerful Quotes by Soren Kierkegaard About Life
1. “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
2. “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
3. “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.”
4. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
5. “Take a chance and you may lose. Take not a chance and you have lost already.”
6. “Don’t forget to love yourself.”
7. “It’s better to get lost in the passion than to lose the passion.”
8. “The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
9. “The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.”
10. “Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.”
11. “Do it or don’t do it – you will regret both.”
12. “To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”
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13. “Leap of faith – yes, but only after reflection.”
14. “The crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.”
15. “Once you label me you negate me.”
16. “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.”
17. “Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?”
18. “I’m so misunderstood that people misunderstand me even when I tell them I’m misunderstood.”
19. “The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”
20. “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 general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.”
21. “Confidence is the present tense of hope.”
22. “For without risk there is no faith, and the greater the risk, the greater the faith.”
23. “The door to happiness opens outward.”
24. “The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss – an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. – is sure to be noticed.”
25. “God creates everything out of nothing. And everything which God is to use, he first reduces to nothing.”
26. “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
27. “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.”
28. “Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.”
29. “Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.”
30. “The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.”
Motivational Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
31. “The thing that cowardice fears most is decision.”
32. “Prayer is a silent surrendering of everything to God.”
33. “Worship isn’t God’s show. God is the audience. God’s watching. The congregation, they are the actors in this drama. Worship is their show. And the minister is just reminding the people of their forgotten lines.”
34. “To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. I am not a teacher, only a fellow student.”
35. “I am so stupid that I cannot understand philosophy; the antithesis of this is that philosophy is so clever that it cannot comprehend my stupidity. These antitheses are mediated in a higher unity; in our common stupidity.”
36. “Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.”
37. “To love another person is to help them love God.”
38. “Purity of heart is to will one thing.”
39. “Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.”
40. “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”
41. “God does not think; he creates. He does not exist; he is eternal.”
42. “It is not the path which is the difficulty; rather, it is the difficulty which is the path.”
43. “There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.”
44. “Love is all, it gives all, and it takes all.”
45. “Therefore do not deceive yourself! Of all deceivers fear most yourself!”
46. “The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing. But because he wants to do it in his own strength, he is fighting not with man, but with God.”
47. “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.”
48. “It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.”
49. “People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.”
50. “Love believes all things and yet is never deceived.”
51. “It is very dangerous to go into eternity with possibilities which one has oneself prevented from becoming realities. A possibility is a hint from God. One must follow it.”
53. “The highest of all is not to understand the highest but to act upon it.”
54. “This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.”
55. “If you think you understand, it isn’t God.”
56. “Now, with God’s help, I shall become myself.”
57. “I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations – one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it – you will regret both.”
58. “I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night.”
59. “The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.”
60. “Had I to carve an inscription on my tombstone I would ask for none other than “The Individual.””
61. “A possibility is a hint from God. One must follow it.”
62. “If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.”
Conclusion: Quotes by Soren Kierkegaard
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