Inspirational Quotes by Soren Kierkegaard
“I raise myself up once more, look about the room with an indescribable peace of mind, and then it’s goodnight, down under the eiderdown.”
“Besides my other numerous circle of acquaintances I have one more intimate confidant – my melancholy. In the midst of my joy, in the midst of my work, he waves to me, calls me to one side, even though physically I stay put. My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known; what wonder, then, that I love her in return. […]”
“My soul is so heavy that no longer can any thought sustain it, no wingbeat lift it up into the ether. If it moves, it only sweeps along the ground like the low flight of birds when a thunderstorm is brewing.”
“What is youth? A dream. What is love? The dream’s content.”
“After all, it is the best time of one’s life, the first period of falling in love, when with every meeting, every glance, one brings home something new to rejoice over.”
“I do not have the courage to know anything, nor to possess, to own anything. Most people complain that the world is so prosaic, that life isn’t like a romantic novel where opportunities are always so favourable. What I complain of is that life is not like a novel where there are hard-hearted fathers, and goblins and trolls to fight with, enchanted princesses to free. What are all such enemies taken together compared to the pallid, bloodless, glutinous nocturnal shapes with which I fight and to which I myself give life and being.”
“People say the good Lord fills the stomach before the eyes. I haven’t noticed; my eyes have had enough and I am weary of everything, and yet I hunger.”
“I would rather be a swineherd at Amagerbro and be understood by the swine than be a poet and be misunderstood by people.”
“That’s why my soul always reverts to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There at least one feels that it’s human beings talking. There people hate, people love, people murder their enemy and curse his descendants through all generations, there people sin.”
“My views are the fleeting observations of a ‘travelling scholar’9 rushing through life in the greatest haste. People say the good Lord fills the stomach before the eyes. I haven’t noticed; my eyes have had enough and I am weary of everything, and yet I hunger.”
“If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all–what then would life be but despair?”
“Philosophy cannot and should not give faith, but it should understand itself and know what it has to offer and take nothing away, and least of all should fool people out of something as if it were nothing. I am not unacquainted with the perplexities and dangers of life, I do not fear them, and I encounter them buoyantly. I am not unacquainted with the dreadful, my memory is a faithful wife, and my imagination is (as I myself am not) a diligent little maiden who all day sits quietly at her work, and in the evening knows how to chat to me about it so prettily that I must look at it, though not always, I must say, is it landscapes, or flowers, or pastoral idylls she paints.”
“Only the lower natures forget themselves and become something new. For instance, the butterfly has entirely forgotten that it was a caterpillar; perhaps in turn it can forget that it was a butterfly so completely that it can become a fish. The”
“For the outward world is subjected to the law of imperfection, and again and again the experience is repeated that he too who does not work gets the bread, and that he who sleeps gets it more abundantly than the man who works. In the outward world everything is made payable to the bearer, this world is in bondage to the law of indifference, and to him who has the ring, the spirit of the ring is obedient, whether he be Noureddin or Aladdin, and he who has the world's treasure, has it, however he got it. It is different in the world of spirit. Here an eternal divine order prevails, here it does not rain both upon the just and upon the unjust, here the sun does not shine both upon the good and upon the evil, here it holds good that only he who works gets the bread, only he who was in anguish finds repose, only he who descends into the underworld rescues the beloved, only he who draws the knife gets Isaac.”
“Now the story of Abraham has the remarkable property that it is always glorious, however poorly one may understand it; yet here again the proverb applies, that all depends upon whether one is willing to labor and be heavy laden. But they will not labor, and yet they would understand the story.”
“For faith is this paradox, that the particular is higher than the universal”
“اما چگونه میتوان از اقربا نفرت داشت؟! وظیفه مطلق می تواند به انجام عملی منجر شود که اخلاق آن را منع کرده است، اما به هیچ وجه نمی تواند شهسوار ایمان را از دوست داشتن بازدارد. این آن چیزی است که ابراهیم نشان می دهد. لحظه ای که میخواهد اسحاق را قربانی کند به لسان اخلاق از او متنفر است. اما اگر به راستی از او متنفر باشد می تواند مطمئن باشد که خدا این قربانی را از او نخواسته است؛ در حقیقت قابیل و ابراهیم یکسان نیستند.”
“That will come when it comes; we must deal with all that lies before us. The future rests with the ones who tend the future.”
“Pues así como estoy, me voy a ir. Venid, venid, compañeros los que estáis presentes y ausentes; y con hachas en las manos corred hacia el lugar famoso. Y yo, puesto que mi opinión así ha cambiado, y yo mismo la aprisioné, quiero estar presente para salvarla; pues temo no sea la mejor resolución el vivir observando las leyes establecidas.”
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Kierkegaard left the task of discovering the meaning of his works to the reader, because "the task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted". Scholars have interpreted Kierkegaard variously as an existentialist, neo-orthodoxist, postmodernist, humanist, and individualist.
Crossing the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, and literature, he is an influential figure in contemporary thought.