Inspirational Quotes by Soren Kierkegaard

“Money! Nothing worse in our lives, so current, rampant, so corrupting. Money - you demolish cities, root men from their homes, you train and twist good minds and set them on to the most atrocious schemes. No limit, you make them adept at every kind of outrage, every godless crime - money!”

“And whoever places a friend above the good of his own country, he is nothing.”

“The mind convicts itself in advance, when scoundrels are up to no good, plotting in the dark. Oh but I hate it more when a traitor, caught red-handed, tries to glorify his crimes.”

“SOPHOCLES (born ca. 496 B.C., died after 413) was one of the three major authors of Greek tragedy. Of his 123 plays, only seven survive in full. Antigone, written and first performed in the late 440s B.C., is among his most often revived plays; its strong roles, and its conflict between individual morality (championed by a brave young woman) and the overbearing political needs of the state, have never lost their compelling interest through the generations.”

“Si tratas de curar la maldad con maldad, sumarás más dolor a tu destino.”

“Destaca-se a prudência sobremodo como a primeira condição para a felicidade. Não se deve ofender os deuses em nada. A desmedida empáfia nas palavras reverte em desmedidos golpes contra os soberbos que, já na velhice, aprendem afinal prudência.”

“I know I please where I must please the most.”

“For you have confused the upper and lower worlds. You have thrust the child of this world into living night, You have kept from the gods below the child that is theirs. The one on a grave before her death, the other, Dead, denied the grave. This is your crime.”

“A person who speaks like a book is exceedingly boring to listen to; sometimes, however, it is not inappropriate to talk in that way. For a book has the remarkable property that it can be interpreted any way you wish. If one talks like a book one’s conversation acquires this property too. I kept quite soberly to the usual formulas. She was surprised, as I’d expected; that can’t be denied. To describe to myself how she looked is difficult. She seemed multifaceted; yes just about like the still to be published but announced commentary to my book, a commentary capable of any interpretation. One word and she would have laughed at me; another and she would have been moved; still another and she would have shunned me; but no such word came to my lips. I remained solemnly unemotional and kept to the ritual.― ‘She had known me for such a short time’, dear God, it’s only on the strait path of engagement one meets such difficulties, not the primrose path of love.” ―from_Either/Or: A Fragment of Life_. Abridged, Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by Alastair Hannay, p. 312”

“…is a desire for what one dreads, a sympathetic antipathy. Anxiety is an alien power which lays hold of an individual, and yet one cannot tear oneself away, nor has a will to do so; for one fears, but what one fears one desires. Anxiety then makes the individual impotent.”

“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.”

“It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. And if one thinks over that proposition it becomes more and more evident that life can never really be understood in time because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting-place from which to understand it.”

“Woman is the conscience of man.”

“Det gäller att finna en sanning, som är sanning för mig, att finna en idé för vilken jag vill leva och dö.”

“Jeg kommer netop nu fra et Selskab, hvor jeg var Sjælen; Vittigheder strømmede ud fra min Mund, alle loe, beundrede mig - men jeg gik, ja den Tankestreg bør være ligesaa lang som Jordbanens Radier ------------------------------- hen og ville skyde mig selv.”

“But, but, but here lies the difficulty. Precisely what the New Testament understands by Christianity and by being a Christian is-and this the New Testament makes no effort to conceal but emphasizes decisively-what most of all is repugnant to the natural man, is an offense to him, against which with wild passion and defiance he must revolt, or else cunningly try at any price to be rid of it, as for example by the help of a knavish trick, calling Christianity what is the exact opposite of Christianity, and then thanking God for Christianity and for the great and inestimable privilege of being a Christian. Attack On Christendom pp 150-3”

“The philistine tranquillises himself with the trivial.”

“One must see how no attack is so feared as that of laughter... because more than any other this attack isolates the one attacked.”

“One must see it close up, the callousness with which otherwise kind people act in the capacity of the public because their participation or non-participation seems to them a trifle - a trifle that with the contributions of the many becomes the monster.”

“…when the ambitious man whose slogan is “Either Caesar or nothing” does not get to be Caesar, he despairs over it. But this also means something else: precisely because he did not get to be Caesar, he now cannot bear to be himself.”