Quotations of Soren Kierkegaard

“To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”

“There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.”

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

"The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”

“Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.”

“People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.”

“Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted? And If I am compelled to take part in it, Where is the director? I want to see him.”

“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.”

“If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.”

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”

“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.”

“Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion -- and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion... while truth again reverts to a new minority.”

“The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins”

During the first period of a man's life the greatest danger is not to take the risk.”

“Pleasure disappoints, possibility never”

“Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.”

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”

“The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever”

“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.”