Quotes By Soren Kierkegaard

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

Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.

Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.

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

There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life's highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.

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

Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.

Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer.

Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.

A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.

God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.

One can advise comfortably from a safe port.

Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.

Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God.

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.

Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.

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.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.

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.

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.

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

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

Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.

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.