Quotessence
Home / Authors / Søren Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

AllPhilosophyDespairGodExistentialismLoveKierkegaardFaithChristianityLifeHumilityHumorLaughSelfSilenceSinSolitudeSufferingWisdomAbsurdityBible

Famous Søren Kierkegaard Quotes

“Can a person, then, do any more than love? Have thought and language any higher expression for loving than always to give thanks? Not at all, it has a lower, a humbler expression. Even the person who is always willing to give thanks nevertheless loves according to his own perfection, and a person can truly love God only when he loves him according to his own imperfection. Which love is this? It is the love that is born of repentance, which is more beautiful than any other love, for in it you love God. It is more faithful and more fervent than all other love, for in repentance it is God who loves you.”

LoveGodHumilityForgivenessRepentance
Book:Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses
Create image

“I cannot shut my eyes and plunge confidently into the absurd; that is for me an impossibility, but I do not praise myself for it. I am convinced that God is love; this thought has for me a primordial lyrical validity. When it is present to me I am unspeakably happy; when it is absent I long for it more intensely than the lover for the object of his love. But I do not believe; this courage I lack.”

LoveGodFaithCourageAbsurdity
Book:Fear and Trembling
Create image

“He who wants, therefore, to prove God’s existence (in a different sense than simply to illuminate the concept of God, and without the reservatio finalis, that we have pointed out, that existence emerges from the proof by means of a leap), he proves something else instead, something that perhaps does not always need a proof, and in any case never something better, because the fool says in his heart that there is no God; but he who says in his heart, or to others: wait a minute and I will prove it—is he not a rare sage! If it is not, in the moment when he must begin the proof, undecided whether God exists, then he does not prove it; and if it is like this at the beginning, then he will never really be able to begin, partly out of fear that he might not succeed, because God may not exist, and partly because he has nothing with which to begin.— In ancient times one was hardly preoccupied with such things. At least Socrates, who is said to have produced the physico-teleological proof for God’s existence, did not concern himself with such things. He constantly assumed God existed and, operating on this assumption, endeavoured to permeate existence with the idea of purpose. If one had asked him why he conducted himself in this way, then he would surely have explained that he did not have the courage to venture upon such a voyage of discovery without having the security behind him that God existed. On the basis of God’s word he, so to speak, casts the net in order to capture the idea of purpose; because nature finds many subterfuges and ways to frighten in order to disturb the inquirer.”

GodPurposeBeliefExistence
Book:Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs
Create image