755 Quotes by Søren Kierkegaard

A man's personality is matured only when he appropriates the truth, whether it is spoken by Balaam's ass or a sniggering wag or an apostle or an angel.

Take it and return it: the kiss of love.

To venture causes anxiety. Not to venture is to lose oneself.

Doubt is thought's despair; despair is personality's doubt. . . . Doubt and despair . . . belong to completely different spheres; different sides of the soul are set in motion. . . . Despair is an expression of the total personality, doubt only of thought.

Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.

But the life of freedom requires a beginning, and here a beginning is a resolution, and the resolution has its work and its pain-thus the beginning has its difficulty.

The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.

Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content; it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.

I go fishing for a thousand monsters in the depths of my own self.