755 Quotes by Søren Kierkegaard

Had I to carve an inscription on my tombstone I would ask for none other than “The Individual.”

We live as if we were unaware of our impending destruction.

Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world?

When you read God’s Word, you must constantly be saying to yourself, “It is talking to me, and about me”.

One should be an enigma not just to others but to oneself too. I study myself. When I’m tired of that I light a cigar to pass the time, and think: God only knows what the good Lord really meant with me, or what He meant to make of me.

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.

A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.

In order to swim one takes off all one’s clothes – in order to aspire to the truth one must undress in a far more inward sense, divest oneself of all one’s inward clothes, of thoughts, conceptions, selfishness etc., before one is sufficiently naked.

A human being is a spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.