755 Quotes by Søren Kierkegaard

To grumble about the world and its unhappiness is always easier than to beat one’s breast and groan over oneself.

But doubt is wily and cunning and never, as it is sometimes said to be, loud or defiant. It is unassuming and sly, not bold or assertive – and the more unassuming, the more dangerous.

Philosophy is life’s dry-nurse, who can take care of us – but not suckle us.

Man is the synthesis of the infinite and the finite, the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man is not yet a self.

I am so fed up and joyless that not only have I nothing to fill my soul, I cannot even conceive of anything that could possibly satisfy it – alas, not even the bliss of heaven.

It is tragic-comic to see that all this knowledge and understanding exercises no power at all over men’s lives, that their lives do not express in the remotest way what they have understood, but rather the opposite.

Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life’s relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.

Freedom’s possibility is not the ability to choose the good or the evil. The possibility is to be able.

The great trick with a woman is to get rid of her while she think’s she’s rid of you.