755 Quotes by Søren Kierkegaard

Silence is the demon’s trap, and the more one is silenced, the more terrible the demon; but silence is also the divinity’s mutual understanding with the single individual.

All the shrewdness of ‘man’ seeks one thing: to be able to live without responsibility.

In the end, therefore, money will be the one thing people will desire, which is moreover only representative, an abstraction. Nowadays a young man hardly envies anyone his gifts, his art, the love of a beautiful girl, or his fame; he only envies him his money. Give me money, he will say, and I am saved... He would die with nothing to reproach himself with, and under the impression that if only he had had the money he might really have lived and might even have achieved something great.

Faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off.

That is the road we all have to take – over the Bridge of Sight into eternity.

Whoever has the world’s treasures has them no matter how he got them. In the world of the spirit it is otherwise.

Men are not on such intimate terms with the sublime that they really can believe in it.

And this is the simple truth – that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.

My tactics were, by God’s aid, to employ every means to make it clear what the requirement of Christianity truly is.