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.

What a difference! Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient! when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular and infinitely boring.

I need the enchantment of creative work to help me forget life’s mean pettinesses.

But one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow.

Only one human being recognized as one’s neighbour is necessary in order to cure a man of self-love.

Language is partly something originally given, partly that which develops freely. And just as the individual... can never reach the point at which he becomes absolutely independent... so too with language.

How ironical that it is by means of speech that man can degrade himself below the level of dumb creation – for a chatterbox is truly of a lower category than a dumb creature.

He follows his heart’s desire, but having found what he sought he wanders round to everyone’s door with his song and speech, so that all can admire the hero as he does, be proud of the hero as he is.

He who does not know how to encircle a girl so that she loses sight of everything he does not want her to see, he who does not know how to poetize himself into a girl so that it is from her that everything proceeds as he wants it-he is and remains a bungler.