755 Quotes by Søren Kierkegaard

My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known -- no wonder, then, that I return the love.

Dread is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.

The paradox is the authentic pathos of the intellectual life, and just as only great souls are susceptible to passions, so are only great thinkers susceptible to what I call Sparadoxes, which are nothing other than grandiose thoughts, not yet fully developed.

Being free requires us to release the brakes that anxiety represents in order to accept and appropriate our proper spiritual fulfillment or perhaps even to recognize, if that is what we in the end believe, that no such prospect is in store.

Anxiety: the dizziness of freedom.

Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy -- to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. Therefore, whenever I see a fly settling, in the decisive moment, on the nose of such a person of affairs; or if he is spattered with mud from a carriage which drives past him in still greater haste; or the drawbridge opens up before him; or a tile falls down and knocks him dead, then I laugh heartily.

God creates out of nothing, wonderful, you say: yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.

Faith itself is a wonder, and everything that is true of the paradox is also true of faith.

Some bend eternity into time for the imagination. Conceived in this way, eternity produces an enchanting effect. One does not know whether it is a dream or actuality.