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Soren Kierkegaard Quotes about Life

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Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Soren Kierkegaard
Love, Life, Positive
The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1844.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

Soren Kierkegaard
Love, Life, Happiness

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.

Soren Kierkegaard
Life, Success, Courage

Once you label me you negate me.

Soren Kierkegaard
Inspirational, Life, Names
"Journal of Marriage and Family Counseling", Vol. 2 by American Association of Marriage and Family Counselors, p. 33, 1976.

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.

Soren Kierkegaard
Life, Loneliness, Simple

To love another person is to help them love God.

Soren Kierkegaard
Love, Life, Helping

Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.

Soren Kierkegaard
Life, Life Lesson, Force

This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness...they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.

Soren Kierkegaard
Life, Soul, Shadow
"Either/Or" by Soren Kierkegaard, ‎Howard Vincent Hong, ‎Edna Hatlestad Hong, Princeton University Press, Vol. 1, (p. 168), 2013.

Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.

Soren Kierkegaard
Inspirational, Life, Teacher

To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self.

Soren Kierkegaard
Life, Motivational, Adventure

There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves.

Soren Kierkegaard
Life, Book, People
"Journals". Book by Soren Kierkegaard, Harper (January 17, 1837), 1959.

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!

Soren Kierkegaard
Life, Success, Wine
Soren Kierkegaard (1959). “Either/ Or”

No time of life is so beautiful as the early days of love, when with every meeting, every glance, one fetches something new home to rejoice over.

Soren Kierkegaard
Love, Life, Beautiful
Soren Kierkegaard (1946). “Either/or”

Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause - that it must be lived forward. The more one thinks through this clause, the more one concludes that life in temporality never becomes properly understandable, simply because never at any time does one get perfect repose to take the stance - backward.

Soren Kierkegaard
Life, Philosophy, Thinking

Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.

Soren Kierkegaard
Inspirational, Life, Motivational

It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.

Soren Kierkegaard
Life, Wisdom, Philosopher
Journal entry (translated by Alexander Dru, 1938).

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward- looking position.

Soren Kierkegaard
Life, Inspiring, Wisdom
Diary (1843)

So to be sick unto death is, not to be able to die-yet not as though there were hope of life; no, the hopelessness in this case is that even the last hope, death, is not available. When death is the greatest danger, one hopes for life; but when one becomes acquainted with an even more dreadful danger, one hopes for death. So when the danger is so great that death has become one's hope, despair is the disconsolateness of not being able to die.

Soren Kierkegaard
Life, Hope, Sick
Soren Kierkegaard (2013). “Sickness Unto Death”, p.12, Simon and Schuster

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.

Soren Kierkegaard
Life, Passion, Soul

Spiritual superiority only sees the individual. But alas, ordinarily we human beings are sensual and, therefore, as soon as it is a gathering, the impression changes - we see something abstract, the crowd, and we become different. But in the eyes of God, the infinite spirit, all the millions that have lived and now live do not make a crowd, He only sees each individual.

Soren Kierkegaard
Life, Spiritual, Eye

The resolving of the ethical, is freedom; the negative resolution also has this, but the freedom, blank and bare, is as if tongue-tied, hard to express, and generally has something hard in its nature. Falling in love, however, promptly sets it to music, even if this composition contains a very difficult passage.

Soren Kierkegaard
Life, Falling In Love, Negative
"Stages on Life's Way" by Søren Kierkegaard, Hong, (p. 111), April 30, 1845.

Repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life.

Soren Kierkegaard
Life, Reality, Repetition

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