Quotes from Soren Kierkegaard

To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. I am not a teacher, only a fellow student.

To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc.

The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply, 'Create silence'.

Backwards understood be only can but, forwards lived be must life.

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

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.

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.

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.

The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.

The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have.

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!

Once you label me you negate me.

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.

Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.

If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.

People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid.

For without risk there is no faith, and the greater the risk, the greater the faith.

Christendom has done away with Christianity without being quite aware of it.

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.

Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.

If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.