Quotes from Soren Kierkegaard

To love another person is to help them love God.

Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.

This is all that I've known for certain, that God is love. Even if I have been mistaken on this or that point: God is nevertheless love.

Love believes all things and yet is never deceived.

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

Ulysses was not comely, but he was eloquent, Yet he fired two goddesses of the sea with love

There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.

The truth is lived before it is understood. It must be fought for, tested, and appropriated. Truth is the way... Anyone will easily understand it if he just gives himself to it.

The truth is a trap: you cannot get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.

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.

In my great melancholy, I loved life, for I love my melancholy.

When you open the door which you shut in order to pray to God, the first person you meet as you go out is your neighbour whom you shall love. Wonderful!

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.

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.

Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.

Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart it torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say. "May new sufferings torment your soul."

The most painful state of living is remembering the future.

The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.

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

What labels me, negates me.

The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.