Wisdom of Soren Kierkegaard

Soren Kierkegaard (May 5th, 1813 – November 11th, 1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian, social critic, poet, and religious author who many consider to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical works on organized religion, morality, ethics, psychology, and the philosophy of religion.

Below we list some words of wisdom by Soren Kierkegaard.

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

"It is better to try something and fail than to try nothing and succeed. The result may be the same, but you won't be. We always grow more through defeats than victories."

"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."

"People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness."

"I found I had less and less to say, until finally, I became silent, and began to listen. I discovered in the silence, the voice of God"

"The most common form of despair is not being who you are."

"In a theatre it happened that a fire started off stage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed-amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke."

"Geniuses are like thunderstorms: they go against the wind, terrify people, clear the air."

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

"It's better to get lost in the passion than to lose the passion"

"Take a chance and you may lose. Take not a chance and you have lost already."

"Christ was crucified because he would have nothing to do with the crowd (even though he addressed himself to all). He did not want to form a party, an interest group, a mass movement, but wanted to be what he was, the truth, which is related to the single individual. Therefore everyone who will genuinely serve the truth is by that very fact a martyr. To win a crowd is no art; for that only untruth is needed, nonsense, and a little knowledge of human passions. But no witness to the truth dares to get involved with the crowd."

"It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand."

"If I could prescribe only one remedy for all the ills of the modern world, I would prescribe silence."

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

"The unhappy person is never present to themself because they always live in the past or the future."

"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."

"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."

"Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?"

"The door to happiness opens outward."

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

"Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth."

"The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived."

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

"In order to help another effectively, I must understand what he understands. If I do not know that, my greater understanding will be of no help to him... instruction begins when you put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and in the way he understands it."

"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."

"It is not the path which is the difficulty; rather, it is the difficulty which is the path."

"The greatest danger to Christianity is, I contend, not heresies, not heterodoxies, not atheists, not profane secularism - no, but the kind of orthodoxy which is cordial drivel, mediocrity served up sweet. There is nothing that so insidiously displaces the majestic as cordiality."

"The minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion."

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

Copyright Stephen Petullo, Stephen Petullo