Soren Kierkegaard

Honour him, dear Symparanekromenoi, for his grey hair and his misfortune.

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

Life must be understood backwards but... it must be lived forward.

The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.

Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic if it is pulled out I shall die.

Once you label me you negate me.

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.

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

Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.

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

Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.

A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.

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.

Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.

At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.

Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.

It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.

Purity of heart is to will one thing.

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

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.

Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards.

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

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.

Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness.

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.