Quotes by Soren Kierkegaard

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

"The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you."

"People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something."

"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."

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

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

"What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music."

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

"Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable."

"Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself."

"Don't forget to love yourself."

"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."

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

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

"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 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."

"Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer."

"I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this."

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