Quote

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

Soren Kierkegaard

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Soren Kierkegaard
Age: 42 †
Born: 1813
Born: January 1
Died: 1855
Died: January 1
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Theologian
Writer
København
Kierkegaard
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
Victor Eremita
Climacus
Anti-Climacus
Sören Aaby Kierkegaard
Use
Thought
Compensation
Thinking
Seldom
People
Intelligence
Demand
Speech
Liberty
Freedom

More quotes by Soren Kierkegaard

Image
A poet is not an apostle he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
Destroy your primitivity, and you will most probably get along well in the world, maybe achieve great success--but Eternity will reject you. Follow up your primitivity, and you will be shipwrecked in temporality, but accepted by Eternity.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
Reflection is not the evil but a reflective condition and the deadlock which it involves, by transforming the capacity for action into a means of escape from action, is both corrupt and dangerous, and leads in the end to a retrograde movement.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
Silence is the demon's trap, and the more one is silenced, the more terrible the demon but silence is also the divinity's mutual understanding with the single individual.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
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.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
There can be no faith without risk.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
The most terrible fight is not when there is one opinion against another, the most terrible is when two men say the same thing -- and fight about the interpretation, and this interpretation involves a difference of quality.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
To be a saint is to will the one thing.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
The paradox in Christian truth is invariably due to the fact that it is the truth that exists for God. The standard of measure and the end is superhuman and there is only one relationship possible: faith.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
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!
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
Hope is a passion for the possible.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
What the philosophers have to say about reality is often as disappointing as a sign you see in a shop window, which reads Pressing Done Here. If you brought your clothes in to be pressed, you would be fooled: for the sign is only for sale.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
If a man wants to set up as an innkeeper and he does not succeed, it is not comic. If, on the contrary, a girl asks to be allowed to set up as a prostitute and she fails, as sometimes happens, it is comic.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
In order to swim one takes off all one's clothes--in order to aspire to the truth one must undress in a far more inward sense, divest oneself of all one's inward clothes, of thoughts, conceptions, selfishness etc., before one is sufficiently naked.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
Once you label me you negate me.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness I have walked myself into my best thoughts.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
It is a very curious thing about superstition. One would expect that the man who had once seen his morbid dreams were not fulfilled would abandon them for the future but on the contrary they grow even stronger just as the love of gambling increases in a man who has once lost in a lottery.
Soren Kierkegaard