Soren Kierkegaard People Quotations

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

People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.

Where there are two people, there is untruth.

If anyone proposes to believe, i.e., imagines himself to believe, because many good and upright people living here on the hill have believed, i.e., have said that they believedthen he is a fool, and it is essentially indifferent whether he believes on account of his own and perhaps a widely held opinion about what good and upright people believe, or believes a Münchhausen.

Most people live dejectedly in worldly joys or sorrows. They sit on the sidelines and do not join the dance.

One could construe the life of man as a great discourse in which the various people represent different parts of speech (the same might apply to states).

What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.

If someone who wanted to learn to dance were to say: For centuries, one generation after the other has learned the positions, and it is high time that I take advantage of this and promptly begin with the quadrille--people would presumably laugh a little at him, but in the world of spirit this is very plausible. What, then, is education? I believed it is the course the individual goes through in order to catch up with himself, and the person who will not go through this course is not much helped by being born in the most enlightened age.

Geniuses are like thunderstorms. They go against the wind, terrify people, cleanse the air.

Worship isn't God's show. God is the audience. God's watching. The congregation, they are the actors in this drama. Worship is their show. And the minister is just reminding the people of their forgotten lines.

There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves.

Shows itself in the notion that what may be objectively true may in the mouth of certain people become false.

...my soul always reverts to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There at least one feels that it's human beings talking. There people hate, people love, people murder their enemy and curse his descendants through all generations, there people sin.

The more people who believe something, the more apt it is to be wrong. The person who's right often has to stand alone.

When all combine in every way to make everything easier, people will want difficulty. I conceived it as my task to make difficulties everywhere.

Those who dream must be awakened, and the deeper the people are who slumber, or the deeper they slumber, the more important it is that they be awakened, and the more powerfully must they be awakened.

The gods were bored and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase in population. Adam was bored alone, then Adam and Eve were bored together; them Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the people were bored en masse.

Adversity not only draws people together, but brings forth that beautiful inward friendship.

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

People have an idea that the preacher is an actor on a stage and they are the critics, blaming or praising him. What they don't know is that they are the actors on the stage; he (the preacher) is merely the prompter standing in the wings, reminding them of their lost lines.

Most people rush after pleasure so fast that they rush right past it.

Most people believe that the Christian commandments are intentionally a little too severe

Most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes--but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.

I'm so misunderstood that people misunderstand me even when I tell them I'm misunderstood.