Soren Kierkegaard Doe Quotations

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

Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.

The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.

Just as in the great moment of resignation one does not mediate but chooses, now the task is to gain proficiency in repeating the impassioned choice and, existing, to express it in existence.

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.

The idea of demonstrating that this unknown something [God] exists, could scarcely suggest itself to Reason. For if God does not exist it would of course be impossible to prove it, and if he does exist it would be folly to attempt it.

Genius never desires what does not exist.

God does not think; he creates. He does not exist; he is eternal.

No one is so terribly deceived as he who does not himself suspect it.

O Luther, you had 95 theses . . . The matter is far more terrible-there is only one thesis. The Christianity of the New Testament does not exist at all. Here there is nothing to reform.

It was not to save a nation that Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac, nor to appease angry gods... Then why does Abraham do it? For God's sake... He does it for the sake of God because God demands proof of his faith... He was not justified by being virtuous, but by being an individual submitted to God in faith.

To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc.

The question is asked in ignorance, by one who does not even know what can have led him to ask it.

A 'no' does not hide anything, but a 'yes' very easily becomes a deception.

I am convinced that God is love, this thought has for me a primitive lyrical validity. When it is present to me, I am unspeakably blissful, when it is absent, I long for it more vehemently than does the lover for his object.