On Søren Kierkegaard - Collected Quotes

"How close men, despite all their knowledge, usually live to madness? What is truth but to live for an idea? When all is said and done, everything is based on a postulate; but not until it no longer stands on the outside, not until one lives in it, does it cease to be a postulate." (Søren Kierkegaard, "The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard" 1A75, 1835)

"Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element." (Søren Kierkegaard, "Either/Or: A Fragment of Life", 1843)

"One should not think slightly of the paradoxical; for the paradox is the source of the thinker's passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity." (Søren Kierkegaard, "Philosophical Fragments: Or, A Fragment of Philosophy" 1844)

"So it happens at times that a person believes that he has a world-view, but that there is yet one particular phenomenon that is of such a nature that it baffles the understanding, and that he explains differently and attempts to ignore in order not to harbor the thought that this phenomenon might overthrow the whole view, or that his reflection does not possess enough courage and resolution to penetrate the phenomenon with his world-view." (Søren Kierkegaard, 1844)

"Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read-ultimately you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books." (Søren Kierkegaard, "Stages on Life's Way", 1845)

"All essential knowledge relates to existence, or only such knowledge as has an essential relationship to existence is essential knowledge." (Søren Kierkegaard, "Concluding Unscientific Postscript", 1846)

"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." (Søren Kierkegaard, [The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard] 1847)

"Take away the paradox from a thinker and you have a professor." (Søren Kierkegaard, 

[journal entry] 1849)

"Once a man acts in a decisive sense and comes out into reality, existence can get a grip on him and providence educate him." (Søren Kierkegaard, [4journal entry] 1850)