Famous Soren Kierkegaard Quotes Explained
Soren Kierkegaard was a 19th-century Danish philosopher, theologian, and religious author, widely regarded as the first existentialist thinker. Kierkegaard wrote under multiple pseudonyms and in many genres; below are eight of the most-quoted lines from across the authorship, with notes on their context.
Attributed to Soren Kierkegaard:
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
What it means
From The Concept of Anxiety (1844). Kierkegaard's analysis links anxiety (Angst) to freedom: the awareness that one can choose, that nothing fixes the choice in advance, produces a vertiginous instability. Anxiety is not pathological in his account but constitutive of being human.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
Det er ganske sandt, hvad Philosophien siger, at Livet maa forstaaes baglænds. Men derover glemmer man den anden Sætning, at det maa leves forlænds.
What it means
From Kierkegaard's Journals (1843). The aphorism states the asymmetry of biography: intelligibility comes only after the events are over, while choice has to be made while they are unfolding. The temporal mismatch is one of Kierkegaard's recurrent themes.
Attributed to Soren Kierkegaard:
“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
What it means
A condensation of Kierkegaard's analysis of despair in The Sickness Unto Death (1849). Despair, for Kierkegaard, is not primarily an emotion but a structural disorder of the self: the failure to coincide with what one actually is rather than what one performs.
Attributed to Soren Kierkegaard:
“To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”
What it means
From Kierkegaard's Journals. The pair states the existentialist's wager: action carries the risk of failure, but inaction carries the certainty of self-loss. The two options are not symmetrical, even though the first is more conspicuously frightening.
Attributed to Soren Kierkegaard:
“Faith is the highest passion in a human being.”
What it means
From Fear and Trembling (1843), in Kierkegaard's analysis of Abraham. Faith, in Kierkegaard's account, is not assent to propositions but a passionate commitment that exceeds the demands of reason — what he calls the "leap." The position became the seed of twentieth-century religious existentialism.
“Purity of heart is to will one thing.”
The two guides call out to a man early and late. And yet, no, for when remorse calls to a man it is always late. The call to find the way again by seeking out God in the confession of sins is always at the eleventh hour. Whether you are young or old, whether you have sinned much or little, whether you have offended much or neglected much, the guilt makes this call come at the eleventh hour. The in
What it means
The title and central image of Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847). Kierkegaard's claim is that the moral self is unified by sustained commitment to a single overriding good; double-mindedness fragments the self regardless of the multiplicity of the goods it pursues.
Attributed to Soren Kierkegaard:
“Boredom is the root of all evil.”
What it means
From Either/Or (1843), in the aesthete's diary. Kierkegaard treats boredom as the existential state that exposes the failure of merely aesthetic life: the pursuit of novel pleasures eventually empties out and reveals the absence of any deeper commitment.
Attributed to Soren Kierkegaard:
“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”
What it means
Attributed to Kierkegaard's discourses and devotional writings. The reformulation moves prayer from the petitionary to the transformative: the point is not to alter what God wills but to alter the petitioner's relation to it.