Skip to content

Since the world does not really believe in God, in the long run the God-fearing person must really love himself. The God-fearing person does not love what the world loves, but then what is left—God and himself. The world takes God away, and therefore the God-fearing person loves himself. The world regards the fear of God as self-love.

— Søren Kierkegaard

Another quote →

More quotes by Søren Kierkegaard

It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.

The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.

Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go.

The Concept of Anxiety (1844)

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

Either/Or (1843)

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are.

All Søren Kierkegaard quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Søren Kierkegaard (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.