Q0119

Søren Kierkegaard

A verified English rendering from the curated archive.

English

Despair is not to will to be oneself — or else to will to be oneself.
Thinker Søren Kierkegaard
School Proto-Existentialism
Source The Sickness unto Death
Theme Philosophy
Another quotation More from this thinker

Source context

This English passage is associated with The Sickness unto Death, within the tradition of Proto-Existentialism. The wording below is a verified rendering prepared for careful reading rather than a claim of unique translation authority.

A short reading

Read in the register of philosophy, the sentence asks the reader to test an assumption rather than to collect a slogan. In Søren Kierkegaard's wider work, similar claims are usually offered as prompts for judgment: what would have to be true for the sentence to hold, and what would follow if it did?

How to cite this quotation

APA: Søren Kierkegaard. (n.d.). Despair is not to will to be oneself — or else to will to be oneself. In Philosophy Blind Box. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0119

MLA: Søren Kierkegaard. “Despair is not to will to be oneself….” Philosophy Blind Box, https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0119.

Chicago: Søren Kierkegaard. “Despair is not to will to be oneself….” Philosophy Blind Box. Accessed 2026. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0119.

Same thinker

More from Søren Kierkegaard

  1. Despair is the sickness unto death — the self's refusal to be itself.
  2. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
  3. Marry, and you will regret it; do not marry, and you will also regret it.
  4. The self is a relation that relates itself to itself.
  5. It is quite true what philosophy says, that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards.

All quotations by Søren Kierkegaard

Same theme

More on philosophy

  1. It is through wonder that people both now begin and first began to philosophize.
  2. A person's character is their destiny.
  3. What is opposed brings together; from what differs comes the finest harmony.
  4. Death is nothing to us: for what has been dissolved has no sensation, and what has no sensation is nothing to us.
  5. Pleasure is the beginning and end of the happy life — not the pleasures of profligates, but freedom from pain in the body and from disturbance in the soul.

Browse the philosophy theme