Daily Inspiration Quote by Søren Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard doesn’t flatter us with the comforting idea that hatred is the opposite of love. He points lower. Enmity between strangers isn’t fueled by passion or even principle; it’s powered by a vacuum. Indifference is the moral basement where hostility becomes cheap, almost recreational. When you don’t recognize the other person as fully real, you don’t need reasons. You need only the permission that comes from not caring.

The line works because it reframes “enemy” as a relationship without relation. Between strangers, there’s no history to settle, no intimacy to betray, no genuine stakes. What remains is a blank space easily filled with suspicion, contempt, or the bureaucratic cruelty of “not my problem.” Kierkegaard’s punch is that indifference isn’t neutral; it’s an active condition that makes harm frictionless. If empathy is the force that slows us down, indifference is the lubricant that lets conflict slide into place.

Context matters: writing in a 19th-century Europe modernizing into anonymity, Kierkegaard was preoccupied with how “the crowd” dissolves responsibility. In a mass public, people become types, not persons; ethics becomes abstract; accountability evaporates. That’s why this sentence lands like a diagnosis of modern life: the stranger isn’t first hated, they’re first unseen. And once unseen, they can be turned into anything - nuisance, threat, punchline, scapegoat - with alarming ease.