Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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The truth is lived before it is understood. It must be fought for, tested, and appropriated. Truth is the way... Anyone will easily understand it if he just gives himself to it.
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What a difference! Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient! when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular and infinitely boring.
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Had I to carve an inscription on my tombstone I would ask for none other than "The Individual."
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When you open the door which you shut in order to pray to God, the first person you meet as you go out is your neighbour whom you shall love. Wonderful!
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Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
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As I stood alone and forsaken, and the power of the sea and the battle of the elements reminded me of my own nothingness, and on the other hand, the sure flight of the birds recalled the words spoken by Christ: Not a sparrow shall fall on the ground without your Father: then, all at once, I felt how great and how small I was; then did those two mighty forces, pride and humility, happily unite in friendship.
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Any truth is only true up to a certain point. When one oversteps the mark, it becomes a non-truth.
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The question is not "To be or not to be," it is what we should be until we are not.
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A man may perform astonishing feats and comprehend a vast amount of knowledge, and yet have no understanding of himself. But suffering directs a man to look within. If it succeeds, then there, within him, is the beginning of his learning.
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The spiritual differs from the religious in being able to endure isolation. The rank of a spiritual person is proportionate to his strength for enduring isolation, whereas we religious people are constantly in need of 'the others,' the herd. We religious folks die, or despair, if we are not reassured by being in the assembly, of the same opinion as the congregation, and so on. But the Christianity of the New Testament is precisely related to the isolation of the spiritual man.
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No time of life is so beautiful as the early days of love, when with every meeting, every glance, one fetches something new home to rejoice over.
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Knowledge is an attitude, a passion, actually an illicit attitude. For the compulsion to know is like dipsomania, erotomania, and homicidal mania, in producing a character that is out of balance. It is not at all that the scientist goes after the truth.
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Theology sits rouged at the window and courts philosophy's favor, offering to sell her charms to it.
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Nowadays not even a suicide kills himself in desperation. Before taking the step he deliberates so long and so carefully that he literally chokes with thought. It is even questionable whether he ought to be called a suicide, since it is really thought which takes his life. He does not die with deliberation but from deliberation.
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Backwards understood be only can but, forwards lived be must life.
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What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?
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I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing.
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At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.
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Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?
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The meaning lies in the appropriation.
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The person who praises God is on the tracks of justice.
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For like a poisonous breath over the fields, like a mass of locusts over Egypt, so the swarm of excuses is a general plaque, a ruinous infection among men, that eats off the sprouts of the Eternal.
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Shows itself in the notion that what may be objectively true may in the mouth of certain people become false.
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Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.