Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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It is very dangerous to go into eternity with possibilities which one has oneself prevented from becoming realities. A possibility is a hint from God. One must follow it.
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When you were called, did you answer or did you not? Perhaps softly and in a whisper?
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I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?
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But doubt is wily and cunning and never, as it is sometimes said to be, loud or defiant. It is unassuming and sly, not bold or assertive - and the more unassuming, the more dangerous.
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It is very important in life to know when your cue comes.
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I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing.
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Learning to know anxiety is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known anxiety or by sinking under it. He therefore who has leaned rightly to be in anxiety has learned the most important thing.
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Idleness, we are accustomed to say, is the root of all evil. To prevent this evil, work is recommended.... Idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; on the contrary, it is truly a divine life, if one is not bored.
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One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical…for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.
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Preparation for becoming attentive to Christianity does not consist in reading many books ... but in fuller immersion in existence.
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The conclusions of passion are the only reliable ones.
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Pain reconciles one to existence. Infinite resignation is that shirt in the old fable. The thread is spun with tears, bleached by tears, the shirt sewn in tears, but then it also gives better protection than iron. The secret in life is that everyone must sew it for himself.
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Without risk, faith is an impossibility.
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Christians remind me of schoolboys who want to look up the answers to their math problems in the back of the book rather than work them through.
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The greatest danger to Christianity is, I contend, not heresies, not heterodoxies, not atheists, not profane secularism - no, but the kind of orthodoxy which is cordial drivel, mediocrity served up sweet. There is nothing that so insidiously displaces the majestic as cordiality.
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However much one generation learns from another, it can never learn from its predecessor the genuinely human factor. In this respect every generation begins afresh. Thus no generation has learned from another how to love, no generation can begin other than at the beginning.
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To the Christian, love is the works of love. To say that love is a feeling or anything of the kind is an unchristian conception of love. That is the aesthetic definition and therefore fits the erotic and everything of that nature. But to the Christian love is the works of love. Christ's love was not an inner feeling, a full heart and what not, it was the work of love which was his life.
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If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.
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Irony is the cultivation of the spirit and therefore follows next after immediacy; then comes the ethicist, then the humourist, then the religious person.
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If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!
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The absurd . . . the fact that with God all things are possible. The absurd is not one of the factors which can be discriminated within the proper compass of the understanding: it is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen.
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Genius never desires what does not exist.
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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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Had I to carve an inscription on my tombstone I would ask for none other than "The Individual."