Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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I am convinced that God is love, this thought has for me a primitive lyrical validity. When it is present to me, I am unspeakably blissful, when it is absent, I long for it more vehemently than does the lover for his object.
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God is present in the moment of choice, not in order to watch but in order to be chosen. Therefore, each person must choose. Terrible is the battle, in a person's innermost being, between God and the world. The crowning risk involved lies in the possession of choice.
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I have only one friend, and that is echo. Why is it my friend? Because I love my sorrow, and echo does not take it away from me. I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night. Why is it my confidant? Because it remains silent.
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People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
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Prayer is a silent surrendering of everything to God.
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It is modest of the nightingale not to require anyone to listen to it; but it is also proud of the nightingale not to care whether any one listens to it or not.
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But the life of freedom requires a beginning, and here a beginning is a resolution, and the resolution has its work and its pain-thus the beginning has its difficulty.
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Repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life.
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You should therefore say: alone in one's boat, alone with one's care, alone with one's despair, which one is craven enough to want rather to keep than submit to the pain of being healed.
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Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.
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To be a woman is something so strange, so confusing and so complicated that only a woman could put up with it.
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In order to learn true humility (I use this expression to describe the state of mind under discussion), it is good for a person to withdraw from the turmoil of the world (we see that Christ withdrew when the people wanted to proclaim him king as well as when he had to walk the thorny path), for in life either the depressing or the elevating impression is too dominant for a true balance to come about. Here, of course, individuality is very decisive.
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Only one human being recognized as one's neighbour is necessary in order to cure a man of self-love.
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All the shrewdness of 'man' seeks one thing: to be able to live without responsibility.
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To the frivolous Christianity is certainly not glad tidings, for it wishes first of all to make them serious.
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Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.
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In my great melancholy, I loved life, for I love my melancholy.
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The melancholy have the best sense of the comic, the opulent often the best sense of the rustic, the dissolute often the best sense of the moral, and the doubter often the best sense of the religious.
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It is (to describe it figuratively) as if an author were to make a slip of the pen, and as if this clerical error became conscious of being such. Perhaps this was no error but in a far higher sense was an essential part of the whole exposition. It is, then, as if this clerical error were to revolt against the author, out of hatred for him, were to forbid him to correct it, and were to say, "No, I will not be erased, I will stand as a witness against thee, that thou art a very poor writer."
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Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read. Ultimately, you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.
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Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.
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I must find a truth that is true for me.
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If the ethical - that is, social morality- is the highest ... then no categories are needed other than the Greek philosophical categories.
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Men think that it is impossible for a human being to love his enemies, for enemies are hardly able to endure the sight of one another. Well, then, shut your eyes--and your enemy looks just like your neighbor.