Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts.
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The thing that cowardice fears most is decision.
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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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I'm so misunderstood that people misunderstand me even when I tell them I'm misunderstood.
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There can be no faith without risk.
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Spirit is the third, yet in such a way that one can speak of a synthesis only when the spirit is posited.
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In the end, therefore, money will be the one thing people will desire, which is moreover only representative, an abstraction. Nowadays a young man hardly envies anyone his gifts, his art, the love of a beautiful girl, or his fame; he only envies him his money. Give me money, he will say, and I am saved...He would die with nothing to reproach himself with, and under the impression that if only he had had the money he might really have lived and might even have achieved something great.
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And this is one of the most crucial definitions for the whole of Christianity; that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.
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If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin. Even though the result may gladden the whole world, that cannot help the hero; for he knows the result only when the whole thing is over, and that is not how he became a hero, but by virtue of the fact that he began.
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Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.
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We live as if we were unaware of our impending destruction.
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What a misfortune to be a woman! And yet, the worst misfortune is not to understand what a misfortune it is.
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People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.
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Only one deception is possible in the infinite sense, self-deception.
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Boredom rests upon the nothingness that winds its way through existence; its giddiness, like that which comes from gazing down into an infinite abyss, is infinite.
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Take it and return it: the kiss of love.
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If a man wants to set up as an innkeeper and he does not succeed, it is not comic. If, on the contrary, a girl asks to be allowed to set up as a prostitute and she fails, as sometimes happens, it is comic.
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The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo; the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes.
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Why I so much prefer autumn to spring is that in the autumn one looks at heaven--in the spring at the earth.
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Sin is: before God, or with the conception of God, in despair not to will to be oneself, or in despair to will to be oneself. Thus sin is intensified weakness or intensified defiance: sin is the intensification of despair. The emphasis is on before God, or with a conception of God; it is the conception of God that makes sin dialectically, ethically, and religiously what lawyers call 'aggravated' despair.
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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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Love believes all things and yet is never deceived.
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What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.
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It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.