Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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Never cease loving a person, and never give up hope for him, for even the prodigal son who had fallen most low, could still be saved; the bitterest enemy and also he who was your friend could again be your friend; love that has grown cold can kindle.
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The wisdom of the years is confusing. Only the wisdom of eternity is edifying.
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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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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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Humor is intrinsitc to Christianity.
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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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Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God.
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Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element.
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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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I must find a truth that is true for me.
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If I could prescribe only one remedy for all the ills of the modern world, I would prescribe silence.
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Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.
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Love believes all things and yet is never deceived.
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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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This age will die not as a result of some evil, but from a lack of passion.
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Teach me, God, not to torture myself, not to make a martyr out of myself through stifling reflection, but rather teach me to breathe deeply in faith.
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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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At one time my only wish was to be a police official. It seemed to me to be an occupation for my sleepless intriguing mind. I had the idea that there, among criminals, were people to fight: clever, vigorous, crafty fellows. Later I realized that it was good that I did not become one, for most police cases involve misery and wretchedness-not crimes and scandals.
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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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...my soul always reverts to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There at least one feels that it's human beings talking. There people hate, people love, people murder their enemy and curse his descendants through all generations, there people sin.
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The object of Christian faith is not the teaching but the Teacher.
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Do it or don't do it - you will regret both.
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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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Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.