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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.
Soren Kierkegaard -
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.
Soren Kierkegaard
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The wisdom of the years is confusing. Only the wisdom of eternity is edifying.
Soren Kierkegaard -
Dread is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.
Soren Kierkegaard -
The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.
Soren Kierkegaard -
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.
Soren Kierkegaard -
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.
Soren Kierkegaard -
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.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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.
Soren Kierkegaard -
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.
Soren Kierkegaard -
Your own tactic is to train yourself in the art of becoming enigmatic to everybody. My young friend, suppose there was no one who troubld himself to guess your riddle--what joy, then, would you have in it?
Soren Kierkegaard -
Take it and return it: the kiss of love.
Soren Kierkegaard -
It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.
Soren Kierkegaard -
...the reason for this age's anxiety and unrest is because in one direction, 'truth' increases in scope and quantity - via science and technology - while in the other, certainty and confidence steadily decline. Our age is a master in developing truths while being wholly indifferent to certitude. It lacks confidence in the good.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Dread is a womanish debility in which freedom swoons. Psychologically speaking, the fall into sin always occurs in impotence. But dread is at the same time the most egotistic thing.
Soren Kierkegaard -
I'm so misunderstood that people misunderstand me even when I tell them I'm misunderstood.
Soren Kierkegaard -
It's better to get lost in the passion than to lose the passion.
Soren Kierkegaard -
The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.
Soren Kierkegaard -
Faith is a marvel, and yet no human being is excluded from it; for that in which all human life is united is passion, and faith is a passion.
Soren Kierkegaard -
Humor is intrinsitc to Christianity.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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.
Soren Kierkegaard -
May new sufferings torment your soul.
Soren Kierkegaard -
With respect to physical existence, one needs little, and to the degree that one needs less, the more perfect one is.
Soren Kierkegaard -
A road well begun is the battle half won. The important thing is to make a beginning and get under way.
Soren Kierkegaard