Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant. ... My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known - no wonder, then, that I return the love.
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There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse.
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What our age lacks is not reflection, but passion.
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To love another person is to help them love God.
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The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
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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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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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I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations - one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it - you will regret both.
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When you read God's Word, you must constantly be saying to yourself, "It is talking to me, and about me".
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Most people believe that the Christian commandments, e.g. to love one's neighbor as oneself, are intentionally a little too severe - like setting a clock half an hour ahead to make sure of not being late in the morning.
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The only analogy I have before me is Socrates. My task is a Socratic task, to revise the definition of what it is to be a Christian. For my part I do not call myself a "Christian" (thus keeping the ideal free), but I am able to make it evident that the others are still less than I.
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The most common form of despair is not being who you are.
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And then the spirit brings hope, hope in the strictest Christian sense, hope which is hoping against hope. For an immediate hope exists in every person; it may be more powerfully alive in one person than in another; but in death every hope of this kind dies and turns into hopelessness. Into this night of hopelessness (it is death that we are describing) comes the life-giving spirit and brings hope, the hope of eternity. It is against hope, for there was no longer any hope for that merely natural hope; this hope is therefore a hope contrary to hope.
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Christ has not only spoken to us by his life but has also spoken for us by his death.
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A human being is a spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation.
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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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Freedom's possibility is not the ability to choose the good or the evil. The possibility is to be able.
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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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Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.
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Do you know of any more overwhelming and humbling expression for God's condescension and extravagance towards us human beings than that He places Himself, so to say, on the same level of choice with the world, just so that we may be able to choose; that God, if language dare speak thus, woos humankind - that He, the eternally strong one, woos sapless humanity? Yet, how insignificant is the young lover's choice between her pursuers by comparison with this choice between God and the world.
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The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.
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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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...knowing God is the condition for the sanctification of a human being by God's assistance and according to His intention. Wherever God is, there He is always creating... He wants to create a new human being. To need God is to become new. And to know God is the crucial thing.
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This is the miracle of life: that each person who heeds him or herself knows what no scientist can ever know: who he or she is.