Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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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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The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.
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Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.
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I must find a truth that is true for me.
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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.
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Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
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Sin is in itself separation from the good, but despair over sin is separation a second time.
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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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It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.
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Future is everything that past has forgotten.
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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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It was not to save a nation that Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac, nor to appease angry gods... Then why does Abraham do it? For God's sake... He does it for the sake of God because God demands proof of his faith... He was not justified by being virtuous, but by being an individual submitted to God in faith.
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All essential knowledge relates to existence, or only such knowledge as has an essential relationship to existence is essential knowledge.
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Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.
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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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The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
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It is impossible to exist without passion.
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The great trick with a woman is to get rid of her while she think's she's rid of you.
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If I had a humble spirit in my service who, when I asked for a glass of water, brought me the world's costliest wines blended in a chalice, I should dismiss him, in order to teach him that my pleasure consists, not in what I enjoy, but in having my own way.
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My scholarly expectation is then that I may succeed in becoming clever in philosophy in spite of my stupidity.
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Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. Therefore, whenever I see a fly settling, in the decisive moment, on the nose of such a person of affairs; or if he is spattered with mud from a carriage which drives past him in still greater haste; or the drawbridge opens up before him; or a tile falls down and knocks him dead, then I laugh heartily.
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Purity of heart is to will one thing.
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The question of immortality is of its nature not a scholarly question. It is a question welling up from the interior which the subject must put to itself as it becomes conscious of itself.
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I divide my time as follows: half the time I sleep, the other half I dream. I never dream when I sleep, for that would be a pity, for sleeping is the highest accomplishment of genius.