Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
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Most people live dejectedly in worldly joys or sorrows. They sit on the sidelines and do not join the dance.
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One could construe the life of man as a great discourse in which the various people represent different parts of speech (the same might apply to states).
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Above all, do not lose your desire to walk.
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Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do.
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How could it occur to anyone to demonstrate that God exists unless one has already allowed Himself to ignore Him? A king's existence is demonstrated by way of subjection and submissiveness. Do you want to try and demonstrate that the king exists? Will you do so by offering a string of proofs, a series of arguments? No. If you are serious, you will demonstrate the king's existence by your submission, by the way you live. And so it is with demonstrating God's existence. It is accomplished not by proofs but by worship. Any other way is but a thinker's pious bungling.
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My sorrow is my castle.
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The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.
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No one is so terribly deceived as he who does not himself suspect it.
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There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.
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It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.
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Affliction is able to drown out every earthly voice. . . but the voice of eternity within a person it cannot drown.
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It doesn't occur to me at this moment to say more; another time, perhaps tomorrow, I may have more to say, but always the same thing and about the same, for only gypsies, robber gangs and swindlers follow the adage that where a person has once been he is never to go again.
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Now, with God's help, I shall become myself.
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... all comparisons injure.
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The paradox in Christian truth is invariably due to the fact that it is the truth that exists for God. The standard of measure and the end is superhuman; and there is only one relationship possible: faith.
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The truth is a trap: you cannot get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.
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Any truth is only true up to a certain point. When one oversteps the mark, it becomes a non-truth.
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The more people who believe something, the more apt it is to be wrong. The person who's right often has to stand alone.
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Ulysses was not comely, but he was eloquent, Yet he fired two goddesses of the sea with love.
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Whoever thou art, whatever in other respects thy life may be, my friend, by ceasing to take part (if ordinarily thou doest) in the public worship of God, as it now is (with the claim that it is the Christianity of the New Testament), thou hast constantly one guilt the less, and that a great one: thou dost not take part in treating God as a fool by calling that the Christianity of the New Testament which is not the Christianity of the New Testament.
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Don't you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this?
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A genius may perhaps be a century ahead of his age and hence stands there as a paradox, but in the end, the race will assimilate what was once a paradox, so it is no longer paradoxical.
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The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever.
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It is only all too easy to understand the requirements contained in God's Word ('Give all your goods to the poor.' 'If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the left.' 'If anyone takes your coat, let him have your cloak also. Rejoice always.' 'Count it sheer joy when you meet various temptations' etc.). The most ignorant, poor creature cannot honestly deny being able to understand God's requirements. But it is tough on the flesh to will to understand it and to then act accordingly. It is not a question of interpretation, but action.