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What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.

Soren Kierkegaard

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Soren Kierkegaard
Age: 42 †
Born: 1813
Born: January 1
Died: 1855
Died: January 1
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Theologian
Writer
København
Kierkegaard
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
Victor Eremita
Climacus
Anti-Climacus
Sören Aaby Kierkegaard
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Unhappy
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Sigh

More quotes by Soren Kierkegaard

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What labels me, negates me.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Do it or don't do it - you will regret both.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Truth is not introduced into the individual from without, but was within him all the time.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.
Soren Kierkegaard
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You wanted God's ideas about what was best for you to coincide with your ideas, but you also wanted him to be the almighty Creator of heaven and earth so that he could properly fulfill your wish. And yet, if he were to share your ideas, he would cease to be the almighty Father.
Soren Kierkegaard
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The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing. But because he wants to do it in his own strength, he is fighting not with man, but with God.
Soren Kierkegaard
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You train yourself in the art of being mysterious to everyone. My dear friend! What if there were no one, who cared about guessing your riddle, what pleasure would you then take in it?
Soren Kierkegaard
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What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world?
Soren Kierkegaard
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Christendom has done away with Christianity without being quite aware of it.
Soren Kierkegaard
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The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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
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To the frivolous Christianity is certainly not glad tidings, for it wishes first of all to make them serious.
Soren Kierkegaard
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The most common despair is...not choosing, or willing, to be oneself...[but] the deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than oneself.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Hope is a passion for the possible.
Soren Kierkegaard
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I believe that there is a longing in my soul that searches the whole world.
Soren Kierkegaard
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I have only one friend, and that is echo. Why is it my friend? Because I love my sorrow, and echo does not take it away from me. I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night. Why is it my confidant? Because it remains silent.
Soren Kierkegaard
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The resolving of the ethical, is freedom the negative resolution also has this, but the freedom, blank and bare, is as if tongue-tied, hard to express, and generally has something hard in its nature. Falling in love, however, promptly sets it to music, even if this composition contains a very difficult passage.
Soren Kierkegaard