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If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.

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
Would
Outcomes
According
Judge
Judging
Begin
Anyone
Action
Verge
Never
Outcome

More quotes by Soren Kierkegaard

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In a theatre it happened that a fire started off stage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed-amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.
Soren Kierkegaard
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It requires courage not to surrender oneself to the ingenious or compassionate counsels of despair that would induce a man to eliminate himself from the ranks of the living but it does not follow from this that every huckster who is fattened and nourished in self-confidence has more courage than the man who yielded to despair.
Soren Kierkegaard
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In order to help another effectively, I must understand what he understands. If I do not know that, my greater understanding will be of no help to him... instruction begins when you put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and in the way he understands it.
Soren Kierkegaard
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The greatest danger to Christianity is, I contend, not heresies, not heterodoxies, not atheists, not profane secularism - no, but the kind of orthodoxy which is cordial drivel, mediocrity served up sweet. There is nothing that so insidiously displaces the majestic as cordiality.
Soren Kierkegaard
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On the secretly blushing cheek is reflected the glow of the heart
Soren Kierkegaard
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Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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.
Soren Kierkegaard
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The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.
Soren Kierkegaard
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God is present in the moment of choice, not in order to watch but in order to be chosen. Therefore, each person must choose. Terrible is the battle, in a person's innermost being, between God and the world. The crowning risk involved lies in the possession of choice.
Soren Kierkegaard
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The door to happiness opens outward.
Soren Kierkegaard
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A good decision is our will to do everything we can within our power. It means to serve God with all we've got, be it little or much. Every person can do that.
Soren Kierkegaard
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People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Nowadays not even a suicide kills himself in desperation. Before taking the step he deliberates so long and so carefully that he literally chokes with thought. It is even questionable whether he ought to be called a suicide, since it is really thought which takes his life. He does not die with deliberation but from deliberation.
Soren Kierkegaard
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People have an idea that the preacher is an actor on a stage and they are the critics, blaming or praising him. What they don't know is that they are the actors on the stage he (the preacher) is merely the prompter standing in the wings, reminding them of their lost lines.
Soren Kierkegaard
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When all combine in every way to make everything easier, people will want difficulty. I conceived it as my task to make difficulties everywhere.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Pleasure disappoints possibility never.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Job endured everything - until his friends came to comfort him, then he grew impatient.
Soren Kierkegaard
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In a mathematical proposition, for example, the objectivity is given, but therefore its truth is also an indifferent truth.
Soren Kierkegaard