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The most common form of despair is not being who you are.

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
Form
Authenticity
Spirituality
Despair
Common

More quotes by Soren Kierkegaard

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Knowledge is an attitude, a passion, actually an illicit attitude. For the compulsion to know is like dipsomania, erotomania, and homicidal mania, in producing a character that is out of balance. It is not at all that the scientist goes after the truth.
Soren Kierkegaard
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But doubt is wily and cunning and never, as it is sometimes said to be, loud or defiant. It is unassuming and sly, not bold or assertive - and the more unassuming, the more dangerous.
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Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner put yourself in his place so that you may understand . . . what he learns and the way he understands it.
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It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Irony is the birth-pangs of the objective mind (based upon the misrelationship, discovered by the I , between existence and the idea of existence). Humor is the birth -pangs of the absolute mind (based upon the misrelationship, discovered by the I , between the I and the idea of the I .
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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How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.
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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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My scholarly expectation is then that I may succeed in becoming clever in philosophy in spite of my stupidity.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Maturity consists in the discovery that there comes a critical moment where everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand more and more that there is something which cannot be understood.
Soren Kierkegaard
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In the eyes of God, the infinite spirit, all the millions that have lived and now live do not make a crowd. He only sees each individual
Soren Kierkegaard
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Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Death induces the sensual person to say: Let us eat and drink, because tomorrow we shall die - but this is sensuality's cowardly lust for life, that contemptible order of things where one lives in order to eat and drink instead of eating and drinking in order to live.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Worldly wisdom thinks that love is a relationship between man and man. Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between man-God-man, that is, that God is the middle term.
Soren Kierkegaard
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When you were called, did you answer or did you not? Perhaps softly and in a whisper?
Soren Kierkegaard
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No one may pride himself at being more than an individual, and no one despondently think that he is not an individual.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Where there are two people, there is untruth.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Nothing is as heady as the wine of possibility
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