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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
Authenticity
Spirituality
Despair
Common
Form

More quotes by Soren Kierkegaard

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The idea of demonstrating that this unknown something [God] exists, could scarcely suggest itself to Reason. For if God does not exist it would of course be impossible to prove it, and if he does exist it would be folly to attempt it.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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.
Soren Kierkegaard
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In my great melancholy, I loved life, for I love my melancholy.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Only the noble of heart are called to difficulty.
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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I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?
Soren Kierkegaard
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Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
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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Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Dread is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Your own tactic is to train yourself in the art of becoming enigmatic to everybody. My young friend, suppose there was no one who troubld himself to guess your riddle--what joy, then, would you have in it?
Soren Kierkegaard
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When you open the door which you shut in order to pray to God, the first person you meet as you go out is your neighbour whom you shall love. Wonderful!
Soren Kierkegaard
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It is a very curious thing about superstition. One would expect that the man who had once seen his morbid dreams were not fulfilled would abandon them for the future but on the contrary they grow even stronger just as the love of gambling increases in a man who has once lost in a lottery.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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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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.
Soren Kierkegaard
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It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand.
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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Because of its tremendous solemnity death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearances.
Soren Kierkegaard
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...the reason for [this age's] anxiety and unrest is because in one direction, 'truth' increases in scope and quantity - via science and technology - while in the other, certainty and confidence steadily decline. Our age is a master in developing truths while being wholly indifferent to certitude. It lacks confidence in the good.
Soren Kierkegaard