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Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.

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
Understood
Life
Forwards
Backwards
Lived

More quotes by 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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Christians remind me of schoolboys who want to look up the answers to their math problems in the back of the book rather than work them through.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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).
Soren Kierkegaard
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Talent warms-up the given (as they say in cookery) and makes it apparent genius brings something new. But our time lets talent pass for genius. They want to abolish the genius, deify the genius, and let talent forge ahead.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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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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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The task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted.
Soren Kierkegaard
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The wisdom of the years is confusing. Only the wisdom of eternity is edifying.
Soren Kierkegaard
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People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.
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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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.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Now, with God's help, I shall become myself.
Soren Kierkegaard
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...there is one thing that all Satan's cunning and all the snares of temptation cannot take by surprise - an undivided will.
Soren Kierkegaard
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If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. If I wish to preserve myself in faith I must constantly be intent upon holding fast the objective uncertainty so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of water, still preserving my faith.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Where there are two people, there is untruth.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Therefore do not deceive yourself! Of all deceivers fear most yourself!
Soren Kierkegaard
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Only the noble of heart are called to difficulty.
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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What the philosophers have to say about reality is often as disappointing as a sign you see in a shop window, which reads Pressing Done Here. If you brought your clothes in to be pressed, you would be fooled: for the sign is only for sale.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Jurists say that a capital crime submerges all lesser crimes and so it is with faith. Its absurdity makes all petty difficultiesvanish.
Soren Kierkegaard