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The deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than himself.

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
Deepest
Despair
Choose
Another
Form

More quotes by Soren Kierkegaard

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If a man wants to set up as an innkeeper and he does not succeed, it is not comic. If, on the contrary, a girl asks to be allowed to set up as a prostitute and she fails, as sometimes happens, it is comic.
Soren Kierkegaard
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It is better to try something and fail than to try nothing and succeed. The result may be the same, but you won't be. We always grow more through defeats than victories.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Learning to know anxiety is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known anxiety or by sinking under it. He therefore who has leaned rightly to be in anxiety has learned the most important thing.
Soren Kierkegaard
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...the greatest thing each person can do is to give himself to God utterly and unconditionally - weaknesses, fears, and all. For God loves obedience more than good intentions or second-best offerings, which are all too often made under the guise of weakness.
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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Now, with God's help, I shall become myself.
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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During the first period of our lives the greatest danger is not to take the risk. When once the risk has been taken, then the greatest danger is to risk too much. By not risking at first one turns aside and serves trivialities in the second case, by risking too much, one turns aside to the fantastic and perhaps to presumption.
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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Job endured everything - until his friends came to comfort him, then he grew impatient.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Where unclarity resides, there is temptation, and there it proves only too easily the stronger. Wherever there is ambiguity, wherever there is wavering, there is disobedience down at the bottom.
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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Nothing is as heady as the wine of possibility
Soren Kierkegaard
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Reflection is not the evil but a reflective condition and the deadlock which it involves, by transforming the capacity for action into a means of escape from action, is both corrupt and dangerous, and leads in the end to a retrograde movement.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Why I so much prefer autumn to spring is that in the autumn one looks at heaven--in the spring at the earth.
Soren Kierkegaard
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The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Destroy your primitivity, and you will most probably get along well in the world, maybe achieve great success--but Eternity will reject you. Follow up your primitivity, and you will be shipwrecked in temporality, but accepted by Eternity.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Worship isn't God's show. God is the audience. God's watching. The congregation, they are the actors in this drama. Worship is their show. And the minister is just reminding the people of their forgotten lines.
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
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Philosophy is life's dry-nurse, who can take care of us - but not suckle us.
Soren Kierkegaard