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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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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
Goes
Illicit
Passion
Homicidal
Knowledge
Mania
Actually
Compulsion
Truth
Producing
Character
Scientist
Like
Balance
Attitude

More quotes by Soren Kierkegaard

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Do it or don't do it - you will regret both.
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People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
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Truth is not introduced into the individual from without, but was within him all the time.
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In a mathematical proposition, for example, the objectivity is given, but therefore its truth is also an indifferent truth.
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What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do 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.
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Just as in the great moment of resignation one does not mediate but chooses, now the task is to gain proficiency in repeating the impassioned choice and, existing, to express it in existence.
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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.
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You wanted God's ideas about what was best for you to coincide with your ideas, but you also wanted him to be the almighty Creator of heaven and earth so that he could properly fulfill your wish. And yet, if he were to share your ideas, he would cease to be the almighty Father.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.
Soren Kierkegaard
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A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized prayer is listening.
Soren Kierkegaard
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The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.
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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I have, I believe, the courage to doubt everything I have, I believe, the courage to fight against everything but I do not have the courage to acknowledge anything, the courage to possess, to own anything.
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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...even the richest personality is nothing before he has chosen himself, and on the other hand even what one might call the poorest personality is everything when he has chosen himself for the great thing is not to be this or that but to be oneself, and this everyone can be if he wills it.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness I have walked myself into my best thoughts.
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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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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To the frivolous Christianity is certainly not glad tidings, for it wishes first of all to make them serious.
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