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

More quotes by Soren Kierkegaard

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Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm and shrewdly relapsing into repose.
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The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes.
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The greatest danger to Christianity is, I contend, not heresies, not heterodoxies, not atheists, not profane secularism - no, but the kind of orthodoxy which is cordial drivel, mediocrity served up sweet. There is nothing that so insidiously displaces the majestic as cordiality.
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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.
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To the frivolous Christianity is certainly not glad tidings, for it wishes first of all to make them serious.
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Never cease loving a person, and never give up hope for him, for even the prodigal son who had fallen most low, could still be saved the bitterest enemy and also he who was your friend could again be your friend love that has grown cold can kindle.
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Only the noble of heart are called to difficulty.
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The paradox in Christian truth is invariably due to the fact that it is the truth that exists for God. The standard of measure and the end is superhuman and there is only one relationship possible: faith.
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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 highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.
Soren Kierkegaard
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With the daguerreotype, everyone will be able to have their portrait taken . . . and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same.
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There can be no faith without risk.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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.
Soren Kierkegaard
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However much one generation learns from another, it can never learn from its predecessor the genuinely human factor. In this respect every generation begins afresh. Thus no generation has learned from another how to love, no generation can begin other than at the beginning.
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In my great melancholy, I loved life, for I love my melancholy.
Soren Kierkegaard
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In the deepest sense, the being in a state of sin is the sin, the particular sins are not the continuation of sin, they are expressions of its continuation.
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.
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This age will die not as a result of some evil, but from a lack of passion.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Christianity demands the crucifixion of the intellect.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.
Soren Kierkegaard