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

More quotes by Soren Kierkegaard

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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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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.
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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.
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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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Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.
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In the Christianity of Christendom the Cross has become something like the child’s hobby-horse and trumpet.
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In a theatre it happened that a fire started off stage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed-amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Faith is the highest passion in a man.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.
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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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There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life's highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.
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.
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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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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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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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But doubt is wily and cunning and never, as it is sometimes said to be, loud or defiant. It is unassuming and sly, not bold or assertive - and the more unassuming, the more dangerous.
Soren Kierkegaard
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I believe that there is a longing in my soul that searches the whole world.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Boredom rests upon the nothingness that winds its way through existence its giddiness, like that which comes from gazing down into an infinite abyss, is infinite.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do
Soren Kierkegaard
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Who is also aware of the tremendous risk involved in faith - when he nevertheless makes the leap of faith - this [is] subjectivity ... at its height.
Soren Kierkegaard