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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.

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
Individual
Angry
Justified
Doe
Demand
Orthodox
Sacrifice
Virtuous
Nation
Demands
Went
Gods
Submitted
Nations
Proof
Appease
Faith
Save
Isaac
Christian
Sake
Abraham

More quotes by Soren Kierkegaard

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It is not where we breathe, but where we Love, that we live.
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In order to swim one takes off all one's clothes--in order to aspire to the truth one must undress in a far more inward sense, divest oneself of all one's inward clothes, of thoughts, conceptions, selfishness etc., before one is sufficiently naked.
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
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I am convinced that God is love, this thought has for me a primitive lyrical validity. When it is present to me, I am unspeakably blissful, when it is absent, I long for it more vehemently than does the lover for his object.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.
Soren Kierkegaard
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. . .the larger the crowd, the more probable that that which it praises is folly, and the more improbable that it is truth and the most improbable of all that it is any eternal truth.
Soren Kierkegaard
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The absurd . . . the fact that with God all things are possible. The absurd is not one of the factors which can be discriminated within the proper compass of the understanding: it is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen.
Soren Kierkegaard
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The truth is a trap: you cannot get it without it getting you you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.
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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With respect to physical existence, one needs little, and to the degree that one needs less, the more perfect one is.
Soren Kierkegaard
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A 'no' does not hide anything, but a 'yes' very easily becomes a deception.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Silence is the demon's trap, and the more one is silenced, the more terrible the demon but silence is also the divinity's mutual understanding with the single individual.
Soren Kierkegaard
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A genius may perhaps be a century ahead of his age and hence stands there as a paradox, but in the end, the race will assimilate what was once a paradox, so it is no longer paradoxical.
Soren Kierkegaard
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The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.
Soren Kierkegaard
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God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Are you not aware that there comes a midnight hour when everyone must unmask...
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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The resolving of the ethical, is freedom the negative resolution also has this, but the freedom, blank and bare, is as if tongue-tied, hard to express, and generally has something hard in its nature. Falling in love, however, promptly sets it to music, even if this composition contains a very difficult passage.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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.
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