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Genius never desires what does not exist.

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
Desires
Exist
Genius
Desire
Doe
Never

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Christendom has done away with Christianity without being quite aware of it.
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Language has time as its element all other media have space as their element.
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God is present in the moment of choice, not in order to watch but in order to be chosen. Therefore, each person must choose. Terrible is the battle, in a person's innermost being, between God and the world. The crowning risk involved lies in the possession of choice.
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Now, with God's help, I shall become myself.
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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.
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One should be an enigma not just to others but to oneself too. I study myself. When I'm tired of that I light a cigar to pass the time, and think: God only knows what the good Lord really meant with me, or what He meant to make of me.
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The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.
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When you open the door which you shut in order to pray to God, the first person you meet as you go out is your neighbour whom you shall love. Wonderful!
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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.
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The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.
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Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.
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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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The minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion.
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Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.
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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.
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To be lost in spiritlessness is the most terrible thing of all.
Soren Kierkegaard
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I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.
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Seek first God's Kingdom, that is, become like the lilies and the birds, become perfectly silent - then shall the rest be added unto you.
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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).
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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