Quote

Destroy your primitivity, and you will most probably get along well in the world, maybe achieve great success--but Eternity will reject you. Follow up your primitivity, and you will be shipwrecked in temporality, but accepted by Eternity.

Soren Kierkegaard

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
World
Along
Temporality
Achieve
Shipwrecked
Probably
Reject
Maybe
Rejects
Success
Destroy
Wells
Accepted
Well
Eternity
Great
Follow

More quotes by Soren Kierkegaard

Image
Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
It is perhaps the misfortune of my life that I am interested in far too much but not decisively in any one thing all my interests are not subordinated in one but stand on an equal footing.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
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
Image
To be a woman is something so strange, so confusing and so complicated that only a woman could put up with it.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
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
Image
To Dare is to risk losing your foothold for a moment, Not to Dare is to risk losing yourself.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
Dread is a womanish debility in which freedom swoons. Psychologically speaking, the fall into sin always occurs in impotence. But dread is at the same time the most egotistic thing.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
Death induces the sensual person to say: Let us eat and drink, because tomorrow we shall die - but this is sensuality's cowardly lust for life, that contemptible order of things where one lives in order to eat and drink instead of eating and drinking in order to live.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to the general applause of wits who believe it's a joke.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
Language has time as its element all other media have space as their element.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
Spirit is the third, yet in such a way that one can speak of a synthesis only when the spirit is posited.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
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.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
Because of its tremendous solemnity death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearances.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
Only the noble of heart are called to difficulty.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
In the Christianity of Christendom the Cross has become something like the child’s hobby-horse and trumpet.
Soren Kierkegaard
Image
Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.
Soren Kierkegaard