Quote

People have an idea that the preacher is an actor on a stage and they are the critics, blaming or praising him. What they don't know is that they are the actors on the stage he (the preacher) is merely the prompter standing in the wings, reminding them of their lost lines.

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
Lines
Critics
Actors
Wings
Idea
Blame
Lost
Praise
Prompter
Ideas
Merely
Praising
People
Standing
Blaming
Actor
Reminding
Stage
Preacher

More quotes by Soren Kierkegaard

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...the reason for [this age's] anxiety and unrest is because in one direction, 'truth' increases in scope and quantity - via science and technology - while in the other, certainty and confidence steadily decline. Our age is a master in developing truths while being wholly indifferent to certitude. It lacks confidence in the good.
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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In a mathematical proposition, for example, the objectivity is given, but therefore its truth is also an indifferent truth.
Soren Kierkegaard
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On the whole, the longing for solitude is a sign that there still is spirit in a person and is a measure of what spirit there is.
Soren Kierkegaard
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The person who praises God is on the tracks of justice.
Soren Kierkegaard
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The deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than himself.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored therefore they created human beings.
Soren Kierkegaard
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If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Take it and return it: the kiss of love.
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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The most common despair is...not choosing, or willing, to be oneself...[but] the deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than oneself.
Soren Kierkegaard
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No, I won't leave the world--I'll enter a lunatic asylum and see if the profundity of insanity reveals to me the riddles of life. Idiot, why didn't I do that long ago, why has it taken me so long to understand what it means when the Indians honour the insane, step aside for them? Yes, a lunatic asylum--don't you think I may end up there?
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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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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It requires courage not to surrender oneself to the ingenious or compassionate counsels of despair that would induce a man to eliminate himself from the ranks of the living but it does not follow from this that every huckster who is fattened and nourished in self-confidence has more courage than the man who yielded to despair.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.
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 most common form of despair is not being who you are.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Worldly wisdom thinks that love is a relationship between man and man. Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between man-God-man, that is, that God is the middle term.
Soren Kierkegaard
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...even the richest personality is nothing before he has chosen himself, and on the other hand even what one might call the poorest personality is everything when he has chosen himself for the great thing is not to be this or that but to be oneself, and this everyone can be if he wills it.
Soren Kierkegaard