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Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.

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
Consists
Explain
Death
Cannot
Must
Earnestness
Observer
Observers
Precisely

More quotes by 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.
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The Bible is God's love letter to us
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The unhappy person is never present to themself because they always live in the past or the future.
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The God that can be named is not God.
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The more people who believe something, the more apt it is to be wrong. The person who's right often has to stand alone.
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For without risk there is no faith, and the greater the risk, the greater the faith.
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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.
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You train yourself in the art of being mysterious to everyone. My dear friend! What if there were no one, who cared about guessing your riddle, what pleasure would you then take in it?
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It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.
Soren Kierkegaard
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A 'no' does not hide anything, but a 'yes' very easily becomes a deception.
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Busyness, keeping up with others, hustling hither and yon, makes it almost impossible for an individual to form a heart.
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Nowadays not even a suicide kills himself in desperation. Before taking the step he deliberates so long and so carefully that he literally chokes with thought. It is even questionable whether he ought to be called a suicide, since it is really thought which takes his life. He does not die with deliberation but from deliberation.
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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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In order to help another effectively, I must understand what he understands. If I do not know that, my greater understanding will be of no help to him... instruction begins when you put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and in the way he understands it.
Soren Kierkegaard
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A poet is not an apostle he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Maturity consists in the discovery that there comes a critical moment where everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand more and more that there is something which cannot be understood.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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
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Every mental act is composed of doubt and belief, but it is belief that is the positive, it is belief that sustains thought and holds the world together.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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
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Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.
Soren Kierkegaard