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It is intelligent to ask two questions: (1) Is it possible? (2) Can I do it?. But it is unintelligent to ask these questions: (1) Is it real? (2) Has my neighbor done it?

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
Asks
Two
Done
Real
Unintelligent
Neighbor
Questions
Intelligent
Possible

More quotes by Soren Kierkegaard

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The unhappy person is never present to themself because they always live in the past or the future.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Take it and return it: the kiss of love.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner put yourself in his place so that you may understand . . . what he learns and the way he understands it.
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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...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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It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.
Soren Kierkegaard
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During the first period of our lives the greatest danger is not to take the risk. When once the risk has been taken, then the greatest danger is to risk too much. By not risking at first one turns aside and serves trivialities in the second case, by risking too much, one turns aside to the fantastic and perhaps to presumption.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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.
Soren Kierkegaard
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If I were a physician, and if I were allowed to prescribe just one remedy for all the ills of the modern world, I would prescribe silence. For even if the Word of God were proclaimed in the modern world, how could one hear it with so much noise? Therefore, create silence.
Soren Kierkegaard
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When you were called, did you answer or did you not? Perhaps softly and in a whisper?
Soren Kierkegaard
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Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.
Soren Kierkegaard
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There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life's highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Dread is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.
Soren Kierkegaard
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For without risk there is no faith, and the greater the risk, the greater the faith.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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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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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Nothing is as heady as the wine of possibility
Soren Kierkegaard
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Knowledge is an attitude, a passion, actually an illicit attitude. For the compulsion to know is like dipsomania, erotomania, and homicidal mania, in producing a character that is out of balance. It is not at all that the scientist goes after the truth.
Soren Kierkegaard