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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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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
Another
Choosing
Form
Deepest
Despair
Oneself
Choose
Willing
Common

More quotes by Soren Kierkegaard

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At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.
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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.
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No one may pride himself at being more than an individual, and no one despondently think that he is not an individual.
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The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.
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The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes.
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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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Backwards understood be only can but, forwards lived be must life.
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To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking him.
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A good decision is our will to do everything we can within our power. It means to serve God with all we've got, be it little or much. Every person can do that.
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This is all that I've known for certain, that God is love. Even if I have been mistaken on this or that point: God is nevertheless love.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer.
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Doubt is thought's despair despair is personality's doubt. . . . Doubt and despair . . . belong to completely different spheres different sides of the soul are set in motion. . . . Despair is an expression of the total personality, doubt only of thought.
Soren Kierkegaard
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With respect to physical existence, one needs little, and to the degree that one needs less, the more perfect one is.
Soren Kierkegaard
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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?
Soren Kierkegaard
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Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.
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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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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May new sufferings torment your soul.
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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Certainty... lurks at the door of faith and threatens to devour it.
Soren Kierkegaard