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One should be an enigma not just to others but to oneself too. I study myself. When I'm tired of that I light a cigar to pass the time, and think: God only knows what the good Lord really meant with me, or what He meant to make of me.

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
Good
Meant
Time
Tired
Think
Study
Thinking
Lord
Others
Enigma
Light
Cigar
Really
Pass
Make
Oneself

More quotes by Soren Kierkegaard

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To be lost in spiritlessness is the most terrible thing of all.
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Talent warms-up the given (as they say in cookery) and makes it apparent genius brings something new. But our time lets talent pass for genius. They want to abolish the genius, deify the genius, and let talent forge ahead.
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When all combine in every way to make everything easier, people will want difficulty. I conceived it as my task to make difficulties everywhere.
Soren Kierkegaard
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The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.
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The greatest danger to Christianity is, I contend, not heresies, not heterodoxies, not atheists, not profane secularism - no, but the kind of orthodoxy which is cordial drivel, mediocrity served up sweet. There is nothing that so insidiously displaces the majestic as cordiality.
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I am so fed up and joyless that not only have I nothing to fill my soul, I cannot even conceive of anything that could possibly satisfy it - alas, not even the bliss of heaven.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Dread is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Where unclarity resides, there is temptation, and there it proves only too easily the stronger. Wherever there is ambiguity, wherever there is wavering, there is disobedience down at the bottom.
Soren Kierkegaard
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In the deepest sense, the being in a state of sin is the sin, the particular sins are not the continuation of sin, they are expressions of its continuation.
Soren Kierkegaard
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I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away - yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.
Soren Kierkegaard
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One could construe the life of man as a great discourse in which the various people represent different parts of speech (the same might apply to states).
Soren Kierkegaard
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Certainty... lurks at the door of faith and threatens to devour it.
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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In order to swim one takes off all one's clothes--in order to aspire to the truth one must undress in a far more inward sense, divest oneself of all one's inward clothes, of thoughts, conceptions, selfishness etc., before one is sufficiently naked.
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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The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever.
Soren Kierkegaard
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People generally think that it is the world, the environment, external relationships, which stand in one's way, in the way of ones' good fortune... and at bottom it is always man himself that stands in his own way.
Soren Kierkegaard
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You wanted God's ideas about what was best for you to coincide with your ideas, but you also wanted him to be the almighty Creator of heaven and earth so that he could properly fulfill your wish. And yet, if he were to share your ideas, he would cease to be the almighty Father.
Soren Kierkegaard
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Most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes--but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.
Soren Kierkegaard
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This age will die not as a result of some evil, but from a lack of passion.
Soren Kierkegaard