Quotes by Kierkegaard, Søren

"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."

Kierkegaard, Søren on adversity
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"Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate."

Kierkegaard, Søren on age and aging
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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."

Kierkegaard, Søren on deliberation
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"In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant. My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known -- no wonder, then, that I return the love."

Kierkegaard, Søren on depression
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"It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite."

Kierkegaard, Søren on desire
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"Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth --look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment."

Kierkegaard, Søren on joy
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"Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further."

Kierkegaard, Søren on faith
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"There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming."

Kierkegaard, Søren on fear
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"People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid."

Kierkegaard, Søren on freedom
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"How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech."

Kierkegaard, Søren on freedom
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"I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved."

Kierkegaard, Søren on frustration
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"Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wander whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid."

Kierkegaard, Søren on ideas
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"Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood."

Kierkegaard, Søren on ideas
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"Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good."

Kierkegaard, Søren on idleness
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"The present generation, wearied by its chimerical efforts, relapses into complete indolence. Its condition is that of a man who has only fallen asleep towards morning: first of all come great dreams, then a feeling of laziness, and finally a witty or clever excuse for remaining in bed."

Kierkegaard, Søren on indolence
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"Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do. He who does not understand irony and has no ear for its whispering lacks of what might called the absolute beginning of the personal life. He lacks what at moments is indispensable for the personal life, lacks both the regeneration and rejuvenation, the cleaning baptism of irony that redeems the soul from having its life in finitude though living boldly and energetically in finitude."

Kierkegaard, Søren on irony
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"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced."

Kierkegaard, Søren on life
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"This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness... they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die."

Kierkegaard, Søren on life
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"It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived --forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position."

Kierkegaard, Søren on life
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"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward."

Kierkegaard, Søren on life
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"Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards."

Kierkegaard, Søren on life
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"Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living."

Kierkegaard, Søren on life
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"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."

Kierkegaard, Søren on anxiety
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"Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable."

Kierkegaard, Søren on marriage
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"The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering."

Kierkegaard, Søren on art
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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."

Kierkegaard, Søren on memory
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"Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion -- and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion... while truth again reverts to a new minority."

Kierkegaard, Søren on minorities
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"Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God."

Kierkegaard, Søren on mystics and mysticism
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"Once you label me you negate me."

Kierkegaard, Søren on names
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"The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo."

Kierkegaard, Søren on paradox
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"What our age lacks is not reflection, but passion."

Kierkegaard, Søren on passion
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"Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own."

Kierkegaard, Søren on personality
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"Philosophy always requires something more, requires the eternal, the true, in contrast to which even the fullest existence as such is but a happy moment."

Kierkegaard, Søren on philosophers and philosophy
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"Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it."

Kierkegaard, Søren on pleasure
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"At one time my only wish was to be a police official. It seemed to me to be an occupation for my sleepless intriguing mind. I had the idea that there, among criminals, were people to fight: clever, vigorous, crafty fellows. Later I realized that it was good that I did not become one, for most police cases involve misery and wretchedness -- not crimes and scandals."

Kierkegaard, Søren on police
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"If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!"

Kierkegaard, Søren on possibilities
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"The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays."

Kierkegaard, Søren on prayer
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"Father in Heaven! When the thought of thee wakes in our hearts let it not awaken like a frightened bird that flies about in dismay, but like a child waking from its sleep with a heavenly smile."

Kierkegaard, Søren on prayer
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"Prayer does not change God, but changes him who prays."

Kierkegaard, Søren on prayer
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"Purity of heart is to will one thing."

Kierkegaard, Søren on purity
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