"To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc."
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Soren Kierkegaard quotes (page 25 of 25)
496 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"And if something should be found, particularly in the first part of the dissertation, that one is generally not accustomed to come across in scholarly writings, the reader must forgive my jocundity, just as I, in order to lighten the burden, sometimes sing at my work."
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"In the Christianity of Christendom the Cross has become something like the child’s hobby-horse and trumpet."
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"Jurists say that a capital crime submerges all lesser crimes; and so it is with faith. Its absurdity makes all petty difficultiesvanish."
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"It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards."
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"Preparation for becoming attentive to Christianity does not consist in reading many books ... but in fuller immersion in existence."
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"No, I won't leave the world--I'll enter a lunatic asylum and see if the profundity of insanity reveals to me the riddles of life. Idiot, why didn't I do that long ago, why has it taken me so long to understand what it means when the Indians honour the insane, step aside for them? Yes, a lunatic asylum--don't you think I may end up there?"
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"Choose to be who you are. . . The individual who would become a person must at some point take over his entire being - must, that is, choose herself."
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"I would rather be a swineherd, understood by the swine, than a poet misunderstood by men."
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"In a mathematical proposition, for example, the objectivity is given, but therefore its truth is also an indifferent truth."
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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."
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"But doubt is wily and cunning and never, as it is sometimes said to be, loud or defiant. It is unassuming and sly, not bold or assertive - and the more unassuming, the more dangerous."
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"If anyone proposes to believe, i.e., imagines himself to believe, because many good and upright people living here on the hill have believed, i.e., have said that they believedthen he is a fool, and it is essentially indifferent whether he believes on account of his own and perhaps a widely held opinion about what good and upright people believe, or believes a Münchhausen."
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"I have, I believe, the courage to doubt everything; I have, I believe, the courage to fight against everything; but I do not have the courage to acknowledge anything, the courage to possess, to own anything."
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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."
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"Irony is a qualification of subjectivity."
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