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Prayer
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Prayer does not change God, but changes him who prays.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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It is a wonderful thing to see a first-rate philosopher at prayer. Tough-minded thinking and tenderhearted reverence are friends, not enemies. We have for too long separated the head from the heart, and we are the lesser for it. We love God with the mind and we love God with the heart. In reality, we are descending with the mind into the heart and there standing before God in ceaseless wonder and endless praise. As the mind and the heart work in concert, a kind of loving rationality pervades all we say and do. This brings unity to us and glory to God.
-Soren Kierkegaard, The Prayers of Soren Kierkegaard,
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Purity
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Purity of heart is to will one thing.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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Reflection
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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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The individual (no matter how well-meaning he might be, no matter how much strength he might have, if only he would use it) does not have the passion to rip himself away from either the coils of Reflection or the seductive ambiguities of Reflection; nor do the surroundings and times have any events or passions, but rather provide a negative setting of a habit of reflection, which plays with some illusory project only to betray him in the end with a way out: it shows him that the most clever thing to do is nothing at all.
-Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age, 1846
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Relationships
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Worldly wisdom thinks that love is a relationship between man and man. Christianity teachers that love is a relationship between: man-God-man, that is, that God is the middle term. However beautiful the love-relationship has been between two or more people, however complete all their enjoyment and all their bliss in mutual devotion and affection have been for them, even if all men have praised their relationship
-Soren Kierkegaard
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Repetition
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Repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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Risk
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During the first period of a man's life, the danger is not to take the risk.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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Sadness
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Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic -- if it is pulled out I shall die.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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Saint, Saints
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God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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Self-love
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Be that self which one truly is.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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Only one human being recognized as one's neighbour is necessary in order to cure a man of self-love
-Soren Kierkegaard
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Sleep
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I divide my time as follows: half the time I sleep, the other half I dream. I never dream when I sleep, for that would be a pity, for sleeping is the highest accomplishment of genius.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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Speech (freedom of)
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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.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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Suicide
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Not even a suicide does away with himself out of desperation, he considers the act so long and so deliberately, that he kills himself with thinking -- one could barely call it suicide since it is thinking which takes his life. He does not kill himself with deliberation but rather kills himself because of deliberation.
-Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age, 1846
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Teaching
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Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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Thought
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The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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Thunderstorms
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Geniuses are like thunderstorms. They go against the wind, terrify people, cleanse the air.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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Travel
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People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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Tyranny
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The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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Understanding
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It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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Worry
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Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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Books by and about Soren Kierkegaard