Soren Kierkegaard Quotes on Life
Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authorship — Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Stages on Life's Way, The Sickness Unto Death — develops the famous account of three existence-stages: aesthetic, ethical, and religious. The aesthetic life pursues the moment of immediate enjoyment and ends in despair; the ethical life accepts duty and the universal but cannot bear the demand for radical self-transformation; the religious life is the leap of faith by which the individual stands as single before God in fear and trembling. The framework is not a developmental ladder one ascends and then surveys but a series of incommensurable existential commitments, each of which can be entered only by the leap of decision the prior stage cannot itself supply.
Quotes
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“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
Det er ganske sandt, hvad Philosophien siger, at Livet maa forstaaes baglænds. Men derover glemmer man den anden Sætning, at det maa leves forlænds. -
Attributed to Soren Kierkegaard:
“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
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Attributed to Soren Kierkegaard:
“To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”
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Attributed to Soren Kierkegaard:
“There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.”
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Attributed to Soren Kierkegaard:
“Boredom is the root of all evil.”
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“It will be easy for us once we receive the ball of yarn from Ariadne (love) and then go through all the mazes of the labyrinth (life) and kill the monster. But how many are there who plunge into life (the labyrinth) without taking that precaution?”
Journal entry, August 1, 1835 -
“Variant translation: My focus should be on what I do in life, not knowing everything, excluding knowledge on what you do. The is key to find a purpose, whatever it truly is that God wills me to do; it's crucial to find a truth which is true to me, to find the idea which I am willing to live and die for.”
What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; 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.