Soren Kierkegaard Quotes on Mind
Kierkegaard's philosophical psychology — developed across The Concept of Anxiety (1844), The Sickness Unto Death (1849), and the broader pseudonymous authorship — gave nineteenth-century philosophy of mind one of its most original and unsettling analyses. Anxiety is not a contingent psychological symptom but the constitutive mood through which the human spirit confronts its own freedom; despair is the disrelation of the self to itself, the misalignment of the finite and infinite poles of the human being whose synthesis the self is meant to be. The framework reorganizes post-Hegelian philosophy of mind around the analysis of selfhood as a task to be accomplished through the existential decisions through which the synthesis is, or fails to be, achieved.
Quotes
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Attributed to Soren Kierkegaard:
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
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Attributed to Soren Kierkegaard:
“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
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“Purity of heart is to will one thing.”
The two guides call out to a man early and late. And yet, no, for when remorse calls to a man it is always late. The call to find the way again by seeking out God in the confession of sins is always at the eleventh hour. Whether you are young or old, whether you have sinned much or little, whether you have offended much or neglected much, the guilt makes this call come at the eleventh hour. The in -
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:
“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”
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“The reason I cannot really say that I positively enjoy nature is that I do not quite realize what it is that I enjoy. A work of art, on the other hand, I can grasp. I can — if I may put it this way — find that Archimedian point, and as soon as I have found it, everything is readily clear for me. Then I am able to pursue this one main idea and see how all the details serve to illuminate it.”
Journals of Søren Kierkegaard 1A 8, 1834 -
“Journal entry, Gilleleie (1 August 1835) Journals 1A; this is considered to be one of the earliest statements of existentialist thought.”
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.