Quotes / Thinkers / Søren Kierkegaard
Thinker · 8 quotes
8 sourced quotes by Søren Kierkegaard on education & knowledge, power & corruption, media, speech & public opinion, happiness & meaning of life, time & change, with a use case for each in GS4, Essay and interviews.
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There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys; they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves.
Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read-ultimately you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.
The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.
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.
Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.
The greatest danger, that of losing one's own self, may pass off as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife etc., is sure to be noticed.
Death induces the sensual person to say: Let us eat and drink, because tomorrow we shall die – but this is sensuality's cowardly lust for life, that contemptible order of things where one lives in order to eat and drink instead of eating and drinking in order to live.