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"With the daguerreotype everyone will be able to have their portrait taken-formerly it was only the prominent-and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same, so we shall only need one portrait."
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"The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements."

"Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category."

"Everything is much easier in the half-blind and half-deaf world of modern giants that seduce processions of the blind into the world of great emptiness. In their sky the stars shine and their names live in the parallel and independently of their work."

"And here is the shocking plot twist: as farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry figured out how to get them into the bodies of people who didn't really want to eat 700 more calories a day."

"Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don't understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls."
Explore more quotes by Soren Kierkegaard


"What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?"


"With every increase in the degree of consciousness, and in proportion to that increase, the intensity of despair increases: the more consciousness the more intense the despair."


"The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo; the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes."


"My opinion is, of course, completely my own. I would not impose it on anyone else and decline any pressure to change it."


"For he who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God."


"It is now my intention to draw out from the story of Abraham the dialecticalconsequences inherent in it, expressing them in the form ofproblemata, in order to seewhat a tremendous paradox faith is, a paradox which is capable of transforming amurder into a holy act well-pleasing to God, a paradox which gives Isaac back toAbraham, which no thought can master, because faith begins precisely there wherethinking leaves off."


"Hence it is a superficial view (which presumably has never seen a person in despair, not even one's own self) when it is said of a man in despair, "He is consuming himself." For precisely this it is he despairs of, and to his torment it is precisely this he cannot do, since by despair fire has entered into something that cannot burn, or cannot burn up, that is, into the self."


"And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not."


"I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved."
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