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Danish · 1813-1855 · 47 quotes
Danish · 1813–1855
47 quotes in our collection
Søren Kierkegaard was the Danish philosopher and theologian who invented existentialism before the word existed. Working in Copenhagen in the 1840s and 1850s, he wrote under a battery of pseudonyms — each representing a different stage of existence — and attacked the comfortable state Christianity of his day with an intensity that made him famous and isolated in equal measure. His central argument was that truth, in the matters that count most, is subjective: it must be appropriated inwardly, not merely assented to. His observation that life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards remains the most compressed description of the human predicament available in any language. He died at forty-two, having published enough to occupy scholars for two centuries.
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