Soren Kierkegaard — "The highest task of a human being is to understand himself."
The highest task of a human being is to understand himself.
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More from Soren Kierkegaard
"If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints,…"
"To be a woman is something so strange, so confusing and so complicated that only a woman could put up with it."
"What is a poet? An unhappy man who in his heart harbors a profound agony, but whose lips are so fashioned that the sounds that emerge from them are like the beautiful music of an organ."
"What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music."
"The only thing I am afraid of is that I shall not remain a humorist."
About Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Danish philosopher and theologian considered the founder of existentialism; Either/Or (1843) and Fear and Trembling (1843) explored the leap of faith. Closely associated with Friedrich Nietzsche (his existentialist successor working in the opposite theological direction) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (literary parallel exploring faith-and-despair). For an intellectual contrast, see G.W.F. Hegel, German Idealist of the totalizing system — Kierkegaard called Hegel's system a 'palatial residence' that nobody could actually live in — his entire authorship is structured against Hegelian abstraction in favor of the existing individual's inwardness.
The standard scholarly entry points to Soren Kierkegaard's work: Joakim Garff (University of Copenhagen, Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre) — Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography (2000); Walter Lowrie (Princeton, his major postwar English translator) — A Short Life of Kierkegaard (1942); C. Stephen Evans (Baylor University, philosophy of religion) — Kierkegaard: An Introduction (2009). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Soren Kierkegaard.