Soren Kierkegaard — "The greatest thing is to be able to do nothing."
The greatest thing is to be able to do nothing.
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More from Soren Kierkegaard
"To be a human being is to be in a state of eternal becoming, and that is why no one can capture himself in a definition."
"The difference between the aesthetic and the ethical is that the aesthetic is immediate, while the ethical is a choice."
"What the philosophers say about reality is often as disappointing as a sign you see in a shop window, which reads 'Pressing Done Here.' If you were to take your clothes to be pressed, you would be foo…"
"The greatest danger for man, in the whole of his life, is to lose himself, to lose his own self."
"All communication is indirect communication."
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.