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It goes against the grain for me to do what so often happens, to speak inhumanly about the great as if a few millennia were an immense distance. I prefer to speak humanly about it, as if it happened yesterday, and let only the greatness itself be the distance.

— Søren Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling (1843)

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More quotes by Søren Kierkegaard

It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.

The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.

Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go.

The Concept of Anxiety (1844)

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

Either/Or (1843)

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are.

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A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.

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History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce Ulysses (1922)

If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!

Thomas Jefferson

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Søren Kierkegaard (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.