Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
When you say 'Yes' or promise something, you can very easily deceive yourself and others also, as if you had already done what you promised. It is easy to think that by making a promise you have at least done part of what you promised to do, as if the promise itself were something of value. Not at all! In fact, when you do not do what you promise, it is a long way back to the truth.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Works of Love. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 93.
It had been written for a nationwide TV address he was to deliver, but he died before so. This was his last writing.
The quotation per se has no historical or political value except that is shows is that there was overt discrimination against Muslims in China in that era. Although there always have been large numbers of Muslims in China, there are few who have ever ascended to major leadership positions, under the late Emperors, under the Chinese Republic, or under the Communist Chinese regime. The graphic is a memorial to the General.
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic, and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christendom, morality, ethics, psychology, and the philosophy of religion, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony, and parables. Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives as a "single individual", giving priority to concrete human reality over abstract thinking and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment. He was against literary critics who defined idealist intellectuals and philosophers of his time, and thought that Swedenborg, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel, and Hans Christian Andersen were all "understood" far too quickly by "scholars".
