Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Whoever has the world's treasures has them no matter how he got them. In the world of the spirit it is otherwise.
To grumble about the world and its unhappiness is always easier than to beat one's breast and groan over oneself.
What looks like politics, and imagines itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious movement.
Affliction is able to drown out every earthly voice. . . but the voice of eternity within a person it cannot drown.
There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.
To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking him.
The crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.
My tactics were, by God's aid, to employ every means to make it clear what the requirement of Christianity truly is.
For love is exultant when it unites equals, but it is triumphant when it makes that which was unequal equal in love.
If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.
With respect to physical existence, one needs little, and to the degree that one needs less, the more perfect one is.
Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.
Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.
No one may pride himself at being more than an individual, and no one despondently think that he is not an individual.
The more people who believe something, the more apt it is to be wrong. The person who's right often has to stand alone.
It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.
It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important.
The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.
Busyness, keeping up with others, hustling hither and yon, makes it almost impossible for an individual to form a heart.
It is more blessed to give than to receive, but then it is also more blessed to be able to do without than to have to have.
In a mathematical proposition, for example, the objectivity is given, but therefore its truth is also an indifferent truth.
...there is one thing that all Satan's cunning and all the snares of temptation cannot take by surprise - an undivided will.
There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.
Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, who so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility.
This is the miracle of life: that each person who heeds him or herself knows what no scientist can ever know: who he or she is.
And this is one of the most crucial definitions for the whole of Christianity; that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.
The minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion.
Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts.
I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.
On the whole, the longing for solitude is a sign that there still is spirit in a person and is a measure of what spirit there is.
What I really need is to get clear out about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge precedes every act.
The truth is a trap: you cannot get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.
Preparation for becoming attentive to Christianity does not consist in reading many books ... but in fuller immersion in existence.
Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates itself to itself.
The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.
Intelligence has got the upper hand to such an extent that it transforms the real task into an unreal trick and reality into a play.
Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic if it is pulled out I shall die.
I found I had less and less to say, until finally, I became silent, and began to listen. I discovered in the silence, the voice of God
The more men believe an idea to be true the greater the likelihood that the idea is mistaken. Those who are right usually stand alone.
Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic - if it is pulled out I shall die.
This is all that I've known for certain, that God is love. Even if I have been mistaken on this or that point: God is nevertheless love.
Jurists say that a capital crime submerges all lesser crimes; and so it is with faith. Its absurdity makes all petty difficultiesvanish.
In the eyes of God, the infinite spirit, all the millions that have lived and now live do not make a crowd. He only sees each individual
God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.
Seek first God's Kingdom, that is, become like the lilies and the birds, become perfectly silent - then shall the rest be added unto you.
All essential knowledge relates to existence, or only such knowledge as has an essential relationship to existence is essential knowledge.
If the ethical - that is, social morality- is the highest ... then no categories are needed other than the Greek philosophical categories.
Faith is a marvel, and yet no human being is excluded from it; for that in which all human life is united is passion, and faith is a passion.
I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?
It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.