Nikolai Berdyaev

Denial of Russia in the name of humanity it is - robbing humanity

— Nikolai Berdyaev

The meaning of conservatism is not that it impedes movement forward and upward, but that it impedes movement backwards and downwards—to chaotic…

— Nikolai Berdyaev

“Reason is independent of all external authority, is outwardly autonomous; it is not, however, inwardly independent in relation to the whole life…

— Nikolai Berdyaev

The Church is simply the path of history, and not the actual kingdom of God.

— Nikolai Berdyaev

It is imperative to bear in mind that human creativity is not a claim or a right on the part of man,…

— Nikolai Berdyaev

It is beyond dispute that the state exercises very great power over human life and it always shows a tendency to go…

— Nikolai Berdyaev

The World is not an idea as asserted by philosophers who have dedicated their entire lives to the exploration of ideas. First…

— Nikolai Berdyaev

I do not think discursively. It is not so much that I arrive at truth as that I take my start from…

— Nikolai Berdyaev

Death, that final evil, is one of the paths to eternity. Endless life in the conditions of our existence would be a…

— Nikolai Berdyaev

Victory over fear is the first spiritual duty of man.

— Nikolai Berdyaev

We are standing on the threshold of a world-epoch of religious creativeness, on a cosmic divide.

— Nikolai Berdyaev

True life is creativity, not development: it is the freedom for creative acts, for creative fire, rather than necessity and the heaviness…

— Nikolai Berdyaev

Every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history.

— Nikolai Berdyaev

...in the third epoch the divinity of man's creative nature is finally revealed and divine power becomes human power.

— Nikolai Berdyaev

The Russian yearning for the meaning of life is the major theme of our literature, and this is the real point of…

— Nikolai Berdyaev

We find the most terrible form of atheism, not in the militant and passionate struggle against the idea of God himself, but…

— Nikolai Berdyaev

Objectification is above all exteriorization, the alienation of spirit from itself.

— Nikolai Berdyaev

Every moral act of love, of mercy, and of sacrifice brings to pass the end of the world where hatred, cruelty, and…

— Nikolai Berdyaev

Time is the product of changing realities, beings, existences.

— Nikolai Berdyaev

So great is the worth of Dostoevsky that to have produced him is by itself sufficient justification for the existence of the…

— Nikolai Berdyaev

In sex we have the source of man's true connection with the cosmos and of his servile dependence. The categories of sex,…

— Nikolai Berdyaev

Perhaps the saddest thing to admit is that those who rejected the Cross have to carry it, while those who welcomed it…

— Nikolai Berdyaev

Creative experience foreshadows a new Heaven and a new Earth.

— Nikolai Berdyaev

Dostoevsky - is not a realist as an artist, he is an experimentator, a creator of an experimential metaphysics of human nature.

— Nikolai Berdyaev

There is something servile in the interpretation of sin as crime which infringes the will of God and calls for legal proceedings…

— Nikolai Berdyaev