Nikolai Berdyaev Quotes

31 quotes in 524 categories

• Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.
• There is a tragic clash between Truth and the world. Pure undistorted truth burns up the world.
• We find the most terrible form of atheism, not in the militant and passionate struggle against the idea of God himself, but in the practical…
• Our attitude towards evil must be freed from hatred, and has itself need to be enlightened in character...Satan rejoices when he succeeds in inspiring us…
• The creation of the world is not only a process which moves from God to humanity. God demands newness from humanity; God awaits the works…
• The central idea of the Eastern Fathers was that of theosis, the divinization of all creatures, the transfiguration of the world, the idea of the…
• So great is the worth of Dostoevsky that to have produced him is by itself sufficient justification for the existence of the Russian people in…
• God is a reality of spirit He cannot be conceived as an object, not even as the very highest object. God is not to be…
• Victory over fear is the first spiritual duty of man.
• The meaning of conservatism is not that it impedes movement forward and upward, but that it impedes movement backwards and downwards—to chaotic darkness and the…
• The World is not an idea as asserted by philosophers who have dedicated their entire lives to the exploration of ideas. First and foremost the…
• Utopias now appear much more realizable than one used to think. We are now faced with a different new worry: How to prevent their realization.
• Freedom is the power to create out of nothing, the power of the spirit to create out of itself.
• The physical union of the sexes ... only intensifies man's sense of solitude.
• Every moral act of love, of mercy, and of sacrifice brings to pass the end of the world where hatred, cruelty, and selfishness reign supreme.
• I never remain passive in the process of reading: while I read I am engaged in a constant creative activity, which leads me to remember…
• In sex we have the source of man's true connection with the cosmos and of his servile dependence. The categories of sex, male and female,…
• The enslaving of the other is also the enslaving of the self.
• The Russian yearning for the meaning of life is the major theme of our literature, and this is the real point of our intelligentsia's existence.
• The will to originality is not the will to be peculiar and unlike anybody else; it means the desire to derive one's consciousness from its…

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