Athens, Greece - 2007 1. “Action and passion is as absent in the present age as peril is absent from swimming in shallow waters....”
2. "Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth."
3. “A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.”
4. "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."
5. “A Revolutionary Age is an age of action; the present age is an age of advertisement, or an age of publicity: nothing happens, but there is instant publicity about it. A revolt in the present age is the most unthinkable act of all; such a display of strength would confuse the calculating cleverness of the times. Nevertheless, some political virtuoso might achieve something nearly as great. He would write some manifesto or other which calls for a General Assembly in order to decide on a revolution, and he would write it so carefully that even the Censor himself would pass on it; and at the General Assembly he would manage to bring it about that the audience believed that it had actually rebelled, and then everyone would placidly go home -- after they had spent a very nice evening out.”
6. "Be that self which one truly is."
7. "Boredom is the root of all evil--the despairing refusal to be oneself."
8. "Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood."
9. “Destroy your primitivity, and you will most probably get along well in the world, maybe achieve great success -- but Eternity will reject you. Follow up your primitivity, and you will be shipwrecked in temporality, but accepted by Eternity.”
10. “Don't forget to love yourself.”
11. “Dread is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.”
12. "During the first period of a man's life, the danger is not to take the risk."
13. "Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are."
14. "Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further."
15. “Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.”
16. “For my own part I don't lack the courage to think a thought whole. No
thought has frightened me so far.”
17. "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."
18. “How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.”
19. "How ironical that it is by means of speech that man can degrade himself below the level of dumb creation -- for a chatterbox is truly of a lower category than a dumb creature."
20. "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."
21. “I divide my time as follows: half the time I sleep, the other half I dream. I never dream when I sleep, for that would be a pity, for sleeping is the highest accomplishment of genius.”
22. "If an Arab in the desert were suddenly to discover a spring in his tent, and so would always be able to have water in abundance, how fortunate he would consider himself; so too, when a man who...is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him."
23. "I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved."
24. “If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of potential -- for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints; possibility never.”
25. “If I were to wish for anything, / I should not wish for wealth and power, / but for the passionate sense of the potential, / for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. / what wine is so sparkling, so fragrant, so intoxicating, as possibility!”
26. “In a theatre it happened that a fire started off stage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed -- amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.”
27. “In order to swim one takes off all one's clothes -- in order to aspire to the truth one must undress in a far more inward sense, divest oneself of all one's inward clothes, of thoughts, conceptions, selfishness etc. before one is sufficiently naked.”
28. "Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do. He who does not understand irony and has no ear for its whispering lacks of what might called the absolute beginning of the personal life. He lacks what at moments is indispensable for the personal life, lacks both the regeneration and rejuvenation, the cleaning baptism of irony that redeems the soul from having its life in finitude though living boldly and energetically in finitude."
29. "It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite."
30. "It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey."
31. “It is the duty of human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.”
32. “It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived -- forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position.”
33. “It is the duty of human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.”
34. "It requires courage not to surrender oneself to the ingenious or compassionate counsels of despair that would induce a man to eliminate himself from the ranks of the living; but it does not follow from this that every huckster who is fattened and nourished in self-confidence has more courage than the man who yielded to despair."
35. "It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important"
36. "Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God."
37. “Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.”
38. "Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced."
39. “Love is all, it gives all, and it takes all.”
40. ”Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.”
41. “Never cease loving a person, and never give up hope for him, for even the prodigal son who had fallen most low, could still be saved; the bitterest enemy and also he who was your friend could again be your friend; love that has grown cold can kindle again”
42. "Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wander whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid."
43. “Oh, cursed be that arrogant satisfaction in standing alone.”
44. “Once you label me, you negate me.”
45. “Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally and happily secured against despair.”
46. “Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.”
47. "People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something."
48. “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
49. “People generally think that it is the world, the environment, external relationships, which stand in one's way, in the way of ones' good fortune... and at bottom it is always man himself that stands in his own way.”
50. "People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have, for example, the freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as compensation."
51. "Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own."
52. "Philosophy always requires something more, requires the eternal, the true, in contrast to which even the fullest existence as such is but a happy moment."
53. "Repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life."
54. "Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings."
55. "Spiritual superiority only sees the individual. But alas, ordinarily we human beings are sensual and, therefore, as soon as it is a gathering, the impression changes -- we see something abstract, the crowd, and we become different. But 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."
56. “Subjectivity is the only truth.”
57. "That is the road we all have to take - over the Bridge of Sighs into eternity.”
58. "The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo, the more he can remember the more divine his life becomes."
59. "The most terrible fight is not when there is one opinion against another, the most terrible is when two men say the same thing -- and fight about the interpretation, and this interpretation involves a difference of quality."
60. "The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo."
61. "The present generation, wearied by its chimerical efforts, relapses into complete indolence. Its condition is that of a man who has only fallen asleep towards morning: first of all come great dreams, then a feeling of laziness, and finally a witty or clever excuse for remaining in bed."
62. “The public has a dog for its amusement. That dog is the Media. If there is someone better than the public, someone who distinguishes himself, the public sets the dog on him and all the amusement begins. The biting dog tears up his coat-tails, and takes all sort of vulgar liberties with his leg -- until the public bores of it all and calls the dog off. That is how the public levels.”
63. “There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life's highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.”
64. “There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys; they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves.”
65. “There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.”
66. “The self is only that which it is in the process of becoming.”
67. ”The truest expression of loving much is just to forget oneself completely.”
68. “The truth is a snare: you cannot have it without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you."
69. “The Two Ways: One is to suffer; the other is to become a professor of the fact that another suffered.”
70. “The tyrant dies and his rule ends, the martyr dies and his rule begins.”
71. “This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness...they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.”
72. "To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception. It is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, neither in time nor in eternity."
73. "To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself."
74. “To write a book is the easiest of all things in our time, if, as is customary, one takes ten older works on the same subject and out of them puts together an eleventh on the same subject.”
75. “Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion -- and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion...while Truth again reverts to a new minority.”
76. “Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness.”
77. “Without risk there is no faith. Faith is precisely the contradiction between the infinite passion of the individual's inwardness and the objective uncertainty. If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. If I wish to preserve myself in faith I must constantly be intent upon holding fast the objective uncertainty, so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of water, still preserving my faith.”
78. "What our age lacks is not reflection, but passion."
