He who knows about depth knows about God.
Since the last decades of the nineteenth century, revolt against the objectified world has determined the character of art and literature.
The passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority.
The existential attitude is one of involvement in contrast to a merely theoretical or detached attitude. “Existential” in this sense can be defined as participating in a situation, especially a cognitive situation, with the whole of one’s existence.
I have given no definition of love. This is impossible, because there is no higher principle by which it could be defined. It is life itself in its actual unity. The forms and structures in which love embodies itself are the forms and structures in which love overcomes its self-destructive forces.
Individualism is the self-affirmation of the individual self as individual self without regard to its participation in its world. As such it is the opposite of collectivism, the self affirmation of the self as part of a larger whole without regard to its character as an individual self.
Man’s ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.
I loved thee beautiful and kind, And plighted an eternal vow; So altered are thy face and mind, t’were perjury to love thee now!
But freedom is the possibility of a total and centered act of the personality, an act in which all the drives and influences which constitute the destiny of man are brought into the centered unity of a decision.
Wisdom loves the children of men, but she prefers those who come through foolishness to wisdom.
Knowledge of that which concerns us infinitely is possible only in an attitude of infinite concern.
In the depth of the anxiety of having to die is the anxiety of being eternally forgotten.
The anxiety of fate is conquered by the self-affirmation of the individual as an infinitely significant microcosmic representation of the universe .
Joy is the emotional expression of the courageous YES to one’s own true being.
We must be ourselves, we must decide where to go.
No self-acceptance is possible if one is not accepted in a person-to-person relation.
The neurotic is aware of the danger of a situation in which his unrealistic self-affirmation is broken down and no realistic self-affirmation takes its place.
He who participates in God participates in eternity.
In the state of despair there is nobody and nothing that accepts. But there is the power of acceptance itself which is experienced. Meaninglessness, as long as it is experienced, includes an experience of the “power of acceptance”. To accept this power of acceptance consciously is the religious answer of absolute faith, of a faith which has been deprived by doubt of any concrete content, which nevertheless is faith and the source of the most paradoxical manifestation of the courage to be.
Man creates what he is.