The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of non-being, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself.
Every institution is inherently demonic.
He who risks and fails can be forgiven. He who never risks and never fails is a failure in his whole being.
Cruelty towards others is always also cruelty towards ourselves.
Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge.
Faith consists in being vitally concerned with that ultimate reality to which I give the symbolical name of God. Whoever reflects earnestly on the meaning of life is on the verge of an act of faith.
The affirmation of one’s essential being in spite of desires and anxieties creates joy.
I hope for the day when everyone can speak again of God without embarrassment.
Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.
We can speak without voice to the trees and the clouds and the waves of the sea. Without words they respond through the rustling of leaves and the moving of clouds and the murmuring of the sea.
The separation of faith and love is always a consequence of a deterioration of religion.
Fear is the absence of faith.
Cynically speaking, one could say that it is true to life to be cynical about it.
Loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude.
Decision is a risk rooted in the courage of being free.
Being human means asking the questions of one’s own being and living under the impact of the answers given to this question. And, conversely, being human means receiving answers to the questions of one’s own being and asking questions under the impact of the answers.
All things and all people, so to speak, call on us with small or loud voices. They want us to listen. They want us to understand their intrinsic claims, their justice of being. But we can give it to them only through the love that listens.
Enthusiasm for the universe, in knowing as well as in creating, also answers the question of doubt and meaninglessness. Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge. And meaninglessness is no threat so long as enthusiasm for the universe and for man as its center is alive.
Accept the fact that you are accepted, despite the fact that you are unacceptable.
There is no place to which we could flee from God, which is outside of God.