Genius never desires what does not exist.
Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do.
There is peace and rest and comfort in sorrow.
When all combine in every way to make everything easier, people will want difficulty. I conceived it as my task to make difficulties everywhere.
That is the road we all have to take – over the Bridge of Sight into eternity.
Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world?
Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, who so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility.
The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.
Irony is the cultivation of the spirit and therefore follows next after immediacy; then comes the ethicist, then the humourist, then the religious person.
Just as in the great moment of resignation one does not mediate but chooses, now the task is to gain proficiency in repeating the impassioned choice and, existing, to express it in existence.
A man’s personality is matured only when he appropriates the truth, whether it is spoken by Balaam’s ass or a sniggering wag or an apostle or an angel.
But the life of freedom requires a beginning, and here a beginning is a resolution, and the resolution has its work and its pain-thus the beginning has its difficulty.
Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.
The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.
Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content; it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.
Jurists say that a capital crime submerges all lesser crimes; and so it is with faith. Its absurdity makes all petty difficultiesvanish.
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.
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.
Seek first God’s Kingdom, that is, become like the lilies and the birds, become perfectly silent – then shall the rest be added unto you.
The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.