A human being is a spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.
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.
Where unclarity resides, there is temptation, and there it proves only too easily the stronger. Wherever there is ambiguity, wherever there is wavering, there is disobedience down at the bottom.
When you open the door which you shut in order to pray to God, the first person you meet as you go out is your neighbour whom you shall love. Wonderful!
It is not a gain that guilt should be wholly forgotten. On the contrary, it is loss and perdition. But it is a gain to win an inner intensity of heart through a deeper and deeper inner sorrowing over guilt.
Freedom’s possibility is not the ability to choose the good or the evil. The possibility is to be able.
Oh, can I really believe the poet’s tales, that when one first sees the object of one’s love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love like all knowledge is remembrance, that love too has its prophecies in the individual.
All moral elevation consists first and foremost of being weaned from the momentary.
Spirit is the third, yet in such a way that one can speak of a synthesis only when the spirit is posited.
The meaning lies in the appropriation.
The question is asked in ignorance, by one who does not even know what can have led him to ask it.
Prayer is a silent surrendering of everything to God.
The wisdom of the years is confusing. Only the wisdom of eternity is edifying.
Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all verbs are irregular.
I have attacked no one as not being a Christian, I have condemned no one.
I have never fought in such a way as to say: I am the true Christian, others are not Christians.
It occurs to me that artists go forward by going backward, something which I have nothing against intrinsically when it is a reproduced retreat – as is the case with the better artists.
To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc.
The God that can be named is not God.
The unhappy person is never present to themself because they always live in the past or the future.