Because of its tremendous solemnity death is the light in which great passions, both good and bad, become transparent, no longer limited by outward appearences.
Take a chance and you may lose. Take not a chance and you have lost already.
Dread is a womanish debility in which freedom swoons. Psychologically speaking, the fall into sin always occurs in impotence. But dread is at the same time the most egotistic thing.
In the Christianity of Christendom the Cross has become something like the child’s hobby-horse and trumpet.
Silence is the demon’s trap, and the more one is silenced, the more terrible the demon; but silence is also the divinity’s mutual understanding with the single individual.
I would rather be a swineherd, understood by the swine, than a poet misunderstood by men.
When you were called, did you answer or did you not? Perhaps softly and in a whisper?
Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?
The stone that was rolled before Christ’s tomb might appropriately be called the philosopher’s stone because its removal gave not only the pharisees but, now for 1800 years, the philosophers so much to think about.
For the sadness in legitimate humour consists in the fact that honestly and without deceit it reflects in a purely human way upon what it is to be a child.
It is perhaps the misfortune of my life that I am interested in far too much but not decisively in any one thing; all my interests are not subordinated in one but stand on an equal footing.
To be lost in spiritlessness is the most terrible thing of all.
For like a poisonous breath over the fields, like a mass of locusts over Egypt, so the swarm of excuses is a general plaque, a ruinous infection among men, that eats off the sprouts of the Eternal.
The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.
Leap of faith – yes, but only after reflection.
I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing.
A man who cannot seduce men cannot save them either.
The best news the World has ever heard came from a graveyard – Christ is risen!
What the philosophers have to say about reality is often as disappointing as a sign you see in a shop window, which reads Pressing Done Here. If you brought your clothes in to be pressed, you would be fooled: for the sign is only for sale.
Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.