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| God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners. | | Uncategorized | |
| Had I to carve an inscription on my tombstone I would ask for none other than "The Individual | | Uncategorized | |
| Honour him, dear Symparanekromenoi, for his grey hair and his misfortune. | | Uncategorized | |
| How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech. | | Uncategorized | |
| How ironical that it is by means of speech that man can degrade himself below the level of dumb creation -- for a chatterbox is truly of a lower category than a dumb creature. | | Uncategorized | |
| I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this. | | Uncategorized | |
| I divide my time as follows: half the time I sleep, the other half I dream. I never dream when I sleep, for that would be a pity, for sleeping is the highest accomplishment of genius. | | Uncategorized | |
| I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved. | | Uncategorized | |
| I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations - one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it - you will regret both. | | Regret | |
| If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. | | Uncategorized | |
| If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of potential -- for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints; possibility never. | | Power; Wealth; Wishes | |
| In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant. My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known -- no wonder, then, that I return the love. | | Uncategorized | |
| Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do | | Irony | |
| Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do. He who does not understand irony and has no ear for its whispering lacks of what might called the absolute beginning of the personal life. He lacks what at moments is indispensable for the personal life, lacks both the regeneration and rejuvenation, the cleaning baptism of irony that redeems the soul from having its life in finitude though living boldly and energetically in finitude. | | Uncategorized | |
| It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite. | | Uncategorized | |
| It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived /forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position. | | Uncategorized | |
| It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey. | | Uncategorized | |
| It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox. | | Uncategorized | |
| It requires courage not to surrender oneself to the ingenious or compassionate counsels of despair that would induce a man to eliminate himself from the ranks of the living; but it does not follow from this that every huckster who is fattened and nourished in self-confidence has more courage than the man who yielded to despair. | | Uncategorized | |
| It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important. | | Relationships | |
