Quote collection
149 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Creation happens to us, burns into us, changes us, we tremble and swoon, we submit. Creation - we participate in it, we encounter the creator, offer ourselves to him, helpers and companions."
"No limits are set to the ascent of man, and to each and everyone the highest stands open. Here it is only your personal choice that decides."
"The work produced is a thing among things, able to be experienced and described as a sum of qualities. But from time to time it can face the receptive beholder in its whole embodied form."
"I'm not sure I can take your advice. You are dealing with English Gentlemen. We are dealing with monsters."
"It pains me to speak of God in the third person."
"In philosophical anthropology, ... where the subject is man in his wholeness, the investigator cannot content himself, as in anthropology as an individual science, with considering man as another part of nature and with ignoring the fact that he, the investigator, is himself a man and experiences this humanity in his inner experience in a way that he simply cannot experience any part of nature."
"To produce is to draw forth, to invent is to find, to shape is to discover."
"One must be truly able to say I in order to know the mystery of the Thou in its whole truth."
"From my youth onwards I have found in Jesus my great brother. That Christianity has regarded and does regard him as God and Savior has always appeared to me a fact of the highest importance which, for his sake and my own, I must endeavor to understand . . . I am more than ever certain that a great place belongs to him in Israel's history of faith and that this place cannot be described by any of the usual categories."
"Freedom and destiny are solemnly promised to one another and linked together in meaning."
"The basic word I-Thou can be spoken only with one's whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a Thou to become; becoming I, I say Thou."
"There are people of spirit and there are people of passion, both less common than one might think. Rarer still are the people of spirit and passion. But rarest of all is a passionable spirit."
"One need ask only 'What for? What am I to unify my being for?' The reply is: Not for my own sake."
"You can rake the muck this way, rake the muck that way-- it will always be muck. Have I sinned or have I not sinned? In the time I am brooding over it, I could be stringing pearls for the delight of Heaven"
"The perfection of any matter, the highest or the lowest, touches on the divine."
"The salvation of man does not lie in his holding himself far removed from the worldly, but in consecrating it to holy, to divine meaning."
"God wants man to fulfill his commands as a human being and with the quality peculiar to human beings."
"The ones who count are those persons who - though they may be of little renown - respond to and are responsible for the continuation of the living spirit."
"I have learned a new form of service from the wars of Frederick, king of Prussia. It is not necessary to approach the enemy in order to attack him. In fleeing from him, it is possible to circumvent him as he advances and fall on him from the rear and force him to surrender. What is needed is not to strike straight at evil but to withdraw to the sources of divine power, and from there to circle around evil, bend it and transform it into its opposite."
"For sin is just this, what man cannot by its very nature do with his whole being; it is possible to silence the conflict in the soul, but it is not possible to uproot it"