Nikolai Berdyaev Quotes - Page 2

There is no objective reality. But there is only an illusion of consciousness, there is only an objectivication of reality, which was created by the spirit. The origin of life is creativity, freedom; and the personality, subject, and spirit are the representatives of that origin, but not the nature, not the object.

God is a reality of spirit He cannot be conceived as an object, not even as the very highest object. God is not to be found in the world of objects.

It is imperative to bear in mind that human creativity is not a claim or a right on the part of man, but God's claim on and call to man. God awaits man's creative act, which is the response to the creative act of God.

Time is the product of changing realities, beings, existences.

Self-realization is a process of permanent auto-creation, an elaboration of the new man at the expense of the old.

Our attitude towards evil must be freed from hatred, and has itself need to be enlightened in character...Satan rejoices when he succeeds in inspiring us with diabolical feelings to himself. It is he who wins when his own methods are used against himself...A continual denunciation of evil and its agents merely encourages its growth in the world a truth sufficiently revealed in the Gospels, but to which we are persistently blind.

Creative experience foreshadows a new Heaven and a new Earth.

Conscience is the spiritual, supernatural principle in man, and it is not of social origin at all. It is rather the perversion and confusion of conscience that is of social origin.

In sex we have the source of man's true connection with the cosmos and of his servile dependence. The categories of sex, male and female, are cosmic categories, not merely anthropological categories.

The question of bread for myself is a material question; but the question of bread for my neighbour, for everybody, is a spiritual and a religious question.

Ethics occupies a central place in philosophy because it is concerned with sin, with the origin of good and evil and with moral valuations. And since these problems have a universal significance, the sphere of ethics is wider than is generally supposed. It deals with meaning and value and its province is the world in which the distinction between good and evil is drawn, evaluations are made and meaning is sought.

Creativity is something which proceeds from within, out of immeasurable and inexplicable depths, not from without, not from the world's necessity. The very desire to make the creative act understandable, to find a basis for it, is failure to comprehend it. To comprehend the creative act means to recognize that it is inexplicable and without foundation.

So great is the worth of Dostoevsky that to have produced him is by itself sufficient justification for the existence of the Russian people in the world: and he will bear witness for his country-men at the last judgement of the nations.

Objectification is above all exteriorization, the alienation of spirit from itself.

The geniuses have created, but they were less: the saints have been, but they created little...A twofold tragedy of creativeness reveals the truth that there has not yet been in our world a religious epoch of creativity.

The Church is simply the path of history, and not the actual kingdom of God.

Philosophy... is the creative perception by the spirit of the meaning of human existence.

I do not think discursively. It is not so much that I arrive at truth as that I take my start from it.

The physical union of the sexes ... only intensifies man's sense of solitude.

The bourgeois takes economic power very seriously, and often worships it quite unselfishly.

The uniting of Orthodoxy with state absolutism came about on the soil of a non-belief in the Divineness of the earth, in the earthly future of mankind; Orthodoxy gave away the earth into the hands of the state because of its own non-belief in man and mankind, because of its nihilistic attitude towards the world. Orthodoxy does not believe in the religious ordering of human life upon the earth, and it compensates for its own hopeless pessimism by a call for the forceful ordering of it by state authority.

In creativity the way will be found for subject to pass into object, the identity of subject with object will be restored. All the great creators have foreseen this turning-point. Today, in the depths of culture itself and in all its separate spheres, this crisis of creativity is ripening.

But man as a person, the same man, gains mastery over egocentric self-confinement by disclosing a universe in himself...Personality is a universe, it is filled with universal content.

The World is not an idea as asserted by philosophers who have dedicated their entire lives to the exploration of ideas. First and foremost the world is passion. But passion is associated with sadness. Sadness does not only arise from death which makes us face the Eternity, but also from life which causes us to confront the Time.

In every artistic activity a new world is created, the cosmos, a world enlightened and free.