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Peter Sloterdijk Quotes

How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can withstand mockery, that is

How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can withstand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot withstand satire is false.

Peter Sloterdijk
Ironic, Joking Around, Gestures

In truth, philosophy is the mode of thought shaped by the most radical form of prejudice: the passion of being-in-the-world. With the sole exception of specialists in the field, virtually everyone senses that anything which offers less than this passion play remains philosophically trivial. Cultural anthropologists suggest the appealing term 'deep play' for the comprehensively absorbing preoccupations of human beings. From the perspective of a theory of the practising life we would add: the deep plays are those which are moved by the heights.

Peter Sloterdijk
Philosophy, Passion, Play
Peter Sloterdijk (2014). “You Must Change Your Life”, p.24, John Wiley & Sons

Ventilation is the profound secret of existence.

Peter Sloterdijk
Profound, Secret, Existence

Wherever one encounters members of the human race, they always show the traits of a being that is condemned to surrealistic effort. Whoever goes in search of humans will find acrobats.

Peter Sloterdijk
Race, Effort, Encounters
Peter Sloterdijk (2014). “You Must Change Your Life”, p.23, John Wiley & Sons

Gardens are enclosed areas in which plants and arts meet. They form 'cultures' in an uncompromised sense of the word.

Peter Sloterdijk
Art, Garden, Culture
Peter Sloterdijk (2014). “You Must Change Your Life”, p.20, John Wiley & Sons

An ideology critique that does not clearly accept its identity as satire can, however, easily be transformed from an instrument in the search for truth into one of dogmatism. All too often, it interferes with the capacity for dialogue instead of opening up new paths for it.

Peter Sloterdijk
Opening Up, Identity, Doe
"Critique of Cynical Reason". Book by Peter Sloterdijk, 1983.

As long as no more than a small minority are capable of reading and writing, universal alphabetization seems like a messianic project. Only once everyone has this ability does one notice the catastrophe that almost no one can do it properly.

Peter Sloterdijk
Reading, Writing, Long
Peter Sloterdijk (2014). “You Must Change Your Life”, p.443, John Wiley & Sons

The violent, antirationalistic impulse in Western countries is reacting to an intellectual state of affairs in which all thinking has become strategy; this impulse shows a disgust for a certain form of self-preservation. It is a sensitive shivering from the cold breath of a reality where knowledge is power and power is knowledge.

Peter Sloterdijk
Country, Reality, Thinking
"Critique of Cynical Reason". Book by Peter Sloterdijk, 1983.

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