Nikolai Berdyaev Quotes
Every moral act of love, of mercy, and of sacrifice brings to pass the end of the world where hatred, cruelty, and selfishness reign supreme.
Perhaps the saddest thing to admit is that those who rejected the Cross have to carry it, while those who welcomed it are so often engaged in crucifying others.
The creation of the world is not only a process which moves from God to humanity. God demands newness from humanity; God awaits the works of human freedom.
Utopias now appear much more realizable than one used to think. We are now faced with a different new worry: How to prevent their realization.
The meaning of conservatism is not that it impedes movement forward and upward, but that it impedes movement backwards and downwards—to chaotic darkness and the return to a primitive state.
Freedom is the power to create out of nothing, the power of the spirit to create out of itself.
Creativity is the supreme mystery of life, the mystery of the appearance of something new, hitherto unknown, derived from nothing, proceeding from nothing, born of nothing other.
Death, that final evil, is one of the paths to eternity. Endless life in the conditions of our existence would be a nightmare.
The overwhelming majority of people, including Christians, are materialists. They do not believe in the power of spirit. They believe only in material power.
Objectification is above all exteriorization, the alienation of spirit from itself.
True life is creativity, not development: it is the freedom for creative acts, for creative fire, rather than necessity and the heaviness of congealing self-perfection.
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.
Self-realization is a process of permanent auto-creation, an elaboration of the new man at the expense of the old.
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.
The will to originality is not the will to be peculiar and unlike anybody else; it means the desire to derive one's consciousness from its primary source.
I do not think discursively. It is not so much that I arrive at truth as that I take my start from it.
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.
The bourgeois takes economic power very seriously, and often worships it quite unselfishly.
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.
Philosophy... is the creative perception by the spirit of the meaning of human existence.
Dostoevsky - is not a realist as an artist, he is an experimentator, a creator of an experimential metaphysics of human nature.
We are standing on the threshold of a world-epoch of religious creativeness, on a cosmic divide.
It is beyond dispute that the state exercises very great power over human life and it always shows a tendency to go beyond the limits laid down for it.
...in the third epoch the divinity of man's creative nature is finally revealed and divine power becomes human power.
In every artistic activity a new world is created, the cosmos, a world enlightened and free.
The Russian yearning for the meaning of life is the major theme of our literature, and this is the real point of our intelligentsia's existence.
