Nikolai Berdyaev famous quotes

Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Spiritual #Making A Difference #Charity

There is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism. [...] The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil, that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power... the Kingdom of God is anarchy.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Religious #Attitude #Men

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.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Sacrifice #Hatred #Selfishness

The enslaving of the other is also the enslaving of the self.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Self

Every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Spiritual #Soul #Humans

There is a tragic clash between Truth and the world. Pure undistorted truth burns up the world.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Truth #World #Tragic

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.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Religious #Attitude #Believe

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.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Sex #Men #Female

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.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Spiritual #Moving #Humanity

Victory over fear is the first spiritual duty of man.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Spiritual #Men #Victory

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

#Thinking

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.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Creativity #Reality #Personality

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

#Sex #Men #Solitude

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.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Mean #Writing #Desire

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.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Spiritual #Men #Confusion

Creative experience foreshadows a new Heaven and a new Earth.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Heaven #Creative #Earth

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.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Philosophy #Evil #World

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.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Exercise #Limits #Tendencies

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.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Religion #Morality #Crosses

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.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Spiritual #Attitude #Character

The central idea of the Eastern Fathers was that of theosis, the divinization of all creatures, the transfiguration of the world, the idea of the cosmos and not the idea of personal salvation...Only later Christian consciousness began to value the idea of hell more than the idea of the transfiguration and divinization of the world...The Kingdom of God is the transfiguration of the world, the universal resurrection, a new heaven and a new earth.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Christian #Spiritual #Father

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

#Objectification #Spirit #Alienation

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.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Country #Men #People

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.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Reality #World #Spirit

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.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Darkness #Movement #Return

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.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Thinking #Worry #Different

Freedom is the power to create out of nothing, the power of the spirit to create out of itself.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Freedom #Spirit

I never remain passive in the process of reading: while I read I am engaged in a constant creative activity, which leads me to remember not so much the actual matter of the book as the thoughts evoked in my mind by it, directly or indirectly.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Book #Reading #Creative

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.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Real #Literature #Meaning Of Life

We find the most terrible form of atheism, not in the militant and passionate struggle against the idea of God himself, but in the practical atheism of everyday living, in indifference and torpor. We often encounter these forms of atheism among those who are formally Christians.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Christian #Atheist #Struggle

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.
-- Nikolai Berdyaev

#Passion #Sadness #Ideas