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

Nikolai Berdyaev

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Nikolai Berdyaev
Age: 73 †
Born: 1874
Born: January 1
Died: 1948
Died: January 1
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
University Teacher
Kiev
Nikolay Aleksandrovich Berdyayev
Nikolaj Berdyayev
Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev
Undistorted
Burns
Clash
Tragic
Pure
Truth
World

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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.
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Every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history.
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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.
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Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.
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I do not think discursively. It is not so much that I arrive at truth as that I take my start from it.
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Objectification is above all exteriorization, the alienation of spirit from itself.
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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.
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...in the third epoch the divinity of man's creative nature is finally revealed and divine power becomes human power.
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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.
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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.
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The physical union of the sexes ... only intensifies man's sense of solitude.
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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.
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Time is the product of changing realities, beings, existences.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Freedom is the power to create out of nothing, the power of the spirit to create out of itself.
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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.
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Victory over fear is the first spiritual duty of man.
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