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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

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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
Consciousness
Derive
Desire
Originality
Means
Unlike
Else
Primaries
Mean
Primary
Writing
Peculiar
Anybody
Source

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Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.
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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.
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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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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.
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Time is the product of changing realities, beings, existences.
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There is a tragic clash between Truth and the world. Pure undistorted truth burns up the world.
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Death, that final evil, is one of the paths to eternity. Endless life in the conditions of our existence would be a nightmare.
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In every artistic activity a new world is created, the cosmos, a world enlightened and free.
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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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Freedom is the power to create out of nothing, the power of the spirit to create out of itself.
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The physical union of the sexes ... only intensifies man's sense of solitude.
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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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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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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 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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We are standing on the threshold of a world-epoch of religious creativeness, on a cosmic divide.
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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
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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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Creativity is the mystery of freedom.
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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.
Nikolai Berdyaev