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

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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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Time is the product of changing realities, beings, existences.
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Creativity is the mystery of freedom.
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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.
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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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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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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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Objectification is above all exteriorization, the alienation of spirit from itself.
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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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Freedom is the power to create out of nothing, the power of the spirit to create out of itself.
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In every artistic activity a new world is created, the cosmos, a world enlightened and free.
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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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The physical union of the sexes ... only intensifies man's sense of solitude.
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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 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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Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.
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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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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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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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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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