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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.

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
Rather
Spiritual
Perversion
Social
Supernatural
Men
Origin
Confusion
Principle
Conscience
Principles

More quotes by Nikolai Berdyaev

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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 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.
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Objectification is above all exteriorization, the alienation of spirit from itself.
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Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.
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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.
Nikolai Berdyaev
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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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Freedom is the power to create out of nothing, the power of the spirit to create out of itself.
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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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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
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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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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
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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.
Nikolai Berdyaev
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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.
Nikolai Berdyaev
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...in the third epoch the divinity of man's creative nature is finally revealed and divine power becomes human power.
Nikolai Berdyaev
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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.
Nikolai Berdyaev
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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.
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.
Nikolai Berdyaev
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Time is the product of changing realities, beings, existences.
Nikolai Berdyaev
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In every artistic activity a new world is created, the cosmos, a world enlightened and free.
Nikolai Berdyaev