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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
Principle
Conscience
Principles
Rather
Spiritual
Perversion
Social
Supernatural
Men
Origin
Confusion

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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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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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We are standing on the threshold of a world-epoch of religious creativeness, on a cosmic divide.
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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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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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Creativity is the mystery of freedom.
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In every artistic activity a new world is created, the cosmos, a world enlightened and free.
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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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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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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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Objectification is above all exteriorization, the alienation of spirit from itself.
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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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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 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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The physical union of the sexes ... only intensifies man's sense of solitude.
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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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Victory over fear is the first spiritual duty of man.
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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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Every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history.
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