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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

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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
Start
Truth
Take
Much
Think
Thinking
Arrive

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.
Nikolai Berdyaev
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The physical union of the sexes ... only intensifies man's sense of solitude.
Nikolai Berdyaev
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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.
Nikolai Berdyaev
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Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.
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.
Nikolai Berdyaev
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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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Victory over fear is the first spiritual duty of man.
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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...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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Creativity is the mystery of freedom.
Nikolai Berdyaev
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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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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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Objectification is above all exteriorization, the alienation of spirit from itself.
Nikolai Berdyaev
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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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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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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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We are standing on the threshold of a world-epoch of religious creativeness, on a cosmic divide.
Nikolai Berdyaev
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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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Time is the product of changing realities, beings, existences.
Nikolai Berdyaev