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Rabbi Zusya said that on the Day of Judgment, God would ask him, not why he had not been Moses, but why he had not been Zusya.

Walter Kaufmann

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Walter Kaufmann
Age: 59 †
Born: 1921
Born: July 1
Died: 1980
Died: September 4
Philosopher
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Freiburg/Breisgau
Walter Arnold Kaufmann
David Dennis
Moses
Judgment
Asks
Would
Rabbi

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Faith means intense, usually confident, belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person.
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Paul substituted faith in Christ for the Christlike life.
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Writing is thinking in slow motion.
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Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. The truth is too complex and frightening the taste for the truth is an acquired taste that few acquire…. ….The world winks at dishonesty. the world does not call it dishonesty
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No other German writer of comparable stature has been a more extreme critic of German nationalism than Nietzsche.
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Philosophy means liberation from the - routine, soaring above the well known, seeing it in new perspectives, arousing wonder and the wish to fly.
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The first function of a book review should be, I believe, to give some idea of the contents and character of the book.
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Life ceases to be so oppressive: we are free to give our own lives meaning and purpose, free to redeem our suffering by making something of it.
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Reason may not always tell us what to believe, but it can help us on what we shouldn't believe.
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The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life-that is the heart of existentialism.
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There is thus a certain plausibility to Nietzsche's doctrine, though it is dynamite. He maintains in effect that the gulf separating Plato from the average man is greater than the cleft between the average man and a chimpanzee.
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Here an attempt is made to explain suffering: the outcaste of traditional Hinduism is held to deserve his fetched fate it is a punishment for the wrongs he did in a previous life.
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The only theism worthy of our respect believes in God not because of the way the world is made but in spite of that. The only theism that is no less profound than the Buddha's atheism is that represented in the Bible by Job and Jeremiah.
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The doctrine of original sin claims that all men sinned in Adam but whether they did or whether it is merely a fact that all men sin does not basically affect the problem of suffering.
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Words signify man's refusal to accept the world as it is.
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It was also Hegel who established the view that the different philosophic systems that we find in history are to be comprehended in terms of development and that they are generally one-sided because they owe their origins to a reaction against what has gone before.
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Thirdly, even if we assume that the world is governed by purpose, we need only add that this purpose - or, if there are several, at least one of them - is not especially intent on preventing suffering, whether it is indifferent to suffering or actually rejoices in it.
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For atheism and polytheism there is no special problem of suffering, nor need there be for every kind of monotheism.
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When Hegel later became a man of influence' he insisted that the Jews should be granted equal rights because civic rights belong to man because he is a man and not on account of his ethnic origins or his religion.
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Job's forthright indictment of the injustice of this world is surely right. The ways of the world are weird and much more unpredictable than either scientists or theologians generally make things look.
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