25 quotes
Reason is like an open secret that can become known to anyone at any time; it is the quiet space into which everyone can enter through his own thought.
The teacher of love teaches struggle. The teacher of lifeless isolation from the world teaches peace.
Psychology of World Views (1919)
To philosophise is to learn to die – philosophising is a soaring up to the Godhead – the knowledge of Being as Being.
One who would influence the masses must have recourse to the art of advertisement. The clamour of puffery is to-day requisite even for an intellectual movement.
Man in the Modern Age (1933)
Philosophy means to be on the way. Its questions are more essential than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question.
When language is used without true significance, it loses its purpose as a means of communication and becomes an end in itself.
Man in the Modern Age (1933)
I approach the presentation of Kierkegaard with some trepidation. Next to Nietzsche, or rather, prior to Nietzsche, I consider him to be the most important thinker of our post-Kantian age.
The Great Philosophers (1962)
Man is always something more than what he knows of himself. He is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process...
Man in the Modern Age (1933)
With the disintegration of all that [Nietzsche] had revered, existence, to him, had become a desert in which only one thing remained, namely that which had relentlessly forced him into this path: truthfulness that knows no limits and is not subject to any condition.
Nietzsche (1946)
Philosophy seemed to me the supreme, even the sole, concern of man.
On My Philosophy (1941)
It may stamp all flat; it is disinclined to tolerate independence and greatness, but prone to constrain people to become as automatic as ants.
Man in the Modern Age (1933)
Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility.
Nietzsche (1946)
Imminent seems the collapse of that which for millennium has constituted man's universe.
Man in the Modern Age (1933)
Even the most elevated psychological understanding is not a loving understanding.
Psychology of World Views (1919)
Conversely, there are forbidden truths: This same threat to the continuance of the community is also counteracted by relentlessly preventing anyone from thinking and uttering unconventional but authentic truths.
Nietzsche (1946)
For any community and those living in it, only that is true which can be communicated to all. Hence universal communicability is unconsciously accepted as the source and criterion of those truths that promote life through communal means.
Nietzsche (1946)
My path was not the normal one of professors of philosophy.
On My Philosophy (1941)
It is impalpable, illusory, transient; "'tis here, 'tis there, 'tis gone"; a nullity which can nevertheless for a moment endow the multitude with power to uplift or destroy.
Man in the Modern Age (1933)
No one is guiltless...But no one is beyond the pale of human existence, provided he pays for his guilt.
The Question of German Guilt (1947)
The 'public' is a phantom, the phantom of an opinion supposed to exist in a vast number of persons who have no effective interrelation and though the opinion is not effectively present in the units.
Man in the Modern Age (1933)