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The soul must accept guilt in order to destroy existing evil, lest it incur the greater guilt of idyllic withdrawal, of seeming to be good by putting up with wrong.

— Ernst Bloch Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (1959)

Aber es steht doch in der Regel so, daß die Seele schuldig werden muß, um das schlecht Bestehende zu vernichten, um nicht durch idyllischen Rückzug, scheingute Duldung des Unrechts noch schuldiger zu werden.

Original text (German)

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Notes from Wikiquote

p. 36

More quotes by Ernst Bloch

Only an atheist can be a good Christian.

In death too, there is always something of the rich cat that lets the mouse run before devouring it

Traces (1930)

Indiscriminate ideological suspicion of any idea, without the urge to exalt an idea of one's own, will discourage rather than promote lucidity.

Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (1959)

In the same society in which the processes of production and distribution will go on far out at the circumference, the essential human concerns will move to the center, to the end, into the teleological questions of "where to" and "what for."

Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (1959)

On bourgeois ground … change is impossible anyway even if it were desired. In fact, bourgeois interest would like to draw every other interest opposed to it into its own failure; so, in order to drain the new life, it makes its own agony apparently fundamental, apparently ontological. The futility of bourgeois existence is extended to be that of the human situation in general, of existence per se.

The Principle of Hope (1959)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ernst Bloch (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.