Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Above all do not forget your duty to love yourself.
This fact, that the opposite of sin is by no means virtue, has been overlooked. The latter is partly a pagan view, which is content with a merely human standard, and which for that very reason does not know what sin is, that all sin is before God. No, the opposite of sin is faith.
The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.
The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.
The truth is a trap: you can not get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.
Far from the self succeeding increasingly in being itself, it becomes increasingly obvious that it is a hypothetical self.
He who says without pretence that he despairs is, after all, a little nearer, a dialectical step nearer being cured than all those who are not regarded and who do not regard themselves as being in despair.
God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but He does what is still more wonderful: He makes saints out of sinners.
If sin is ignorance, then sin does not really exist, for sin is precisely consciousness; if sin is ignorance of what is right, and one then does what is wrong because one does not know what is right, then no sin has occurred.
The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.
Sin is in itself separation from the good, but despair over sin is separation a second time.
People think the world needs a republic, and they think it needs a new social order, and a new religion, but it never occurs to anyone that what the world really needs, confused as it is by much learning, is a new Socrates.
Someone in despair despairs over something. So, for a moment, it seems, but only for a moment. That same instant the true despair shows itself, or despair in its true guise. In despairing over something he was really despairing over himself, and he wants now to be rid of himself.
It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.
Every human being is tried this way in the active service of expectancy. Now comes the fulfillment and relieves him, but soon he is again placed on reconnaissance for expectancy; then he is again relieved, but as long as there is any future for him, he has not yet finished his service. And while human life goes on this way in very diverse expectancy, expecting very different things according to different times and occasions and in different frames of mind, all life is again one nightwatch of expectancy.
Become perfectly silent — then shall the rest be added unto you.
What we call worldliness simply consists of such people who, if one may so express it, pawn themselves to the world.
Only one deception is possible in the infinite sense, self-deception.
Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?
What the age needs is not a genius — it has had geniuses enough, but a martyr, who in order to teach men to obey would himself be obedient unto death. What the age needs is awakening. And therefore someday, not only my writings but my whole life, all the intriguing mystery of the machine will be studied and studied. I never forget how God helps me and it is therefore my last wish that everything may be to his honour.
The truth is always in the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because as a rule the minority is made up of those who actually have an opinion, while the strength of the majority is illusory, formed of that crowd which has no opinion — and which therefore the next moment (when it becomes clear that the minority is the stronger) adopts the latter’s opinion, which now is in the majority, i. e. becomes rubbish by having the whole retinue and numerousness on its side, while the truth is again in a new minority.
Sin is in itself separation from the good, but despair over sin is separation a second time.
What afflicts the adult is not to much the illusion of hope as, no doubt among other things, the grotesque illusion of looking down from some supposedly higher vantage-point, free from illusion, upon the illusions of the young.
In an inadmissible and unlawful way we have learned to know him; whereas to believe in him is the only permissible mode of approach.
Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic — if it is pulled out I shall die.
It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand…
Worldly wisdom thinks that love is a relationship between man and man. Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between: man-God-man, that is, that God is the middle term.
The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded.
cannot make me one with the neighbor in a united self. Love to one’s neighbor is love between two individual beings, each eternally qualified as spirit.
To stand on one leg and prove God’s existence is a very different thing from going on one’s knees and thanking Him.
If I have ventured wrongly, very well, life then helps me with its penalty. But if I haven’t ventured at all, who helps me then?