What makes us afraid is our great freedom in the face of the emptiness that has still to be filled.

The Socratic teacher turns his students away from himself and back onto themselves; he hides in paradoxes, makes himself inaccessible. The intimate relationship between student and teacher here is not one of submission, but of a contest for truth.

An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation and evasion in some sense or other to his advantage.

I discovered that the study of past philosophers is of little use unless our own reality enters into it. Our reality alone allows the thinker's questions to become comprehensible.

My own being can be judged by the depths I reach in making these historical origins my own.

Only in those moments when I exercise my freedom am I fully myself.

Only then, approaching my fortieth birthday, I made philosophy my life's work.