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

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.

The soul of a landscape, the spirits of the elements, the genius of every place will be revealed to a loving view of nature.

Greatness of mind becomes an object of love only when the power at work in it itself has a noble character

At the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from Parmenides to Hegel, is lost.

Conflicts may be the sources of defeat, lost life and a limitation of our potentiality but they may also lead to greater depth of living and the birth of more far-reaching unities, which flourish in the tensions that engender them.