When language is used without true significance, it loses its purpose as a means of communication and becomes an end in itself.

The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying the history of philosophy ultimately serves their better understanding.

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

Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names he would become their master, so is contemporary man faced by this incomprehensible, which disorders his calculations.

As a universal history of philosophy, the history of philosophy must become one great unity.

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.

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