Only a development of thought achieved through the self-education of the whole man can prevent any body of thought whatsoever from becoming a poison; can prevent enlightenment from becoming an agent of death.

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.

To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.

The moment is the sole reality.

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

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