Philosophic meditation is an accomplishment by which I attain Being and my own self, not impartial thinking which studies a subject with indifference.

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.

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

Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension.

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.

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