Nikolai Berdyaev Quotes

Victory over fear is the first spiritual duty of man.

I never remain passive in the process of reading: while I read I am engaged in a constant creative activity, which leads me to remember not so much the actual matter of the book as the thoughts evoked in my mind by it, directly or indirectly.

True life is creativity, not development: it is the freedom for creative acts, for creative fire, rather than necessity and the heaviness of congealing self-perfection.

Denial of Russia in the name of humanity it is - robbing humanity

God is a reality of spirit He cannot be conceived as an object, not even as the very highest object. God is not to be found in the world of objects.

It is imperative to bear in mind that human creativity is not a claim or a right on the part of man, but God's claim on and call to man. God awaits man's creative act, which is the response to the creative act of God.

Conscience is the spiritual, supernatural principle in man, and it is not of social origin at all. It is rather the perversion and confusion of conscience that is of social origin.

But man as a person, the same man, gains mastery over egocentric self-confinement by disclosing a universe in himself...Personality is a universe, it is filled with universal content.

Perhaps the saddest thing to admit is that those who rejected the Cross have to carry it, while those who welcomed it are so often engaged in crucifying others.

There is something servile in the interpretation of sin as crime which infringes the will of God and calls for legal proceedings on the part of God. Sin is dividedness, a state of deficiency, incompleteness, dissociation, enslavement, hatred, but it is not disobedience and not formal violation of the will of God.

Creativity is something which proceeds from within, out of immeasurable and inexplicable depths, not from without, not from the world's necessity. The very desire to make the creative act understandable, to find a basis for it, is failure to comprehend it. To comprehend the creative act means to recognize that it is inexplicable and without foundation.

The physical union of the sexes ... only intensifies man's sense of solitude.

Self-realization is a process of permanent auto-creation, an elaboration of the new man at the expense of the old.

In every artistic activity a new world is created, the cosmos, a world enlightened and free.

The World is not an idea as asserted by philosophers who have dedicated their entire lives to the exploration of ideas. First and foremost the world is passion. But passion is associated with sadness. Sadness does not only arise from death which makes us face the Eternity, but also from life which causes us to confront the Time.

The will to originality is not the will to be peculiar and unlike anybody else; it means the desire to derive one's consciousness from its primary source.

We find the most terrible form of atheism, not in the militant and passionate struggle against the idea of God himself, but in the practical atheism of everyday living, in indifference and torpor. We often encounter these forms of atheism among those who are formally Christians.

Creative experience foreshadows a new Heaven and a new Earth.

The enslaving of the other is also the enslaving of the self.

Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.

The overwhelming majority of people, including Christians, are materialists. They do not believe in the power of spirit. They believe only in material power.

Creativity is the mystery of freedom.

The central idea of the Eastern Fathers was that of theosis, the divinization of all creatures, the transfiguration of the world, the idea of the cosmos and not the idea of personal salvation...Only later Christian consciousness began to value the idea of hell more than the idea of the transfiguration and divinization of the world...The Kingdom of God is the transfiguration of the world, the universal resurrection, a new heaven and a new earth.

The geniuses have created, but they were less: the saints have been, but they created little...A twofold tragedy of creativeness reveals the truth that there has not yet been in our world a religious epoch of creativity.

Every moral act of love, of mercy, and of sacrifice brings to pass the end of the world where hatred, cruelty, and selfishness reign supreme.

Creativeness is liberation from slavery. Man is free when he finds himself in a state of creative activity. Creativeness leads to ecstasy of the moment. The products of creativeness are within time, but the creative act itself lies outside time.

The essential in artistic creativity is victory over the burden of necessity. In art, man lives outside himself, outside his burdens, the burdens of life. Every creative artistic act is a partial transfiguration of life. In the artistic concept man breaks out through the heaviness of the world. In the creative-artistic attitude towards this world we catch a glimpse of another world.

The creation of the world is not only a process which moves from God to humanity. God demands newness from humanity; God awaits the works of human freedom.

The Russian yearning for the meaning of life is the major theme of our literature, and this is the real point of our intelligentsia's existence.

Our attitude towards evil must be freed from hatred, and has itself need to be enlightened in character...Satan rejoices when he succeeds in inspiring us with diabolical feelings to himself. It is he who wins when his own methods are used against himself...A continual denunciation of evil and its agents merely encourages its growth in the world a truth sufficiently revealed in the Gospels, but to which we are persistently blind.

There is a tragic clash between Truth and the world. Pure undistorted truth burns up the world.

Freedom is the power to create out of nothing, the power of the spirit to create out of itself.

Utopias now appear much more realizable than one used to think. We are now faced with a different new worry: How to prevent their realization.

Philosophy... is the creative perception by the spirit of the meaning of human existence.

Death, that final evil, is one of the paths to eternity. Endless life in the conditions of our existence would be a nightmare.

The bourgeois takes economic power very seriously, and often worships it quite unselfishly.

We are standing on the threshold of a world-epoch of religious creativeness, on a cosmic divide.

In sex we have the source of man's true connection with the cosmos and of his servile dependence. The categories of sex, male and female, are cosmic categories, not merely anthropological categories.

Every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history.

The question of bread for myself is a material question; but the question of bread for my neighbour, for everybody, is a spiritual and a religious question.

Dostoevsky - is not a realist as an artist, he is an experimentator, a creator of an experimential metaphysics of human nature.

...in the third epoch the divinity of man's creative nature is finally revealed and divine power becomes human power.

So great is the worth of Dostoevsky that to have produced him is by itself sufficient justification for the existence of the Russian people in the world: and he will bear witness for his country-men at the last judgement of the nations.

There is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism. [...] The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil, that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power... the Kingdom of God is anarchy.

The meaning of conservatism is not that it impedes movement forward and upward, but that it impedes movement backwards and downwards—to chaotic darkness and the return to a primitive state.

Time is the product of changing realities, beings, existences.

In creativity the way will be found for subject to pass into object, the identity of subject with object will be restored. All the great creators have foreseen this turning-point. Today, in the depths of culture itself and in all its separate spheres, this crisis of creativity is ripening.

Creativity is the supreme mystery of life, the mystery of the appearance of something new, hitherto unknown, derived from nothing, proceeding from nothing, born of nothing other.