It requires courage not to surrender oneself to the ingenious or compassionate counsels of despair that would induce a man to eliminate himself from the ranks of the living; but it does not follow from this that every huckster who is fattened and nourished in self-confidence has more courage than the man who yielded to despair.

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.

The crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.

Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do. He who does not understand irony and has no ear for its whispering lacks of what might called the absolute beginning of the personal life. He lacks what at moments is indispensable for the personal life, lacks both the regeneration and rejuvenation, the cleaning baptism of irony that redeems the soul from having its life in finitude though living boldly and energetically in finitude.

Christians remind me of schoolboys who want to look up the answers to their math problems in the back of the book rather than work them through.

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

In the Christianity of Christendom the Cross has become something like the child’s hobby-horse and trumpet.