What the philosophers have to say about reality is often as disappointing as a sign you see in a shop window, which reads Pressing Done Here. If you brought your clothes in to be pressed, you would be fooled: for the sign is only for sale.

Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.

Most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes--but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.

Just as in the great moment of resignation one does not mediate but chooses, now the task is to gain proficiency in repeating the impassioned choice and, existing, to express it in existence.

The most common form of despair is not being who you are.

One is not unpopular because he uses peculiar expressions; that just so happens; such terms become a fad, and by and by everybody, down to the last simpleton, uses them. But a person who follows through an idea in his mind is, and always will be, essentially unpopular. That is why Socrates was unpopular, though he did not use any special terms, for to grasp and hold his 'ignorance' requires greater vital effort than understanding the whole of Hegel's philosophy.

It is tragic-comic to see that all this knowledge and understanding exercises no power at all over men's lives, that their lives do not express in the remotest way what they have understood, but rather the opposite.