The deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than himself.

One could construe the life of man as a great discourse in which the various people represent different parts of speech (the same might apply to states).

Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.

The object of (Christian) faith is not the teaching but the Teacher.

Be that self which one truly is.

I have attacked no one as not being a Christian, I have condemned no one.

The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.