To pace about, looking to obtain status, looking to attain 'importance' - I can think of nothing more ridiculous.

If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.

People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.

Out of love for mankind, and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.

Truth is not something you can appropriate easily and quickly. You certainly cannot sleep or dream yourself to the truth. No, you must be tried, do battle, and suffer if you are to acquire the truth for yourself. It is a sheer illusion to think that in relation to the truth there is an abridgement, a short cut that dispenses with the necessity for struggling for it.

For love is exultant when it unites equals, but it is triumphant when it makes that which was unequal equal in love.

Irony is the cultivation of the spirit and therefore follows next after immediacy; then comes the ethicist, then the humourist, then the religious person.