“Nowadays one becomes an author not through one’s originality but by reading. One becomes a human being by aping others. That one is human is known not from one’s own case but by inference: one is like the others, therefore one is human. God knows whether any of us are! And in our age, when […]

“In the case of children, the ruinous character of boredom is universally acknowledged. Children are always well-behaved as long as they are enjoying themselves. This is true in the strictest sense; for if they sometimes become unruly in their play, it is because they are already beginning to be bored — boredom is already approaching, […]

“The existing individual becomes concrete in his experience, and in going on he still has his experience with him, and hence may at any moment lose it; he has it with him not as something one has in a pocket, but his having it constitutes a definite something by which he is himself specifically determined, […]

“The loving man, he in whom there is love, hides the multitude of sins, sees not his neighbor’s fault, or, if he sees, hides it from himself and from others; love makes him blind in a sense far more beautiful than this can be said of a lover, blind to his neighbor’s sins. On the […]

“A landscape painter, whether he strives to produce an effect by a faithful rendering of the subject, or by a more ideal reproduction, perhaps leaves the individual cold, but such a picture as I have in mind produces an indescribable effect for the fact that one does not know whether to laugh or cry, and […]

“The lover discovers nothing, hence he conceals the multitude of sins which would be exposed through the discovery. The life of the lover is an expression of the apostolic precept of being a child in malice. That which the world really admires as shrewdness is an understanding of evil; wisdom is essentially the understanding of […]

“Eighteen hundred years have not contributed a jot to demonstrating the truth of Christianity; on the contrary, with steadily increasing power they have contributed to abolishing Christianity… Now, since it has been demonstrated, and on an enormous scale, that Christianity is the truth, now there is no one, almost no one, who is willing to […]

“An existential system cannot be formulated. Does this mean that no such system exists? By no means; nor is it implied in our assertion. Existence itself is a system — for God; but it cannot be a system for any existing spirit. System and finality correspond to one another, but existence is precisely the opposite […]