Nikolai Berdyaev quotes - page 2

The subject alone always has reality. (Nikolai Berdyaev)
No one today likes truth: utility and self interest have long ago been substituted for truth. View quote
Nikolai Berdyaev
The greater part of Eastern teachers of the Church, from Clement of Alexandria to Maximus the Confessor, were supporters of Apokatastasis, of universal salvation and resurrection. View quote
Nikolai Berdyaev
Spirit, like flame, like freedom, like creativeness, is opposed to any social stagnation or any lifeless tradition. View quote
Nikolai Berdyaev
Christ cannot have human vicarage in the person of the tsar or high-priest. View quote
Nikolai Berdyaev
The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power... the Kingdom of God is anarchy. View quote
Nikolai Berdyaev
Ethics occupies a central place in philosophy because it is concerned with sin, with the origin of good and evil and with moral valuations. View quote
Nikolai Berdyaev
Spirit is never an object; nor a spiritual reality an objective one. View quote
Nikolai Berdyaev
In objectification there are no primal realities, but only symbols. The objective spirit is merely a symbolism of spirit. Spirit is realistic while cultural and social life are symbolical. View quote
Nikolai Berdyaev
There is no objective reality. But there is only an illusion of consciousness, there is only an objectivication of reality, which was created by the spirit. View quote
Nikolai Berdyaev
Fate and freedom alike play a part in history; and there are times, as in wars and revolutions, when fate is the stronger of the two. Freedom. (Nikolai Berdyaev)
The Christian world doesn't know Orthodoxy too well. It only knows the external and for the most part, the negative features of the Orthodox Church and not the inner spiritual treasure. View quote
Nikolai Berdyaev
A real reconciliation of East and West is impossible and inconceivable on the basis of a materialistic Communism, or of a materialistic Capitalism, or indeed of a materialistic Socialism. View quote
Nikolai Berdyaev
The new religious consciousness rises up against the nihilistic attitude towards the world and mankind. View quote
Nikolai Berdyaev
The uniting of Orthodoxy with state absolutism came about on the soil of a non-belief in the Divineness of the earth, in the earthly future of mankind; Orthodoxy gave away the earth into the hands of the state because of its own non-belief in man and mankind, because of its nihilistic attitude towards the world. Orthodoxy does not believe in the religious ordering of human life upon the earth, and it compensates for its own hopeless pessimism by a call for the forceful ordering of it by state authority. View quote
Nikolai Berdyaev
Ethics occupies a central place in philosophy because it is concerned with sin, with the origin of good and evil and with moral valuations. And since these problems have a universal significance, the sphere of ethics is wider than is generally supposed. It deals with meaning and value and its province is the world in which the distinction between good and evil is drawn, evaluations are made and meaning is sought. View quote
Nikolai Berdyaev
There is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism. ... The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil, that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power... the Kingdom of God is anarchy. View quote
Nikolai Berdyaev
There is no objective reality. But there is only an illusion of consciousness, there is only an objectivication of reality, which was created by the spirit. The origin of life is creativity, freedom; and the personality, subject, and spirit are the representatives of that origin, but not the nature, not the object. View quote
Nikolai Berdyaev
The bourgeois takes economic power very seriously, and often worships it quite unselfishly. View quote
Nikolai Berdyaev
We live in a nightmare of falsehoods, and there are few who are sufficiently awake and aware to see things as they are. Our first duty is to clear away illusions and recover a sense of reality. If war should come, it will do so on account of our delusions, for which our hag-ridden conscience attempts to find moral excuses. To recover a sense of reality is to recover the truth about ourselves and the world in which we live, and thereby to gain the power of keeping this world from flying asunder. View quote
Nikolai Berdyaev