NIKOLAI BERDYAEV

The question of bread for myself is a material question, but the question of bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question.

There is a tragic clash between Truth and the world. Pure undistorted truth burns up the world.

Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.

The enslaving of the other is also the enslaving of the self.

The Russian yearning for the meaning of life is the major theme of our literature, and this is the real point of our intelligentsia's existence.

The bourgeois takes economic power very seriously, and often worships it quite unselfishly.

Every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history.

Freedom is the power to create out of nothing, the power of the spirit to create out of itself.

Denial of Russia in the name of humanity it is - robbing humanity

The will to originality is not the will to be peculiar and unlike anybody else; it means the desire to derive one's consciousness from its primary source.

Death, that final evil, is one of the paths to eternity. Endless life in the conditions of our existence would be a nightmare.

The overwhelming majority of people, including Christians, are materialists. They do not believe in the power of spirit. They believe only in material power.

Every moral act of love, of mercy, and of sacrifice brings to pass the end of the world where hatred, cruelty, and selfishness reign supreme.

Creativeness is liberation from slavery. Man is free when he finds himself in a state of creative activity. Creativeness leads to ecstasy of the moment. The products of creativeness are within time, but the creative act itself lies outside time.

God is a reality of spirit He cannot be conceived as an object, not even as the very highest object. God is not to be found in the world of objects.

Conscience is the spiritual, supernatural principle in man, and it is not of social origin at all. It is rather the perversion and confusion of conscience that is of social origin.

Self-realization is a process of permanent auto-creation, an elaboration of the new man at the expense of the old.

Time is the product of changing realities, beings, existences.

Dostoevsky - is not a realist as an artist, he is an experimentator, a creator of an experimential metaphysics of human nature.

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.

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.

There is something servile in the interpretation of sin as crime which infringes the will of God and calls for legal proceedings on the part of God. Sin is dividedness, a state of deficiency, incompleteness, dissociation, enslavement, hatred, but it is not disobedience and not formal violation of the will of God.

In sex we have the source of man's true connection with the cosmos and of his servile dependence. The categories of sex, male and female, are cosmic categories, not merely anthropological categories.

The Church is simply the path of history, and not the actual kingdom of God.

Creative experience foreshadows a new Heaven and a new Earth.