Nikolai Berdyaev Quotes

Man is a universe within himself.

Earth and heaven are in us

Long ago I'd said that I am "fascinated by the phantasmagoria of human personality" - this is perhaps even truer now than years ago.

I am not a communist first and an individualist second. I am an individualist first, and I don't mean this in the shallow, purely egotistical sense of self-interest and everyone else be damned. I mean this in the true sense of enlightenment, recovery of personality, and the full development of personality.

Your entire universe is in your mind and nowhere else. To expand the universe, expand your mind.

All good work requires self-revelation.

If thou has not seen the devil, look at thine own self.

Self-knowledge is the great power by which we comprehend and control our lives

I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression.

It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.

Self-expression is the dominant necessity of human nature.

The highest purpose of intellectual cultivation is to give a man a perfect knowledge and mastery of his own inner self.

Till it has loved, no man or woman can become itself.

The sphere that is deepest, most unexplored, and most unfathomable, the wonder and glory of God's thought and hand, is our own soul!

Your mind, this globe of awareness, is a starry universe. When you push off with your foot, a thousand new roads become clear.

The imagination is not an escape, but a return to the richness of our true selves; a return to reality.

The disease we all have and that we have to fight against all our lives is ... the disease of self.

I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

Over time you learn to know a bit more about yourself - you develop a certain amount of self-insight and self-awareness, and you know what you can absorb, and what you cannot; what gets to you and what doesn't. And I observe a lot. I see a lot around me. And over time you also get to understand the nature of man and the environments you are dealing with, and you can't always allow emotions and temper to flare up because you're displeased with something, or you want to change it.

The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.

Humankind is never what he is but the self he seeks.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us.

While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves. We can become the world's greatest experts on anger, jealousy, and self-deprecatio n, as well as on joyfulness, clarity, and insight. Everything that human beings feel, we feel. We can become extremely wise and sensitive to all of humanity and the whole universe simply by knowing ourselves, just as we are.

Our problem is to become acquainted with our own selves, letting our personalities loose upon the world for the sheer adventure of their full development and in the positive hope that they may in their own way lift the level of humanity.

Self-awareness is a key to self-mastery