Nikolai Berdyaev Quotes

I mean I think that when you've got a big brain, when you find yourself planted in a world with a brain big enough to understand quite a lot of what you see around you, but not everything, you naturally fall to thinking about the deep mysteries. Where do we come from? Where does the world come from? Where does the universe come from?

And so I ask, "Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins?" But God, who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in his weary cryptic way, "Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits.

If life is so meaningless, then why are we always bringing it up?

Every kid goes to school full of questions about meaning. You know, 'What's my place in the universe? What does it mean to be a human being? What are human beings?' Existing courses cannot help you answer those questions. They can't even help you ask them.

I think of myself as being a relatively intelligent man who is open to a lot of different things and I think that questioning our purpose in life and the meaning of existence is something that we all go through at some point.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

We have to make philosophy itself an object of philosophical concern.

Whenever you're talking about meaning, basically... I think a lot of the human experience has to do with trying to understand what things mean, and there's not really any tools to do that unless you're thinking about it in a more spiritual or philosophical realm.

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.

Initially, I studied philosophy, because it claimed to give you answers to the meaning of existence, but it didn't: It was basically a semantics game.

Who does understand life?

Man - a being in search of meaning.

French existentialism is an unhelpful philosophy in which to couch modern feminism: born from the ravages of the Second World War, it is a cynical, individualistic school of thought that posits the self and personal choice as the measure of life's entire meaning.

Science and literature are both ways to ask questions about why we're here.

Make philosophy thy journey, theology thy journey's end: philosophy is a pleasant way, but dangerous to him that either tires or retires; in this journey it is safe neither to loiter nor to rest, till thou hast attained thy journey's end; he that sits down a philosopher rises up an atheist.

If I want to read something that's really giving me something serious and fundamental to think about, about the human condition, if you like, or what we're all doing here, or what's going on, then I'd rather read something by a scientist in the life sciences, like Richard Dawkins, for instance.

Philosophy is not in a state of external reflection on other domains, but in a state of active and internal alliance with them, and it is neither more abstract nor more difficult.

The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

"What is the meaning of life?" This question has no answer except in the history of how it came to be asked. There is no answer because words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself. Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.

What is the meaning of human life, or, for that matter, of the life of any creature? To know the answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: Does it make any sense, then, to pose this question? I answer: The man who regards his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice.

Philosophy is such an impertinently litigious lady that a man had as good be engaged in lawsuits as have to do with her.

Life, what is it but a dream?

The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers. Each of us emerges from the preconsciousness of babyhood and simply finds himself here, in it, in the world. That experience alone astonishes some people. What is all this - what is the world? And what are we? From the beginning of humanity some have been under a compulsion to ask these questions, and have felt a craving for the answers. This is what is really meant by any such phrase as 'mankind's need for metaphysics.'

What is the real question is not whether to be, but how to be?