Quotes from Ernst Bloch

The most tragic form of loss isn't the loss of security; it's the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different.

Man is that which has still much before it. He is repeatedly transformed in his work and by it. [...] The authentic in man and in the world is potential, waiting, living in fear of being frustrated, living in hope of succeeding.

Women with bare arms are not allowed into church, but they let naked Jews dig their own graves.

No dreaming may stand still, for this bodes no good. But if it becomes a dreaming ahead, then its cause appears quite differently and excitingly alive. The dim and weakening features, which may be characteristic of mere yearning, disappears; and then yearning can show what it really is able to accomplish.

Und könnte [das Ich] eine Leere, eine Losgelassenheit, eine disparate, gar absurde Schranke auch noch spüren, wenn keine Bewegung in ihm wäre, die an die Schranke stößt? […] Die Akte des Überschreitens selber lassen sich jedenfalls nicht nihilisieren, nicht einmal dort, wo die härteste Gegenutopie: der Tod jedes irdische Dunkel so unermesslich überbietet, unterbietet.

The best thing about religion is that it makes for heretics.

ich aufrichtender Mensch und noch nicht ausdeterminierte reale Möglichkeit, das sind für die Entwicklung unseres Lebens, unserer Literatur, Philosophie, Praxis sicher die unabdingbarsten Kategorien.

Implicit in Marxism – as the leap from the Kingdom of Necessity to that of Freedom – there lies the whole so subversive and un-static heritage of the Bible.

In death too, there is always something of the rich cat that lets the mouse run before devouring it.

God appears as a gentle rustling, not as a package of fire, floods, and earthquakes.

If the Church had not always stood so watchfully behind the ruling powers, there would not have been such attacks against everything it stood for.

So the sick man has the feeling not that he lacks something but that he has too much of something. His discomfort, as something which is hanging around him and superfluous, has to go; pain is proud flesh. He dreams of the body which knows how to keep comfortably quiet again.

No entrance without any exit, no possible society without a spacious graveyard.

What is a health which merely makes people ripe to be damaged, abused, and shot at again?

The enlightened consciousness of life capitulates in the face of death, the ecclesiastical one cuts through it, but nowhere is the Gordian knot really entwined into victory.

We may finally risk the proposition that precisely because the doctor, even at the individual sick-bed, has an almost crazy utopian plan latently in view, he ostensibly avoids it. This definite plan, the final medical wishful dream, is nothing less than the abolition of death.

To Jesus, the kingdom of this world was the devil. This is why he never suggested allowing it to go on; he did not conclude a non-aggression pact with it.

Most often the little man makes himself even smaller than he already is, so as not to be seen.

The most tragic form of loss isn't the loss of security; it's the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different.

In capitalist society health is the capability to earn, among the Greeks it was the capability to enjoy, and in the Middle Ages the capability to believe.

As the sick man does not skip and leap around, his wishes do so all the more.

The couch from which the sick man arises would only be perfect if he was refreshed instead of merely patched up.

Fraudulent hope is one of the greatest malefactors, even enervators, of the human race, concretely genuine hope its most dedicated benefactor.

We must die without much delay, and corpses may not require such expansive wrappings, in order to go the way of all flesh.