Quotes from Nikolai Berdyaev

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

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

...in the third epoch the divinity of man's creative nature is finally revealed and divine power becomes human power.

Philosophy... is the creative perception by the spirit of the meaning of human existence.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Perhaps the saddest thing to admit is that those who rejected the Cross have to carry it, while those who welcomed it are so often engaged in crucifying others.

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

Creativity is the supreme mystery of life, the mystery of the appearance of something new, hitherto unknown, derived from nothing, proceeding from nothing, born of nothing other.

True life is creativity, not development: it is the freedom for creative acts, for creative fire, rather than necessity and the heaviness of congealing self-perfection.

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

The creation of the world is not only a process which moves from God to humanity. God demands newness from humanity; God awaits the works of human freedom.

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.

The question of bread for myself is a material question; but the question of bread for my neighbour, for everybody, is a spiritual and a religious question.

It is beyond dispute that the state exercises very great power over human life and it always shows a tendency to go beyond the limits laid down for it.

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.

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.

I do not think discursively. It is not so much that I arrive at truth as that I take my start from it.

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

But man as a person, the same man, gains mastery over egocentric self-confinement by disclosing a universe in himself...Personality is a universe, it is filled with universal content.