Nikolai Berdyaev Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Spiritual, Soul, Humans

  60 Copy quote

• 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.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Lying, Men, Creative

  32 Copy quote

• 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.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Sacrifice, Hatred, Selfishness

  53 Copy quote

• Victory over fear is the first spiritual duty of man.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Spiritual, Men, Victory

  53 Copy quote

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

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Spiritual, Philosophy, Differences

  75 Copy quote

• 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.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Religion, Morality, Crosses

  53 Copy quote

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

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Freedom, Spirit

  35 Copy quote

• The central idea of the Eastern Fathers was that of theosis, the divinization of all creatures, the transfiguration of the world, the idea of the cosmos and not the idea of personal salvation...Only later Christian consciousness began to value the idea of hell more than the idea of the transfiguration and divinization of the world...The Kingdom of God is the transfiguration of the world, the universal resurrection, a new heaven and a new earth.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Christian, Spiritual, Father

  58 Copy quote

• 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.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Creativity, Fire, Self

  24 Copy quote

• Creativity is the mystery of freedom.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Creativity, Mystery

  27 Copy quote

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

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Self

  42 Copy quote

• The meaning of conservatism is not that it impedes movement forward and upward, but that it impedes movement backwards and downwards—to chaotic darkness and the return to a primitive state.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Darkness, Movement, Return

  40 Copy quote

• There is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism. [...] The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil, that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power... the Kingdom of God is anarchy.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Religious, Attitude, Men

  "Slavery and Freedom". Book by Nikolai Berdyaev, 1939.

  65 Copy quote

• 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.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Spiritual, Moving, Humanity

  48 Copy quote

• Utopias now appear much more realizable than one used to think. We are now faced with a different new worry: How to prevent their realization.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Thinking, Worry, Different

  41 Copy quote

• 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.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Hatred, Sin, Crime

  23 Copy quote

• We find the most terrible form of atheism, not in the militant and passionate struggle against the idea of God himself, but in the practical atheism of everyday living, in indifference and torpor. We often encounter these forms of atheism among those who are formally Christians.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Christian, Atheist, Struggle

  12 Copy quote

• 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.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Writing, Mean, Desire

  18 Copy quote

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

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Evil, Would Be, Finals

  31 Copy quote

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

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Truth, World, Tragic

  37 Copy quote

• 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.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Creativity, Mystery, Appearance

  31 Copy quote

• I never remain passive in the process of reading: while I read I am engaged in a constant creative activity, which leads me to remember not so much the actual matter of the book as the thoughts evoked in my mind by it, directly or indirectly.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Book, Reading, Creative

  11 Copy quote

• The essential in artistic creativity is victory over the burden of necessity. In art, man lives outside himself, outside his burdens, the burdens of life. Every creative artistic act is a partial transfiguration of life. In the artistic concept man breaks out through the heaviness of the world. In the creative-artistic attitude towards this world we catch a glimpse of another world.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Art, Attitude, Creativity

  27 Copy quote

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

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Men, Self, Realization

  21 Copy quote

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

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Christian, Believe, People

  31 Copy quote

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