18 Quotes by Helmuth Plessner

It is not for nothing that the person stands between heaven and hell. He has to live so as to do justice to both the spirit and the flesh and to honor the fragility of life where it reveals itself to him. This he should do as a pragmatist out of a respect for the deep ambiguity contained in all of existence, not as a petty profiteer: he will be part of one of the two halves of the world soon enough.

Earthly love and heavenly love irreconcilably oppose each other ... No mediation exists between the law of the public sphere and the willingness to be without restraint; between the two spheres there is nothing - to be sure, the positive nothing, the nothing of freedom.

Humanity demands from their leaders the courage to sin. To take account of reality means to take account of the devil. And to take account of the devil without degenerating and slipping into him is a difficult skill; it is the true problem of an ethic of balance, of the true center, not the ethic of simply negating what resists the demands of honesty, conviction, and love.

All ceremonial events such as initiation (baptism) and incorporation, signs of communal membership, signify in the final analysis the renunciation of the intimate sphere of the person, if not emotionally, as in the bond of a biological blood-based kinship, then nevertheless spiritually, ideationally, and symbolically.

Radicalism is the party of the spirit whose ideas erect signposts to eternity and, in every situation, remind the conscience of the future. It scorns the conditioned and limited, small things and steps, restraint, discretion, and unconsciousness. It is joyful, but only towards what is great; it is reverent, but only towards what is powerful. It is pure and, therefore, self-righteous; principled and, therefore, repressive; fanatical and, therefore, destructive.

Every level of our being calls for play and danger.

In nature all things are close to or distant from each other. The psychological world knows first the intermediate region of distance seducing to nearness, nearness pressing towards distance, of an irreconcilable closeness-distance.

Only what is mysterious, undiscovered, and veiled attracts us; only what is hidden radiates magic that promises untold possibilities.

One does not escape the fate of Nietzsche's teaching so long as one recognizes strength only as strength and weakness only as weakness.