65 Quotes by Nikolai Berdyaev

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

So great is the worth of Dostoevsky that to have produced him is by itself sufficient justification for the existence of the Russian people in the world: and he will bear witness for his country-men at the last judgement of the nations.

The physical union of the sexes ... only intensifies man's sense of solitude.

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

In sex we have the source of man's true connection with the cosmos and of his servile dependence. The categories of sex, male and female, are cosmic categories, not merely anthropological categories.

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.

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.

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

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.