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It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important.
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Leap of faith – yes, but only after reflection.
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Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.
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A human being is a spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation.
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Human justice is very prolix, and yet at times quite mediocre; divine justice is more concise and needs no information from the prosecution, no legal papers, no interrogation of witnesses, but makes the guilty one his own informer and helps him with eternity's memory.
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Nothing is as heady as the wine of possibility.
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Future is everything that past has forgotten.
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The question of immortality is of its nature not a scholarly question. It is a question welling up from the interior which the subject must put to itself as it becomes conscious of itself.
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All essential knowledge relates to existence, or only such knowledge as has an essential relationship to existence is essential knowledge.
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Choose to be who you are. . . The individual who would become a person must at some point take over his entire being - must, that is, choose herself.
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I divide my time as follows: half the time I sleep, the other half I dream. I never dream when I sleep, for that would be a pity, for sleeping is the highest accomplishment of genius.
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Only one deception is possible in the infinite sense, self-deception.
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May new sufferings torment your soul.
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The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.
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Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.
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Sin is in itself separation from the good, but despair over sin is separation a second time.
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Take it and return it: the kiss of love.
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The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
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Your own tactic is to train yourself in the art of becoming enigmatic to everybody. My young friend, suppose there was no one who troubld himself to guess your riddle--what joy, then, would you have in it?
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It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.
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...knowing God is the condition for the sanctification of a human being by God's assistance and according to His intention. Wherever God is, there He is always creating... He wants to create a new human being. To need God is to become new. And to know God is the crucial thing.
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Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. Therefore, whenever I see a fly settling, in the decisive moment, on the nose of such a person of affairs; or if he is spattered with mud from a carriage which drives past him in still greater haste; or the drawbridge opens up before him; or a tile falls down and knocks him dead, then I laugh heartily.
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With the daguerreotype, everyone will be able to have their portrait taken . . . and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same.
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To love another person is to help them love God.