Great Throughts Treasury

"The ultimate function of art is to make men do what they want to do, as it is to make them recognize what they know."

"If you really want to understand a man, don't just listen to what he says but watch what he does."

"The relationship between truth and reason: Truth cannot be reached by reason alone!"

"There is in man a life better than man, and it is not man who can sustain life; something divine has to dwell in him. Absolutely impossible and absolutely necessary for man: that is properly the notion of the supernatural. Man's action goes beyond man; and all the effort of his reason is to see that he cannot, that he must not restrict himself to it."

"Our God dwells within us and the only way we can become one with our God is to become one with our authentic self. "

"Yes or no, has life a meaning and do humans have a destiny? I act without knowing what action is, with-out having wished to live... This appearance of the weight of an eternal responsibility, and even at the cost of blood I cannot purchase nothingness, because for me it can no longer be. I find myself condemned to life, condemned to death, condemned to eternity. Why and by what right, since I have neither known nor willed it."

"As soon as we regard Him [God]from without as a mere object of knowledge, or a mere occasion for speculative study, without freshness of heart and the unrest of love, then all is over, and we have in our hands nothing but a phantom and an idol."

"As long as we see the X to be discovered in the relation of thought and object... there is no solution and no real progress is conceivable. But it is altogether different once the unknown is within us, in ourselves. Once, in a word, the truth to be conquered is not an external abstraction, but an internal concrete reality. For if the X of objective thought is inaccessible and indeterminable, the X of our own proper equation with ourselves can be obtained and determined step by step... The solution is already within us, already provisionally determined by each of our moments which could be our last."