Even if there were no ear for them but the void, our prayers would still be the only things that sanctify our existence.
In teaching the young you have to satisfy the schoolchild in yourself and enter the region where all meanings start. That is where, in any case, the philosopher has perpetually to start.
The more severely he struggles to hold on to the primal face-to-face relation with God, the more tenuous this becomes, until in the end the relation to God Himself threatens to become a relation to Nothingness.
The bond that attaches us to the life outside ourselves is the same bond that holds us to our own life.
The happiness of mankind, if it ever should come to pass, would still leave men asking: Why? What point to it? To what end?
The nature of consciousness is to point beyond itself. It is a tending toward or pointing to… Since consciousness points beyond itself, it is in its very being a self-transcendence.
There is no truth that does not ultimately rest upon what is evident to us in our own experience.
The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived.
Truth and untruth weave the seamless web of human nature.
What has to be accepted, the given, is forms of life.’ (Wittgenstein) This is the fact, the given, from which all thinking must start; and thinking, which starts from this fact, is in turn itself but another form of life.
Modern Existentialism… is a total European creation, perhaps the last philosophic legacy of Europe to America or whatever other civilization is now on its way to supplant Europe.