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| �Carried to its extreme limit, what is pleasure other than disgust? What is earthly honor at its dizzy pinnacle other than contempt for existence? What are riches, the highest superabundance of riches, other than poverty? For no matter how much all the earth's gold hidden in covetousness may amount to, is it not infinitely less than the smallest mite hidden in the contentment of the poor! What is worldly omnipotence other than dependence? What slave in chains is as unfree as a tyrant!� (Purity of Heart)
�...Catholicism has a conception of the Christian ideal: to become nothing in this world. Protestantism is worldliness from beginning to end.� ("A Sad Reflection") �Certainly faith must involve an expression of will, yet in a sense other than that in which, for instance, all acts of cognition must be said to involve an expression of will; for how else can I explain that the New Testament has it that he who does not have faith shall be punished?� (25 November 1834) �Certainly friendship calls for an understanding, but not of the kind in which the one always knows what the other is going to say, no indeed, what it needs is that the one never knows what the other is going to say. If it got to that point the friendship would be over. But friendships of that kind also make such people believe that they understand everyone else too. Hence the complacency with which they say that they expected one to answer just as one did, etc., which is often untrue and based on the presumption that everyone's conversation is just like their own, vapid, trivial, and pointless... It is always well to avoid such people, for in spite of all their understanding they continually misunderstand.� (1837) �Christ says: not a sparrow shall fall to earth unless it be at his will. Oh, I bid lower still, to God I am less than a sparrow--that God love me becomes more certain still, the syllogism more solid still in its conclusion.� �Christianity can only be communicated by witnesses, i.e. by those who existentially express what is said, make it real in their lives.� ("Sermonizing", 1850) �Christianity does not unite people--no, it separates them--in order to unite every single one with God. And when a person is able to belong to God, he has died away from what unites people.� (1854) �Christianity has been transformed from a primary colour... into a crumb of caution to be used for avoiding colds, toothache, and the like.� (1850) �Christianity knows a better answer to the question of what love is and about loving than does any poet. Precisely therefore it knows too that which escapes the attention of many poets, that the love they praise is secretly self-love, and that this explains its intoxicated expression about loving another man better than one's self. Earthly love is still not the eternal love; it is the beautiful fantasy of the infinite, its highest expression is mysterious foolishness.� (Works of Love) � 'Community' is no doubt more than a sum, but is truly still a sum of units; the public is nonsense: a sum of negative units, of units that are not units, that become units with the sum, instead of the sum being a sum of units.� ("The Difference Between 'Crowd', 'Public'--and 'Community' ", 1850) |
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