Nikolai Berdyaev Spiritual Quotations

The question of bread for myself is a material question; but the question of bread for my neighbour, for everybody, is a spiritual and a religious question.

Our attitude towards evil must be freed from hatred, and has itself need to be enlightened in character...Satan rejoices when he succeeds in inspiring us with diabolical feelings to himself. It is he who wins when his own methods are used against himself...A continual denunciation of evil and its agents merely encourages its growth in the world a truth sufficiently revealed in the Gospels, but to which we are persistently blind.

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.

The creation of the world is not only a process which moves from God to humanity. God demands newness from humanity; God awaits the works of human freedom.

Every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history.

Victory over fear is the first spiritual duty of man.

The central idea of the Eastern Fathers was that of theosis, the divinization of all creatures, the transfiguration of the world, the idea of the cosmos and not the idea of personal salvation...Only later Christian consciousness began to value the idea of hell more than the idea of the transfiguration and divinization of the world...The Kingdom of God is the transfiguration of the world, the universal resurrection, a new heaven and a new earth.

Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.