“Philosophy leaps ahead on tiny toeholds; hope and intuition lend wings to its feet. Calculating reason lumbers heavily behind, looking for better footholds, for reason too wants to reach that alluring goal which its divine comrade has long since reached.”

“Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without "taste," at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost. Philosophical thinking, on the other hand, is ever on the scent of those things which are most worth knowing, the great and the important insights.”

“The quest for philosophical beginnings is idle, for everywhere in all beginnings we find only the crude, the unformed, the empty and the ugly. What matters in all things is the higher levels.”

“A man as he ought to be: that sounds to us as insipid as "a tree as it ought to be."”

“We cannot help but see Socrates as the turning-point, the vortex of world history.”

“Art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity in this life.”

“There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts.”

“Nonviolence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed.”

“There are many causes that I am prepared to die for but no causes that I am prepared to kill for.”

“For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. So, let us be alert — alert in a twofold sense: Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.”

“If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death.”

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”