The greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, That is all there was! But twist them all together and you have something tremendous.
If your arguments be rational, offer them in as moving a manner as the nature of the subject will admit; but beware of letting the pathetic part swallow up the rational.
Of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, [...] everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.
It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite.
If these are the themes of phenomenology, then it can also be called "science of consciousness," if consciousness be taken purely as such.
One of the most difficult of the philosopher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches.
I now come to the third great obstacle to human self-knowledge, to the belief, deeply rooted in our western culture, that what can be explained in terms of natural science has no values. This belief springs from an exaggeration of Kant's values-philosophy, the consequence of the idealistic dichotomy of the world into the external world of things and the internal laws of human reason.
Because of the way that myth takes it for granted that miracles are always happening, the waking life of a mythically inspired people, the ancient Greeks, for instance, more closely resembles a dream than it does the waking world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker.
Man has an invincible inclination to allow himself to be deceived and is, as it were, enchanted with happiness when the rhapsodist tells him epic fables as if they were true, or when the actor in the theater acts more royally than any real king. So long as it is able to deceive without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is free; it is released from its former slavery and celebrates its Saturnalia. It is never more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more clever and more daring.
This means also that the type of being of consciousness is the opposite of that which the ontological proof reveals to us. Since consciousness is not possible before being, but since its being is the source and condition of all possibility, its existence implies its essence.