None learns the secret of freedom save only by way of control. Action — 20: 198-199
God’s command is enough and your faith in him to sustain you. — 20: 202-202
Freedom, we sought you long in discipline, action, suffering. Now as we die we see you and know you at last, face to face. — 20: 210-211
Self-knowledge is man’s interminable striving to overcome his disunion with himself by thought; by unceasingly distinguishing himself from himself he endeavours to achieve unity with himself. — 29: 324-325
But the good of which Jesus speaks consists entirely in action and not in judgement. Judging the other man always means a break in one’s own activity. The man who judges never acts himself; or, alternatively, whatever action of his own he may be able to show, and sometimes indeed there is plenty of it, is never more than judgement, condemnation, reproaches and accusations against other men. — 34: 401-404
No longer knowing good and evil, but knowing Christ as origin and as reconciliation, man will know all. For in knowing Christ man knows and acknowledges God’s choice which has fallen upon this man himself; he no longer stands as the chooser between good and evil, that is to say, in disunion; he is the chosen one, who can no longer choose, but has already made his choice in his being chosen in the freedom and unity of the deed and will of God. — 37: 441-444
If the Holy Scripture insists with such great urgency on doing, that is because it wishes to take away from man every possibility of self-justification before God on the basis of his own knowledge of good and evil. — 46: 578-579
The error of the Pharisees, therefore, did not lie in their extremely strict insistence on the necessity for action, but rather in their failure to act. “They say, and do not do it.” — 46: 581-582
the law never confronts him otherwise than in summoning him personally to action. — 47: 597-598
The beatification of the doer includes his hearing, just as the beatification of the hearer includes his doing. One thing is needful: not to hear or to do, but to do both in one, — 50: 634-636
He will easily consent to the bad, knowing full well that it is bad, in order to ward off what is worse, and in doing this he will no longer be able to see that precisely the worse which he is trying to avoid may still be the better. This is one of the underlying themes of tragedy. — 69: 900-902
Fear he calls responsibility. Desire he calls keenness. Irresolution becomes solidarity. Brutality becomes masterfulness. Human weaknesses are played upon with unchaste seductiveness, so that meanness and baseness are reproduced and multiplied ever anew. The vilest contempt for mankind goes about its sinister business with the holiest of protestations of devotion to the human cause. And, as the base man grows baser, he becomes an ever more willing and adaptable tool in the hand of the tyrant. The small band of the upright are reviled. Their bravery is called insubordination; their self-control is called pharisaism; their independence arbitrariness and their masterfulness arrogance. For the tyrannical despiser of men popularity is the token of the highest love of mankind. His secret profound mistrust for all human beings he conceals behind words stolen from a true community. — 74: 983-989
But the good man too, no less than the wicked, succumbs to the same temptation to be a despiser of mankind if he sees through all this and withdraws in disgust, leaving his fellow-men to their own devices, and if he prefers to mind his own business rather than to debase himself in public life. Of course, his contempt for mankind is more respectable and upright, but it is also more barren and ineffectual — 75: 993-996
There is no clearer indication of the idolization of death than when a period claims to be building for eternity and yet life has no value in this period, or when big words are spoken of a new man, of a new world and of a new society which is to be ushered in, and yet all that is new is the destruction of life as we have it. — 80: 1066-1068
The real man is not an object either for contempt or for deification, but an object of the love of God. The rich and manifold variety of God’s creation suffers no violence here from false uniformity or from the forcing of men into the pattern of an ideal or a type or a definite picture of the human character. The real man is at liberty to be his Creator’s creature. To be conformed with the Incarnate is to have the right to be the man one really is. Now there is no more pretence, no more hypocrisy or self-violence, no more compulsion to be something other, better and more ideal than what one is. God loves the real man. God became a real man. — 82: 1098-1103
For indeed it is not written that God became an idea, a principle, a programme, a universally valid proposition or a law, but that God became man. This means that though the form of Christ certainly is and remains one and the same, yet it is willing to take form in the real man, that is to say, in quite different guises. Christ does not dispense with human reality for the sake of an idea which demands realization at the expense of the real. What Christ does is precisely to give effect to reality. He affirms reality. And indeed He is Himself the real man and consequently the foundation of all human reality. — 86: 1155-1159
The purpose of what follows is not indeed to develop a programme for shaping or formation of the western world. What is intended is rather a discussion of the way in which in this western world the form of Christ takes form. — 88: 1190-1191
Wherever the incarnation of Christ, His becoming man, is more intensely in the foreground of Christian consciousness, there one will seek for the reconciliation of antiquity with Christianity. And wherever the cross of Christ dominates the Christian message, there the breach between Christ and antiquity will be very greatly emphasized. But Christ is both the Incarnate and the Crucified, and He demands to be recognized as both of these alike. — 92: 1244-1247