Only when man has internalized morality and in his innermost being reaches beyond himself are morality and freedom not antithetical but, rather, mutually dependent realities that build on one another.

He yearns for the certainty that love does not lead to emptiness, that we all do not exist separately alongside each other with no possibility of being united, but, rather, that there is a union going down to the foundations that cannot be destroyed and really corresponds to my yearning for fulfillment.

that one cannot buy redemption, so to speak, ready-made off the rack; one must enter into it with the whole path of one’s human existence.

Man is the unhappy being that does not know what it is, what it is for, what it is supposed to do with itself.

But immediately it became obvious that behind a loosening of dogma and behind the abandonment of confession, the promised land of the happy freedom of the redeemed does not appear—far from it—but, rather, a waterless waste that only becomes ghastlier the farther one walks.

Of course, behind it something deeper is noted: we have a sense that, actually, we do not have to be redeemed by Christianity but, rather, from Christianity;

ever. In all truth, he is the only consolation that never degenerates into an empty promise.

The salvation of the world does not come, in the final analysis, from a transformation of the world or a political system that sets itself up as absolute and divine.

In this world of suffering, adoration has continued to rise up from the fiery furnaces of the crematories and not from the spectators of the horror.