 It is not theories that explain existence, but existence, rather, that explains why men make

theories.
 The being of consciousness, in other words, is not the same as the consciousness of being
 There is never any ego-consciousness but only a consciousness of ego. The ego is an object of
reflective consciousness
 We are not it. A self or ego is made to use, not to be
 Theories are only for use in case one has already decided what he wants and what he wants to
be
 Religions, which turn out to be extensions, merely, of institutional economic and political
interests
 I choose in order to make myself responsible for what I do or fail to do
 Responsible also in choosing as I chose to act
 If an agent is not free in his very choosing, he is not free at all
 Abulia
 Nietzchean ‘Yea to Life’
 No role can contain a man unless he first chooses to make himself small enough to fit into it
 Christ and Dionysius go together
 Concept is empty without aesthetic perception, and aesthetic perception logically blind without
the concept
 Existing man must often choose between truthfulness and the truth for the very meaning of his
existence
 Philosophers never lie, they only make mistakes. They never die, but only fade away
 Without a living man there is neither past, present, nor future, neither hope nor despair, neither
conscience nor consciousness, but only anonymous and impersonal motion
 A man comes into the world without his consent
 He remains a stranger, estranged from the world
 The account he gives of himself can be only through the very ambiguity which constitutes him as
a being
 Man is a being who must choose himself in the absence of himself
 All men die in the same way, no matter what theories they hold about it. It is not theories that
ensure the success of a man’s death, but the decision a man himself is able to make about it.
 Abyss out of which God emerges
 A man’s body is his own immediate milieu. It sets the first conditions for his ability or inability to
act. But it does not determine what he must or must not choose to be
 The disturbed personality arrested in its past reveals itself as alienated from it and, by this fact,
alienated from itself.
 He can have his past or be it by becoming guilty of having it and, hence, impotent in maintaining
his distance from it.
 But it can also be a reservoir of strength for self-choice when the existing individual permits
neither himself nor others to use it as an immobilizing strait jacket and a prison
 The institution of the past, that of the future can best serve the existing man only if it can
function in the interest of a ‘now’ where alone spontaneity can have its being
 A man can be nothing for himself and everything for others, and nothing for others and
everything for himself, drowning in despair and anxiety.
 Why is there something rather than nothing?
 He wants nothing of this world but the uncontainable joy of spontaneous being, and knows that
this is gained only by him who neither possess, nor is possessed
 He keeps free even from himself
 He keeps healthily maladjusted to the world and all its depersonalizing institutions
 Only that knowledge knows which knows the known by the knower
 Man must be helped to come to birth, even while living
 Mutatis mutandis, excogitate
 The things we actually see are not what we see
