Peter Sloterdijk Quotes

#1. We are in an outside that carries inner worlds.

Peter Sloterdijk

#2. Being-'subject' means taking up a position from which an actor can make the transition from theory to practice. This transition usually takes place once an actor has found the motive that liberates them from hesitation and disinhibits them for action.

Peter Sloterdijk

#3. The disciple of philosophy must present itself, first as a way of thinking and then as a way of life.

Peter Sloterdijk

#4. An ideology critique that does not clearly accept its identity as satire can, however, easily be transformed from an instrument in the search for truth into one of dogmatism. All too often, it interferes with the capacity for dialogue instead of opening up new paths for it.

Peter Sloterdijk

#5. Consequently, immune systems at this level can be defined a priori as embodied expectations of injury and the corresponding programmes of protection and repair.

Peter Sloterdijk

#6. It is not sufficient, he emphasized, to colour (colorare) the mind with wisdom; it must be pickled (macerare) in it, as it were, soaked in it (inficere), and entirely transformed by it.

Peter Sloterdijk

#7. Ventilation is the profound secret of existence.

Peter Sloterdijk

#8. This much should be clear by now: the term 'renaissance' can only remain fruitful and demanding as long as it refers to a far-reaching idea: that it is the fate of Europeans to develop life and forms of life according to and alongside the Christian definitions of life and forms of life.

Peter Sloterdijk

#9. Mysticism is the acquired immunodeficiency of regional ontologies; one catches it through unprotected thought intercourse with the stirred-up concept of the infinite.

Peter Sloterdijk

#10. Repetition plus translation plus generalization results, with the correct calculation, in clarification. If there is such a thing as 'progress in religion', it can only manifest itself as increasing explicitness.

Peter Sloterdijk

#11. As in the days of the first Merovingian, who pledged allegiance to the cross because of a victorious battle, today's children of the banalized Enlightenment are likewise meant to burn what they worshipped and worship what they burned.

Peter Sloterdijk

#12. In the wall-less house of sounds, humans became the animals that come together by listening. Whatever else they might be, they are sonospheric communards.

Peter Sloterdijk

#13. As long as no more than a small minority are capable of reading and writing, universal alphabetization seems like a messianic project. Only once everyone has this ability does one notice the catastrophe that almost no one can do it properly.

Peter Sloterdijk

#14. Nietzsche is no more or less than the Schliemann of asceticisms. In the midst of the excavation sites, surrounded by the psychopathic rubble of millennia and the ruins of morbid palaces, he was completely right to assume the triumphant expression of a discoverer.

Peter Sloterdijk

#15. Gardens are enclosed areas in which plants and arts meet. They form 'cultures' in an uncompromised sense of the word.

Peter Sloterdijk

#16. Wherever one encounters members of the human race, they always show the traits of a being that is condemned to surrealistic effort. Whoever goes in search of humans will find acrobats.

Peter Sloterdijk