Walter Kaufmann Quotes

#1. Writing is thinking in slow motion.

Walter Kaufmann

#2. Perfection lies in intensity, and what is most intense cannot be endured long.

Walter Kaufmann

#3. The only theism worthy of our respect believes in God not because of the way the world is made but in spite of that. The only theism that is no less profound than the Buddha's atheism is that represented in the Bible by Job and Jeremiah.

Walter Kaufmann

#4. One can oppose the shallow optimism of so many Western thinkers and yet refuse to negate life.

Walter Kaufmann

#5. To try to fashion something from suffering, to relish our triumphs, and to endure defeats without resentment: all that is compatible with the faith of a heretic.

Walter Kaufmann

#6. Paul substituted faith in Christ for the Christlike life.

Walter Kaufmann

#7. There is thus a certain plausibility to Nietzsche's doctrine, though it is dynamite. He maintains in effect that the gulf separating Plato from the average man is greater than the cleft between the average man and a chimpanzee.

Walter Kaufmann

#8. Rabbi Zusya said that on the Day of Judgment, God would ask him not why he had not been Moses, but why he had not been Zusya.

Walter Kaufmann

#9. Thirdly, even if we assume that the world is governed by purpose, we need only add that this purpose - or, if there are several, at least one of them - is not especially intent on preventing suffering, whether it is indifferent to suffering or actually rejoices in it.

Walter Kaufmann

#10. It does not follow that the meaning must be given from above; that life and suffering must come neatly labeled; that nothing is worth while if the world is not governed by a purpose.

Walter Kaufmann

#11. Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. The truth is too complex and frightening; the taste for the truth is an acquired taste that few acquire ... .
... .The world winks at dishonesty. the world does not call it dishonesty

Walter Kaufmann

#12. For atheism and polytheism there is no special problem of suffering, nor need there be for every kind of monotheism.

Walter Kaufmann

#13. It was also Hegel who established the view that the different philosophic systems that we find in history are to be comprehended in terms of development and that they are generally one-sided because they owe their origins to a reaction against what has gone before.

Walter Kaufmann

#14. But a solitary suffers terribly from any suspicion concerning the few people he loves - especially

Walter Kaufmann

#15. Life ceases to be so oppressive: we are free to give our own lives meaning and purpose, free to redeem our suffering by making something of it.

Walter Kaufmann

#16. The great artist is the man who most obviously succeeds in turning his pains to advantage, in letting suffering deepens his understanding and sensibility, in growing through his pains.

Walter Kaufmann

#17. The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life-that is the heart of existentialism.

Walter Kaufmann

#18. Philosophy means liberation from the - routine, soaring above the well known, seeing it in new perspectives, arousing wonder and the wish to fly.

Walter Kaufmann

#19. Being read is a fringe benefit, and being
read with understanding is a form of grace.

Walter Kaufmann

#20. Success is no proof of virtue. In the case of a book, quick acclaim is presumptive evidence of a lack of substance and originality.

Walter Kaufmann

#21. we others who thirst for reason want to look our experiences as straight in the eye as if they represented a scientific experiment

Walter Kaufmann

#22. The first function of a book review should be, I believe, to give some idea of the contents and character of the book.

Walter Kaufmann

#23. No other German writer of comparable stature has been a more extreme critic of German nationalism than Nietzsche.

Walter Kaufmann

#24. The doctrine of original sin claims that all men sinned in Adam; but whether they did or whether it is merely a fact that all men sin does not basically affect the problem of suffering.

Walter Kaufmann

#25. The problem of suffering is: why is there the suffering we know?

Walter Kaufmann

#26. When Hegel later became a man of influence' he insisted that the Jews should be granted equal rights because civic rights belong to man because he is a man and not on account of his ethnic origins or his religion.

Walter Kaufmann

#27. Man stands alone in the universe, responsible for his condition, likely to remain in a lowly state, but free to reach above the stars.

Walter Kaufmann

#28. Here an attempt is made to explain suffering: the outcaste of traditional Hinduism is held to deserve his fetched fate; it is a punishment for the wrongs he did in a previous life.

Walter Kaufmann

#29. A system must necessarily be based on premises that by its very nature it cannot question.

Walter Kaufmann

#30. In all three cases, and for most human beings, the problem of suffering poses no difficult problem at all: one has a world picture in which suffering has its place, a world picture that takes suffering into account.

Walter Kaufmann

#31. Those who believe in God because their experience of life and the facts of nature prove his existence must have led sheltered lives and closed their hearts to the voice of their brothers' blood.

Walter Kaufmann

#32. All of us have so much more time than we use well. How many hours in a life are spent in a way of which one might be proud, looking back?

Walter Kaufmann

#33. when Nietzsche's fame had begun to spread rapidly, she climbed on the bandwagon. She acquired the sole rights to all his writings, including even the letters that he had sent to others. She sued those who published material to which she could claim a right.

Walter Kaufmann

#34. Faith means intense, usually confident, belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person.

Walter Kaufmann

#35. Reason may not always tell us what to believe, but it can help us on what we shouldn't believe.

Walter Kaufmann

#36. The Greeks had considered hope the final evil in Pandora's box. They also gave us an image of perfect nobility: a human being lovingly doing her duty to another human being despite all threats, and going to her death with pride and courage, not deterred by any hope - Antigone.

Walter Kaufmann

#37. Job's forthright indictment of the injustice of this world is surely right. The ways of the world are weird and much more unpredictable than either scientists or theologians generally make things look.

Walter Kaufmann

#38. The deepest difference between religions is not that between polytheism and monotheism.

Walter Kaufmann

#39. It is widely assumed, contrary to fact, that theism necessarily involves the two assumptions which cannot be squared with the existence of so much suffering, and that therefore, per impossibile, they simply have to be squared with the existence of all this suffering, somehow.

Walter Kaufmann