If moral choice is ultimately non-rational, how can its existence be autonomous? But to this it may be countered: if moral judgement is ultimately rational, how can it be a matter of choice?

The first procedure of a philosophy ought to be to expel things from consciousness and to reestablish its true connection to the world, to know that consciousness is a positional consciousness of the world.

Labour is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labour. The human condition of labour is life itself. Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an ‘artificial’ world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness. Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. […] Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live. All three activities and their corresponding conditions are intimately connected with the most general condition of human existence: birth and death, natality and mortality.

‘Beziehen’ ist (fundiert) dann (und nur dann) schlechthin absolut und ist als solches es selbst, wenn und sofern es sich bestimmen läßt als die Einheit der Einzigkeit oder Identität seines Selbstbezugs mit dem Grundsein für anderes in der Weise, daß diese Einheit noch einmal – und sachlich vorweg (a priori) – Bezug selber ist: und zwar so, daß genau das in der Zweiheit (Mehrheit, grundlegender Vielheit) der beiden Aspekte von strengem Selbstbezug oder Einzigkeit und Fremdbezug oder Mehrheit (der Relate, Resultate, der Vielen ‘als Plural’) gesetzte, immanent gültige Moment eines totaleren Selbstvollzugs: als Einheit (dieses Bezugsganzen) sich vollziehend gedacht ist.

The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellowmen. The man who is endowed with important personal qualities will be only too ready to see clearly in what respects his own nation falls short, since their failings will be constantly before his eyes. But every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.

I do not make the world that the thing gathers. I do not systematize the language in which the thing differs from all other things in the world. I testify to both, to acknowledge my need of both.

The tired intellectual sums up the deformities and the vices of a world adrift. He does not act, he suffers; if he favours the notion of tolerance, he does not find in it the stimulant he needs. Tyranny furnished that, as do the doctrines of which it is the outcome. If he is the first of its victims, he will not complain: only the strength that grinds him into the dust seduces him. To want to be free is to want to be oneself; but he is tired of being himself, of blazing a trail into uncertainty, of stumbling through truths. ‘Bind me with the chains of Illusion’, he sighs, even as he says farewell to the peregrinations of knowledge. Thus he will fling himself, eyes closed, into any mythology which will assure him the protection and the peace of the yoke. Declining the honour of assuming his own anxieties, he will engage in enterprises from which he anticipates sensations he could not derive from himself, so that the excesses of his lassitude will confirm the tyrannies. Churches, ideologies, police – seek out their origin in the horror he feels for his own lucidity, rather than in the stupidity of the masses.

[N]ot to know of what things one should demand demonstration, and of what one should not, argues want of education. For it is impossible that there should be demonstration of absolutely everything (there would be an infinite regress, so that there would still be no demonstration).

The division of human life into the sacred and the secular is one that comes naturally to Western thought. It is a division which at one and the same time bears the marks of its Christian origin and witnesses to the death of a properly religious culture. For when the sacred and the secular are divided, then religion becomes one more department of human life, one activity among others. This has in fact happened to bourgeois religion. […] Only a religion which is a way of living in every sphere either deserves to or can hope to survive. For the task of religion is to help see the secular as the sacred, the world as under God. When the sacred and the secular are separated, then the ritual becomes an end not the hallowing of the world, but in itself. Likewise if our religion is fundamentally irrelevant to our politics, then we are recognising the political as a realm outside the reign of God. To divide the sacred from the secular is to recognise God’s action only within the narrowest limits. A religion which recognises such a division, as does our own, is one on the point of dying.