Thoughts cannot convey a knowledge of God, only a consciousness of the way Transcendence enters our soul in our situation. … It seems to be the deity's own will that every way of seeking after truth be dared at the risk of error. We need not fear unveiling what it would conceal; what we have to fear is falsehood. Yet this daring all, and saying all, is limited to my own stage of consciousness. Not every man is ready to conceive each thought and to think it truly, to be struck by each fact and to sense the cipher in it. … There is a time for all things. The great leaps and crises change the whole of man, as if organs of sight were evolving, and others decaying. Men who really belong together may be kept apart by a discrepancy in their stages of consciousness.

Absolute Reality is to me transcendent; but in the immanence of empirical existence and Existenz I can experience limits where I feel its presence.

Existenz can grasp itself in its own freedom only if at the same time, and in the same act, it will perceive something other than itself. Strict unconditionality makes me aware, not only that my existence is not selfmade and is the helpless prey of certain doom, but that I do not have myself alone to thank for my freedom either. In some way or other, the realization of unconditionality will occur only in relation to its Transcendence. … Freedom is not being-in-itself. In Transcendence freedom ceases because decision has an end; in Trancendence there is neither freedom nor unfreedom. Being free—the most profound appeal to us as long as it is still up to us what we are—is not the same as being transcendent. Confined to itself, even freedom withers. It seeks its fulfillment in Transcendence, which as such opens only to freedom, and whatever this fulfillment is will turn into a possibility for freedom: into the possibility of perfection or of reconciliation, of redemption or of pain at transcendent Being. In every case the end of possible self-sufficiency is freedom's ultimate satisfaction in temporal existence. … Existenz is either in relation to Transcendence or not at all.

Superstitious belief in science must be exposed to the light of day. In our era of restless unbelief, men have snatched at science as a supposedly firm foundation, set their faith in so-called scientific findings, blindly subjected themselves to supposed experts, believed that the world as a whole could be put in order by scientific planning, expected science to provide life aims, which science can never offer—and expected a knowledge of being as a whole, which is beyond the scope of science. … [Philosophy] is science in the age-old and enduring sense of methodical thought, but it is not science in the pure modern sense of an inquiry into things, leading to universally valid, cogent knowledge, identical for all. The fallacious identification of philosophy and science by Descartes, a misconception in keeping with the spirit of these last centuries, has made science into supposedly total knowledge and has ruined philosophy. Today the purity of philosophy must be gained along with the purity of science. The two are inseparable, but they are not the same thing; philosophy is neither a specialized science along with others, nor a crowning science resulting from the others, nor a foundation-laying science by which the others are secured. Philosophy is bound to science and thinks in the medium of all sciences. Without the purity of scientific truth, the truth of philosophy is inaccessible. Science has its own realm and is guided by philosophical ideas which grow up in all the sciences, though they themselves can never be scientifically justified. ... The modern aspiration for consciousness of truth has become possible only on the basis of the sciences of the last [XIX] century, but it has not yet been achieved. The work required for its realization is among the most urgent needs of the present historical moment. In opposition to the disintegration of science into unrelated specialities, in opposition to the scientific superstition of the masses, in opposition to the superficiality brought upon philosophy by the confusion of science and philosophy—scientific research and philosophy must join hands to guide us on the path of authentic truth.

[O]ur life in history is two things at once: the life that serves, and creates a basis for the life of those to come after us, and the life that cuts across history, the life in actuality as such, oriented toward Transcendence, that liberates us.

Our enduring task in philosophical endeavour is to become authentic men by becoming aware of Being; or, and this is the same thing: to become ourselves by achieving certainty of God.

The one origin of mankind at the beginning of prehistory is as obscure as the future world of humanity dominating the globe, when it has entered into the unity of its legally ordered existence, whose spiritual and material horizons are infinite. Between the origin (which we simply cannot imagine or conceive) and the goal (of which we cannot formulate any adequate concrete image) our actual history is taking place. But origin and goal are interrelated: as I think of the one, so I think of the other. Symbols make manifest that which cannot attain any convincing perceptual shape as a reality: in the ‘Creation of Man’—the origin—and in the ‘Everlasting Realm of Spirits’—the goal.

The question now is whether the coming course of historical evolution will remain open and lead, through terrible sufferings, distortions and horrifying abysses, to the the creation of the real man. As to how this might happen we can form no idea.

The history of mankind visible to us took, so to speak, two breaths. The first led from the Promethean Age via the ancient civilisations to the Axial Age and its consequences. The second started with the scientific-technological, the new Promethean Age and may lead, through constructions that will be analogous to the organisation and planning of the ancient civilisations, into a new, second Axial Age, to the final process of becoming-human, which is still remote and invisible to us.

The independence ... of the deepest inner being of the man related to Transcendence, his liberty of soul, that draws courage from discourse with the great cultural heritage, this remains the last refuge.