Tragic Sense of Life; Ch. VIII

"[W]e have at times the direct feeling of God, above all in mooments of spiritual suffocation. And this feeling--mark it well, for all that is tragic in it and the whole tragic sense of life is founded upon this--this feeling is a feeling of hunger for God, of the lack of God. To believe in God is, in the first instance, as we shall see, to wish that there may be a God, to be unable to live without Him." pp. 149

"And God does not exist, but rather super-exists, and He is sustaining our existence, existing us (existie'ndonos)." pp. 149

"God is and reveals Himself in collectivity. And God is the richest and most personal of human conceptions." pp. 150

"The concept that is most extensive and at the same time least comprehensive is that of being or of thing, which embraces everything that exists and possesses no other distinguishing quality than that of being... And the logical or rational God, the God obtained by way of negation, the absolute entity, merges, like reality itself, into nothingness; for, as Hegel pointed out, pure being and pure nothingness are identical." pp. 150

"And there may be a truer revelation in superstition itself than in theology. The venerable Father of the long beard and white locks who appears among the clouds carrying the globe in his hand is more living and more real than the ens realissimum of theodicy." pp. 157

"In its etymological signification to exist is to be outside of ourselves, outside of our mind: ex-sistere. But is there anything outside of our mind, outside of our consciousness which embraces the sum of the known? Undoubtedly there is. The matter of knowledge comes to us from without. And what is the mode of this matter? It is impossible for us to know, for to know is to clothe matter with form, and hence we cannot know the formless as formless. To do so would be tantamount to investing chaos with order." pp. 161

"We wish not only to save ourselves, but to save the world from nothingness. And therefore God. Such is His finality as we feel it." pp. 162

"If [the supposition of objectified reason without will and feeling] is reality, our life is deprived of sense and value.
It is not, therefore, rational necessity, but vital anguish that impels us to believe in God. And to believe in God is, before and above all, to feel a hunger for God, a hunger for divinity, to be sensible of His lack and absence, to wish that God may exist." pp. 162

Personification:
"This eternal and eternalizing person who gives meaning--and I will add, a human meaning, for there isnone other--to the Universe, is it a substantial something, existing independently of our consciousness, independently of our desire? Here we arrive at the insoluble, and it is best that it should be so. Let it suffice for reason that it cannot prove the impossibility of His existence." pp. 163