Sacredness

“The invasion of technique desacralizes the world in which man is called upon to live. For technique nothing is sacred, there is no mystery, no taboo. ... Technique worships nothing, respects nothing. It has a single role: to strip off externals, to bring everything to light, and by rational use to transform everything into means. ... Science brings to the light of day everything man had believed sacred. Technique takes possession of it and enslaves it.”

“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

“Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.”

“God is for man the commonplace book where he registers his highest feelings and thoughts, the genealogical album into which he enters the names of the things most dear and sacred to him.”

“To theology, ... only what it holds sacred is true, whereas to philosophy, only what holds true is sacred.”

“In every well-governed state, wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.”

“Why is it so important—what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own?”

“Don’t let anything remain sacred in a man’s soul—and his soul won’t be sacred to him. Kill reverence and you’ve killed the hero in man.”

“Before the sacred, people lose all sense of power and all confidence; they occupy a powerless and humble attitude toward it. And yet no thing is sacred of itself, but by my declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgment, my bending the knee.”

“If you can't spontaneously detect (without analyzing) the difference between the sacred and profane, you'll never know what religion means. You will also never figure out what we commonly call art. You will never understand anything.”

“That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way.”

“It is likely … that human society cannot exist without some source of sacredness. Those states which have sought openly to remove it have tended in the end to assume divinity themselves.”