Top 40 Walter Kaufmann Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “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

4. “Writing is thinking in slow motion.”

— Walter Kaufmann

5. “The great artist is the man who most obviously succeeds in turning his pains to advantage, in letting suffering deepen his understanding and sensibility, in growing through his pains.”

— Walter Kaufmann

6. “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

7. “Reason may not always tell us what to believe, but it can help us on what we shouldn’t believe.”

— Walter Kaufmann

8. “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

9. “Nietzsche says: “Nicht nur fort sollst du dich pflanzen sondern hinauf” – you should propagate yourself not only onward but upward: procreation need not be a senseless continuation of an essentially meaningless story and an addition of more and more zeros – it can really be a creation.”

— 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. “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

12. “The deepest difference between religions is not that between polytheism and monotheism.”

— Walter Kaufmann

13. “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

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

— Walter Kaufmann

15. “Words signify man’s refusal to accept the world as it is.”

— Walter Kaufmann

16. “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

17. “No one system reveals the entire truth; at best, each organizes one point of view or perspective. We must consider many perspectives, and a philosopher should not imprison his thought in one system.”

— Walter Kaufmann

18. “No other German writer of comparable stature has been a more extreme critic of German nationalism than Nietzsche.”

— Walter Kaufmann

19. “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

20. “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

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

— Walter Kaufmann

22. “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

23. “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

24. “The self is essentially intangible and must be understood in terms of possibilities, dread, and decisions. When I behold my possibilities, I experience that dread which is “the dizziness of freedom,” and my choice is made in fear and trembling.”

— Walter Kaufmann

25. “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

26. “The value of a human being, Nietzsche said, does not lie in his usefulness: for it would continue to exist even if there were nobody to whom he could be useful.”

— Walter Kaufmann

27. “The problem of suffering is: why is there the suffering we know?”

— Walter Kaufmann

28. “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

29. “Paul substituted faith in Christ for the Christlike life.”

— Walter Kaufmann

30. “A system must necessarily be based on premises that by its very nature it cannot question.”

— Walter Kaufmann

31. “The point is not at all that you are found interesting or fascinating instead of being seen as a fellow I. The shock is rather that you are not found interesting or fascinating at all: you are not recognized as an object any more than a subject. You are accepted, if at all, as one to be spoken at and spoken of; but when you are spoken of, the lord of every story will be I.”

— Walter Kaufmann

32. “All that we are is the result of what we have thought.”

— Walter Kaufmann

33. “In our time equality is confused with conformity – as Nietzsche sees it– and it is taken to involve the renunciation of personal initiative and the demand for a general leveling. Men are losing the ambition to be equally excellent, which involves as the surest means the desire to excel one another in continued competition, and they are becoming resigned to being equally mediocre.”

— Walter Kaufmann

34. “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

35. “The difference between great philosophers who disagree is perhaps less considerable than that which separates them from their followers. Members of philosophic schools or coteries live on what others have seen, and the disciple usually applies his master’s insights with a confidence which, most of the time, the master lacked.”

— Walter Kaufmann

36. “When it is founded on decision, love is no longer an unreliably moving passion, but the fulfillment to which alone real Being reveals itself.”

— Walter Kaufmann

37. “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

38. “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

39. “One can oppose the shallow optimism of so many Western thinkers and yet refuse to negate life.”

— Walter Kaufmann

40. “He’s poodlishly ridiculous.”

— Walter Kaufmann

41. “And man is capable of standing superhuman suffering if only he feels sure that there is some point and purpose to it, while much less pain will seem intolerable of devoid of meaning.”

— Walter Kaufmann

42. “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