Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov > Quotes

“True spiritual love is not a feeble imitation and anticipation of death, but a triumph over death, not a separation of the immortal form from the mortal, of the eternal from the temporal, but a transfiguration of the mortal into the immortal, the acceptance of the temporal into the eternal. False spirituality is a denial of the flesh; true spirituality is the regeneration of the flesh, its salvation, its resurrection from the dead.”
― Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love

“Suicides also involuntarily prove that life has a meaning, for their despair is due to the fact that life does not fulfill their arbitrary and contradictory demands. These demands could only be fulfilled if life were devoid of meaning; the non-fulfillment proves that life has a meaning which these persons, owing to their irrationality, do not wish to know (instances: Romeo, Cleopatra).”
― vladimir solovyov

“Failure to recognize one's own absolute significance is equivalent to a denial of human worth; this is a basic error and the origin of all unbelief. If one is so faint-hearted that he is powerless even to believe in himself, how can he believe in anything else? The basic falsehood and evil of egoism lie not in this absolute self-consciousness and self-evaluation of the subject, but in the fact that, ascribing to himself in all justice an absolute significance, he unjustly refuses to others this same significance. Recognizing himself as a centre of life (which as a matter of fact he is), he relegates others to the circumference of his own being and leaves them only an external and relative value.”
― Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love

“The meaning and worth of love, as a feeling, is that it really forces us, with all our being, to acknowledge for ANOTHER the same absolute central significance which, because of the power of our egoism, we are conscious of only in our own selves. Love is important not as one of our feelings, but as the transfer of all our interest in life from ourselves to another, as the shifting of the very centre of our personal life. This is characteristic of every kind of love, but predominantly of sexual love; it is distinguished from other kinds of love by greater intensity, by a more engrossing character, and by the possibility of a more complete overall reciprocity. Only this love can lead to the real and indissoluble union of two lives into one; only of it do the words of Holy Writ say: 'They shall be one flesh,' i.e., shall become one real being.”
― Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love

“Truth as a living power that takes possession of the internal being of a human and actually rescues him from false self-assertion is termed Love. Love as the actual abrogation of egoism is the real justification and salvation of individuality. Love is greater than rational consciousness, yet without the latter it could not act as an internal saving power, elevating and not abrogating individuality. Only thanks to a rational consciousness (or, what is the same thing, a consciousness of the truth) can a human being discriminate his very self, i.e., his true individuality, from his egoism, and therefore sacrifice this egoism, and surrender himself to love. In doing so he finds not merely a living, but also a life-giving power, and does not forfeit his individual being together with his egoism, but on the contrary makes it eternal.”
― Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov, The Meaning of Love

“The central fact of biblical history, the birth of the Messiah, more than any other, presupposes the design of Providence in the selecting and uniting of successive producers, and the real, paramount interest of the biblical narratives is concentrated on the various and wondrous fates, by which are arranged the births and combinations of the 'fathers of God.' But in all this complicated system of means, having determined in the order of historical phenomena the birth of the Messiah, there was no room for love in the proper meaning of the word. Love is, of course, encountered in the Bible, but only as an independent fact and not as an instrument in the process of the genealogy of Christ. The sacred book does not say that Abram took Sarai to wife by force of an ardent love, and in any case Providence must have waited until this love had grown completely cool for the centenarian progenitors to produce a child of faith, not of love. Isaac married Rebekah not for love but in accordance with an earlier formed resolution and the design of his father. Jacob loved Rachel, but this love turned out to be unnecessary for the origin of the Messiah. He was indeed to be born of a son of Jacob - Judah - but the latter was the offspring, not of Rachel but of the unloved wife, Leah. For the production in the given generation of the ancestor of the Messiah, what was necessary was the union of Jacob precisely with Leah; but to attain this union Providence did not awaken in Jacob any powerful passion of love for the future mother of the 'father of God' - Judah. Not infringing the liberty of Jacob's heartfelt feeling, the higher power permitted him to love Rachel, but for his necessary union with Leah it made use of means of quite a different kind: the mercenary cunning of a third person - devoted to his own domestic and economic interests - Laban. Judah himself, for the production of the remote ancestors of the Messiah, besides his legitimate posterity, had in his old age to marry his daughter-in-law Tamar. Seeing that such a union was not at all in the natural order of things, and indeed could not take place under ordinary conditions, that end was attained by means of an extremely strange occurrence very seductive to superficial readers of the Bible. Nor in such an occurrence could there be any talk of love. It was not love which combined the priestly harlot Rahab with the Hebrew stranger; she yielded herself to him at first in the course of her profession, and afterwards the casual bond was strengthened by her faith in the power of the new God and in the desire for his patronage for herself and her family. It was not love which united David's great-grandfather, the aged Boaz, with the youthful Moabitess Ruth, and Solomon was begotten not from genuine, profound love, but only from the casual, sinful caprice of a sovereign who was growing old.”
― Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love

“what is important is not that in every man are the roots of good and evil, but which of the two prevails.”
― Vladimir Soloviev, War, the Christian, and The Anti-Christ

“Я ничeгo oт тeбя нe тpeбyю, и я пoмoгy тeбe. Paди тeбя caмoro, paди твoeгo coбcтвeннoгo дocтoинcтвa и пpeвocxoдcтвa и paди мoeй чиcтoй, бecкopыcтнoй любви к тeбe — я пoмoгy тeбe. Пpими дyx мoй. Kaк пpeждe мoй дyx poдил тeбя в кpacome, тaк тeпepь oн poждaeт тeбя в cилe”
― Vladimir S. Soloviev , Tale of the Anti-Christ

“Without loving nature for its own sake, it is impossible to organise material life in a moral way.”
― Vladimir Soloviev

“William Palmer, a distinguished member of the Anglican Church and of the University of Oxford, wished to join the Orthodox Church. He went to Russia and Turkey to study the contemporary situation in the Christian East and to find out on what conditions he would be admitted to the communion of the Eastern Orthodox. At St. Petersburg and at Moscow he was told that he had only to abjure the errors of Protestantism before a priest, who would thereupon administer to him the sacrament of Holy Chrism or Confirmation. But at Constantinople he found that he must be baptized afresh. As he knew himself to be a Christian and saw no reason to suspect the validity of his baptism (which incidentally was admitted without question by the Orthodox Russian Church), he considered that a second baptism would be a sacrilege. On the other hand, he could not bring himself to accept Orthodoxy according to the local rules of the Russian Church, since he would then become Orthodox only in Russia while remaining a heathen in the eyes of the Greeks; and he had no wish to join a national Church but to join the universal Orthodox Church. No one could solve his dilemma, and so he became a Roman Catholic.”
― Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov

“In its two aspects, organic thinking belongs, on the one hand, to the true philosophers and, on the other, to the masses of the people. Between these two groups stand the majority of the so-called educated or enlightened people, who, as a result of a greater formal development of intellectual activity, are detached from the world-view of the masses of the people but who have not attained an integral philosophical consciousness.”
― Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity

“Baignée toute d'azur et d'or
À la main une fleur de pays étrangers,
Te voici, sourire radieux,
Un signe de tête et tu disparais dans le
Brouillard.”
― Vladimir S. Soloviev, Trois rencontres

“There is only one power which can from within undermine egoism at the root, and really does undermine it, namely love, and chiefly sexual love. The falsehood and evil of egoism consists in the exclusive acknowledgement of absolute significance for oneself and in the denial of it for others. Reason shows us that this is unfounded and unjust, but simply by the facts love directly abrogates such an unjust relation, compelling us not by abstract consciousness, but by an internal emotion and the will of life to recognize for ourselves the absolute significance of another. Recognizing in love the truth of another, not abstractly, but essentially, transferring in deed the centre of our life beyond the limits of our empirical personality, we by so doing reveal and realize our own real truth, our own absolute significance, which consists just in our capacity to transcend the borders of our factual phenomenal being, in our capacity to live not only in ourselves, but also in another.”
― Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love

“Non posso lasciarti né obliarti:
il mondo perderebbe i colori,
ammutolirebbero per sempre nel buio della notte,
le canzoni pazze, le favole pazze.”
― Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov

“Vladimir Soloviev
Est couché ici.
A été philosophe,
Squelette aujourd'hui.
Aimable pour certains,
Pour beaucoup ennemi ;
Il aima sans esprit,
S'est jeté au ravin.
A perdu son âme,
S'est tu sur son corps :
À celle-ci le mal,
Pour celui-là les crocs.
Passant, passe ! Mais de cet exemple retiens
Comme l'amour et néfaste, et la foi — un bien.
(« Épitaphe », 15 juin 1892)”
― Vladimir S. Soloviev, Trois rencontres

“La verdadera civilización reclama que todo tipo de enfrentamiento entre hombres y naciones sea eliminado por completo”
― Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov, Los tres diálogos y el relato del Anticristo

“All that we call evil in a moral sense—violence, slavery, the destruction of one creature by another—is the law of the world and nature, which lives by nothing more than this rule of struggle among creatures and destruction of creatures by one another.”
― Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov, Politics, Law, and Morality

“Ce qui est, ce qui était, ce qui vient de tout temps —
Ton regard impassible a tout embrassé...”
― Vladimir S. Soloviev, Trois rencontres

“Soloviev’s return to Christian faith might be understood as a conversion experience not unlike that of St. Augustine”
― Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov, The Heart of Reality: Essays on Beauty, Love, and Ethics

“But this general law of nature would not have been perceived as evil if another law had not existed. That this other law or principle already appears in nonhuman nature but acts there as a blind, unconscious, and internally imperceptible force is without doubt.”
― Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov, Politics, Law, and Morality

“And he loved before all else the living human soul everywhere and in everything”
― Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov, The Heart of Reality: Essays on Beauty, Love, and Ethics