"The purity of the spirit is dependent upon truth. A spirit is pure when it makes clear-cut distinctions between great and little, good and bad; when it refuses to bend yes into no and no into yes, but keeps them undistorted by a straight either-or. This doesn't mean that with the resultant clarity the good is also already accomplished and the bad avoided; it means something much more elementary: that virtue is never called vice, and vice virtue. Purity of spirit lies at the beginning of things, there where the first stirrings set in, where conceptions of being and doing are formed. It is that initial authenticity in which the true meaning of words is grounded and their relation to each other is corrected, their edges are trimmed. Spirit becomes impure through essential dishonesty. When it attempts to call evil good, it becomes essentially corrupt. A lie is always evil, but worse than its conscious evil is loss of the fundamental sense of truth. The spirit that errs is not yet impure—for example when it judges facts falsely, uses words incorrectly, confuses images. It is impure when it is indifferent to truth; when it no longer desires to think cleanly or to measure by the standards of eternity, when it no longer knows that that the dignity and honor of truth are its own dignity and honor; when it besmudges the sense of words—which is the sense of things and of existence itself—robbing them of their austerity and nobility."