"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 […] when it is indifferent to truth; when it no longer desires to think cleanly or to measure by the standards of eternity; […] when it besmudges the sense of words—which is the sense of things and of existence itself—robbing them of their austerity and nobility."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
, The Lord (Der Herr, 1937), trans. Elinor Castendyk Briefs (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1954), pp. 490–491.
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