Fate means what we are at the mercy of. And we are at the mercy of what cannot yet become word.

Salvation always comes from where nobody expects it, from the depraved, from the impossible.

Evil increases automatically. Inertia, laziness, cowardice, death are self-multiplying. Good 'is' not, except by propagation; it is not in any man, but originates only between. No man is good. But the word or act that links men may be good. And by linking evil has to be constantly combated.

Man must be torn open again and again by the plowshare of suffering.

Nothing great in this world can be achieved without great expectation. The expectancy of the listeners is a condition for every communication. Only in response to the messianic expectancy of all peoples could the Messiah come. And only what fulfils a longing finds an enduring place in history.

Only by his great outcry, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,' did Jesus become our brother[….] Faith cannot live unless it remains intermittent; that bitter truth admits death where it belongs in our belief, as a bringing of new life.

The combined expectation and delay of Christ's return is the contradiction on which the Christian lives, a tension which is the paradoxical essence of Christianity.

The greatest temptation of our time is impatience, in its full original meaning: refusal to wait, undergo, suffer.

The history of the human race is accordingly written on a single theme: How does love become stronger than death?

Death is not overcome by not dying, but by our loving beyond death.

Rosenstock-Huessy, cited here.