William Barrett Quotes

#1. The happiness of mankind, if it ever should come to pass, would still leave men asking: Why? What point to it? To what end?

William Barrett

#2. The deflation, or flattening out, of values in Modern art does not necessarily indicate an ethical nihilism. Quite the contrary; in opening our eyes to the rejected elements of existence, art may lead us to a more complete and less artificial celebration of the world.

William Barrett

#3. The philosopher seeks a generality beyond the boundaries of science; he attempts to frame a comprehensive and coherent framework of ideas within which the partial results of science may become more intelligible.

William Barrett

#4. The more severely he struggles to hold on to the primal face-to-face relation with God, the more tenuous this becomes, until in the end the relation to God Himself threatens to become a relation to Nothingness.

William Barrett

#5. The bond that attaches us to the life outside ourselves is the same bond that holds us to our own life.

William Barrett

#6. Truth and untruth weave the seamless web of human nature.

William Barrett

#7. To discover one's own spiritual poverty is to achieve a positive conquest by the spirit.

William Barrett

#8. In teaching the young you have to satisfy the schoolchild in yourself and enter the region where all meanings start. That is where, in any case, the philosopher has perpetually to start.

William Barrett

#9. There is no truth that does not ultimately rest upon what is evident to us in our own experience.

William Barrett

#10. The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived.

William Barrett

#11. If a man has learned to think, no matter what he may think about, he is always thinking of his own death. All philosophers were like that. And what truth can there be, if there is death?

William Barrett

#12. Anxiety is not fear, being afraid of this or that definite object, but the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing at all. It is precisely Nothingness that makes itself present and felt as the object of our dread.

William Barrett

#13. We exist within the question of God.

William Barrett

#14. The nature of consciousness is to point beyond itself. It is a tending toward or pointing to ... Since consciousness points beyond itself, it is in its very being a self-transcendence.

William Barrett

#15. Modern Existentialism ... is a total European creation, perhaps the last philosophic legacy of Europe to America or whatever other civilization is now on its way to supplant Europe.

William Barrett

#16. We really know time, says Heidegger, because we know we are going to die. Without this passionate realization of our mortality, time would be simply a movement of the clock that we watch passively, calculating its advance - a movement devoid of human meaning.

William Barrett

#17. We must be free for the truth; and conversely, to be able to be open toward the truth may be our deepest freedom as human creatures.

William Barrett

#18. It is the familiar that usually eludes us in life. What is before our nose is what we see last.

William Barrett

#19. Even if there were no ear for them but the void, our prayers would still be the only things that sanctify our existence.

William Barrett

#20. What has to be accepted, the given, is forms of life.' (Wittgenstein) This is the fact, the given, from which all thinking must start; and thinking, which starts from this fact, is in turn itself but another form of life.

William Barrett

#21. The path of specialization leads away from the ordinary and concrete acts of understanding in terms of which man actually lives his day-to-day life.

William Barrett

#22. What you find in the mirror you will find in the reality it mirrors.

William Barrett

#23. Hunger is not the worst feature of unemployment; idleness is.

William Barrett

#24. Our freedom is the way in which we are able to let the world open before us, and ourselves stand open within it.

William Barrett

#25. Mechanism as a philosophic doctrine might be defined as the belief that the last machine which human ingenuity has created gives us the final form of reality.

William Barrett