Quotes About Being Finite

#1. All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.

Walter Lippmann

#2. The cause being finite, the effect must be finite. If the cause is eternal the effect can be eternal, but all these causes, doing good work, and all other things, are only finite causes, and as such cannot produce infinite result.

Swami Vivekananda

#3. The tonal is also endless and limitless. We like to think of it as being finite so we feel better.

Frederick Lenz

#4. Religion unites man with God, or forms a communication between them; yet do they not say, 'God is infinite?' If God be infinite, no finite being can have communication or relation with him.

Baron D'Holbach

#5. God is a being of transcendent and unlimited perfections: his nature therefore is incomprehensible to finite spirits.

George Berkeley

#6. That's what being in love looks like. I didn't have that, and I wanted it.

But then you found it.

I did, but that doesn't mean you won't. Love isn't a finite thing in the universe. It's not like it gets used up by people who got there first.

Melanie Harlow

#7. Being human, we can only receive infinite truth in finite doses

Norman Grubb

#8. The finite human being shall never know in its fullness Truth and Love which is itself infinite.

Mahatma Gandhi

#9. We are many, many selves. We're not just a finite being. The selves don't necessarily speak in words. But they are you.

Frederick Lenz

#10. Every existence above a certain rank has its singular points; the higher the rank the more of them. At these points, influences whose physical magnitude is too small to be taken account of by a finite being may produce results of the greatest importance.

James C. Maxwell

#11. The universe is deathless; Is deathless because, having no finite self, it stays infinite. A sound man by not advancing himself stays the further ahead of himself, By not confining himself
to himself sustains himself outside himself: By never being an end in himself he endlessly becomes himself.

Laozi

#12. In another sense he is "being itself," in that he is the inexhaustible source of all reality, the absolute upon which the contingent is always utterly dependent, the unity and simplicity that underlies and sustains the diversity of finite and composite things.

David Bentley Hart

#13. we play the cards we've been dealt - as Isabel in Secrets of a Charmed Life says - based on finite knowledge, and while being largely unaware that everyone around us is playing their own cards.

Susan Meissner

#14. I feel awed by the mystery of being both so finite and yet so infinite, so much and so little, so conscious and yet, so coincidental.

Warren Farrell

#15. Man is a mixed being, made up of a spiritual soul and of a fleshly body; the angels are pure spirits, herein nearer to God, only that they are created and finite in all respects, free from decay, free from the power of death, whereas God is infinite and uncreated.

Augustus Hare

#16. The infinite being has assumed unto himself the mystery of finitude. And in him who is love the finite and the infinite are made one.

Rabindranath Tagore

#17. The nature of finite things is to have the seed of their passing-away as their essential being: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

#18. Any movement of the mind or will toward truth, goodness, beauty, or any other transcendental end is an adherence of the soul to God. It is a finite participation in the highest truth of existence. As Shankara says, the fullness of being, lacking nothing, is also boundless consciousness,

David Bentley Hart

#19. The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of non-being, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself.

Paul Tillich

#20. Faith is an act of a finite being who is grasped by, and turned to, the infinite.

Paul Tillich

#21. According to Zen philosophy each human being has two minds, a finite mind and an infinite mind.

Frederick Lenz

#22. God is not merely one, in the way that a finite object might be merely singular or unique, but is oneness as such, the one act of being and unity by which any finite thing exists and by which all things exist together.

David Bentley Hart

#23. From infinite awareness, something comes forward, a sense of infinite awareness and finite awareness. That perception is the birth of a being.

Frederick Lenz

#24. Suddenly we could all hear, we could all listen, and instead of being caught up in our finite little balls of bullshit, we could all become players in that great universal orchestra again.

Anthony Kiedis

#25. Sadly, the things that we have set out as being worth striving for are not ultimately the things that satisfy human longings. And why not? Because we are practically the ultimate paradox: the finite made for the infinite.

Desmond Tutu

#26. There is something more awful in happiness than in sorrow
the latter being earthly and finite, the former composed of the substance and texture of eternity, so that spirits still embodied may well tremble at it.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#27. All the analysis of infinite reality which the finite human mind can conduct rests on the tacit assumption that only a finite portion of this reality constitutes the object of scientific investigation, and that only it is 'important' in the sense of being 'worthy of being known.'

Max Weber

#28. Reincarnation is a process in which a finite being will go through a series of transmutations and will perceive different things. There will be a continuity of perception.

Frederick Lenz

#29. Death is simply a change in perception. It is not an end to perception as a finite being.

Frederick Lenz

#30. The fact that man never is satisfied with any stage of his finite development, the fact that nothing finite can hold him, although finitude is his destiny, indicates the indissoluble relation of everything finite to being-itself.

Paul Tillich

#31. Fools and young men prate about everything being possible for a man. That, however, is a great error. Spiritually speaking, everything is possible, but in the world of the finite there is much which is not possible.

Soren Kierkegaard

#32. Prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them.

C.S. Lewis

#33. [T]he human being (and so all finite beings generally) becomes human only among others. Self and other stand in a relation of potential reciprocity.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

#34. Of course, the plea for respect for nonhuman life goes far beyond the scientific delight of familiarity with our planet mates. The nonhuman forms of life with which we 6,000 million talking, upright apes share this finite planet are directly or indirectly connected to our well-being.

Lynn Margulis

#35. Right now, oil is being isolated around the globe, and there is a major effort in shipping, trucking and otherwise transporting that oil around to a very finite number of refineries. Biology allows us to make these same fuels in a much more distributed fashion.

Craig Venter

#36. Because he loves only as man, not as human being, there is in his sexual feelings something narrow, seemingly wild, malicious, temporal, finite, which weakens his art and makes it equivocal and dubious.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#37. By our very nature, we are a human paradox. We are a human being. The being is infinite and the human is very finite. We walk around like lightening in a bottle.

Mark Nepo

#38. Because I write the screenplay entirely and precisely, there is the danger that an actor might feel that this finite role is being imposed on them. I want the actors to feel that this is their own role, and that they can go back to point zero and develop this character.

Asghar Farhadi

#39. Particularly in these high school-set movies, there's something about being in high school that's like a cauldron, a boiling pot of emotion and joy and heartbreak that you feel so intensely. Because you don't have any awareness yet, you don't realize that it's a finite time and feeling.

Mark Waters

#40. Drugged to sleep by repetition of the diurnal
round, the monotonous sorrow of the finite,
within I am awake
repairing in dirt the frayed immaculate thread
forced by being to watch the birth of suns

Frank Bidart