William Barrett Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. Science tells us what we have reason to believe. Not what we have a duty to believe. Not what experts, in their pontificating wisdom, instruct us to believe ... No, science tells us what there is good reason to believe.

Richard Dawkins

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. Once people begin to roll their eyes and gently tell you that you're crazy, laugh with gratification. When you're a scientist, it means that you're doing it right.

Hope Jahren

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

William Barrett

#8. Conservatism clings to what has been established, fearing that, once we begin to question the beliefs that we have inherited, all the values of life will be destroyed.

Morris Raphael Cohen

#9. You can have the greatest job skills in the world, but if no one knows you have them or can't find you to offer you a job, then those skills go to waste. Just

Paul Hill

#10. 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

#11. I wanted to write in you.

Beatrice Sparks

#12. 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

#13. Some of the greatest survivors have been women. Look at the courage so many women have shown after surviving earthquakes in the rubble for days on end.

Bear Grylls

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

William Barrett

#15. Friday night is our date night. We really carve out time for each other.

Karen Kain

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

William Barrett

#17. He mobilised the English language and sent it into battle.

Winston S. Churchill

#18. 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

#19. A good novel is the biography of an imaginary person--and when the biography is completed, the person is no longer imaginary; he is as real as his creator

William Edmund Barrett

#20. 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

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

William Barrett

#22. 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

#23. People like Justin Frankel and Daniel Sheldon linger on the fringe until they dream up something that has great commercial potential. Then some big company swoops in and buys them, or they give birth to the big company themselves.

Michael Lewis

#24. Sometimes you want to fall on your knees and thank God in heaven for all the poor news reporting that goes on in the world.

Sue Monk Kidd

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. People open bookstores because they want their souls back.
(from "Two Women" published in Do Me: Tales of Sex & Love from Tin House)

Elizabeth Tallent

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

William Barrett

#30. Yeah, it's true we're all dealt a set of cards. But it's also true that it's up to us to figure out how to play the hand.

Francis S. Collins

#31. If you want to avoid making mistakes don't do anything

Thabiso Monkoe

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

William Barrett

#33. 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

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

William Barrett

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

William Barrett

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. There are times when a falsehood well told bridges over quite a difficulty, but in the long run, you had better tell the truth, even if you swim the creek.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#39. We exist within the question of God.

William Barrett

#40. 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