William Barrett Quotes

American academic (1913–1992)

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William Christopher Barrett (1913 – 1992) was a professor of philosophy at New York University from 1950 to 1979. He received his PhD at Columbia University. He was an editor of Partisan Review and later the literary critic of The Atlantic Monthly magazine. He was well known for writing philosophical works for nonexperts.

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Alternative Names: William Christopher Barrett

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Plato began his philosophic career as the result of a conversion. This is surely an existential beginning.

The peasantry are wiser in their ignorance than the savants of St Petersburg in their learning.

Faith can no more be described to a thoroughly rational mind than the idea of colors can be conveyed to a blind man.

Power as the pursuit of more power inevitably founders in the void that lies beyond itself.

Nietzsche's life has all the characteristics of a psychological fatality.

Now at the end, we come back to the beginning: to the situation of the world here and now, from which all understanding must start and to which it must return. In all existential thinking it is we ourselves, the questioners, who are ultimately in question.

That existence has meaning, finally, only as the liberty to say No, and by saying No to create a world.

Journalism has become a great god of the period, and gods have a way of ruthlessly and demonically taking over their servitors.

The anguish of loss may be redeemed, but can never be mediated.

The will to power is weakness as well as strength, and the more it is cut off and isolated from the rest of the human personality, the more desperate, in its weakness, it can become.

A recognition of limits, of boundaries, may be the only thing that prevents power from dizzy collapse.

Of all the non-European philosophers, William James probably best deserves to be an Existentialist.

We do not ask ourselves what the ultimate ideas behind our civilization are that have brought us into this danger; we do not search for the human face behind the bewildering array of instruments that man has forged; in a word, we do not dare to be philosophical.

One does wish that Sartre would pause for a while to regroup his forces. The man really does write too much.

Heidegger's philosophy is neither atheism nor theism, but a description of the world from which God is absent.