William Barrett Quotes

Where Plato and Aristotle had asked the question, What is man?, St. Augustine (in the Confessions) asks, Who am I? — and this shift is decisive.

The essential freedom, the ultimate and final freedom that cannot be taken from a man, is to say No. This is the basic premise in Sartre's view of human freedom: freedom is in its very essence negative, though the negativity is also creative.

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

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.

Poets are witnesses to Being before the philosophers are able to bring it into thought.

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

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

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

Anyone who attempts to gain a unified understanding of modern art as a whole is bound to suffer the uncomfortable sensation of having fallen into a thicket of brambles.

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

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 decline of religion in modern times means simply that religion is no longer the uncontested center and ruler of man's life, and that the Church is no longer the final and unquestioned home and asylum of his being.

Jaspers sees the historical meaning of existential philosophy as a struggle to awaken in the individual the possibilities of an authentic and genuine life, in the face of the great modern drift toward a standardized mass society.