Top 15 William Barrett Quotes

As a teacher of philosophy, a very dubious profession in this country, I am in a position to observe how precarious a hold the intellect has upon American life; and this is not true merely of the great majority of students but of cultured people, of intellectuals, to whom here in America a philosophical idea is an alien and embarrassing thing. In their actual life Americans are not only a non-intellectual but an anti-intellectual people.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

The instincts of man are so earth-bound that they shrewdly sense it whenever the approach of logic threatens them.

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.

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