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 bomb reveals the dreadful and total contingency of human existence. Existentialism is the philosophy of the atomic age.

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.

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.

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

Where feudalism is concrete and organic, with man dominated by the image of the land, capitalism is abstract and calculating in spirit, and severs man from the earth.

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.

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.