Emanuele Severino Quotes
1929–2020 Italy
Emanuele Severino (26 February 1929 – 17 January 2020) was an Italian philosopher, a disciple of Gustavo Bontadini.
Random Emanuele Severino quote
20 quotes
If we already take for granted what madness is, philosophy becomes completely superfluous.
Since the USSR no longer controls the grassroots movements against global wealth and Islam has taken their place, the survival of the rich world is in danger.
Taking refuge in nature is to shut oneself up within the walls of violence.
Every civilisation, especially the Western one, has been nothing but edifying – even and especially when it has produced the extreme of destruction and horror. Can man ever fail to be edifying?
Adam would have been victorious over his own sin only if he had eaten the forbidden fruit.
Cornelio Fabro essentially drew on Thomas Aquinas, while someone like Bontadini was first and foremost a Gentilean.
Music is the birthplace of the word, but only the words that come to light in this house recognise it as their birthplace and as the evocation of the cry.
Hemingway conceived sincerity as the supreme moral commandment. This applies above all to writing, which must not hide what man truly feels.
It can be said that the only thing denied to the people of the “paradise of technology” is the truth of paradise. A paradise without truth can be a deception. The suspicion that it is so makes it a hell.
It is a matter of understanding that construction and destruction have the same soul...
Hemingway had learned that the pleasure of life is inseparable from pain: life is a struggle – it is “war”, said the ancient Heraclitus.
Ethics is one of the extreme forms of violence, because it is the administration of becoming, with a view to achieving the goals that are considered suitable for the full realisation of man.
Pride is a quality of those who are powerless. It is from God's point of view that Lucifer sins with pride. But God's victory over Lucifer is an illusion of God.
The individual Severino, still inhabited by the will to power, can succumb to all the weaknesses to which immortals abandon themselves. But the authentic Severino, who like everyone else has always been open to the truth, and is therefore something infinitely greater than God, cannot be afraid of death.
Being born means [...] coming out of nothingness; dying means returning to nothingness: the living is that which comes out of nothingness and returns to nothingness.
Philosophy is inevitably heading towards its own decline, that is, towards science, which is nevertheless the way philosophy exists today. [...] Everyone can see that philosophy, on a global scale, is declining in scientific knowledge.
But Bruno's agreement with Parmenides is also agreement with Heraclitus, for whom, Bruno recalls, all things are One. Just as episteme is about to abandon its faith in the immediate ability of thought to grasp the deepest meaning of truth, that faith finds one of its most powerful and grandiose expressions in Bruno's philosophy.
Even for atheists, things come from nothing and return to nothing: God's friend is a madman who believes he needs a master, a lord, a creator; the atheist is a madman who believes he does not need one, but both belong to the same soul.
It is completely misleading to condemn the “West” and capitalism for dominating and exploiting the rest of the world. Peoples have no morals. Have you ever seen one sacrifice itself for another? When they have power, they impose themselves on the weaker ones, just as nature fills the void.
Is not the height of madness to think that being is nothingness? And is not “nihilism” first and foremost to think that being is nothing? And is it not because of this ancient thought that all the radical destructions that mark the history of the West have been able to mature?